RSS Feeds - A Website Owner's Friend in Disguise

We've all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you're a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide anRSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use anRSS feed to keep your site's content fresh.

RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, "RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs...the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data." Wikipedia goes on to say that "A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones."

If you're a website owner, you can use RSS to your advantage in two ways: use someone else's RSS feed or produce your own RSS feed. 1. Install a script on your website-whenever a web page on your website is loaded the script automatically loads data from an RSS feed. If the RSS feed you choose to use is the latest news, then the latest news will appear on your website. This is fairly easy to set up and is good for search engine optimization purposes. I'll discuss installing an RSS feed script on your website later on in this article.

2. Provide an RSS feed of your website's content so others can use it. By providing an RSS feed of your website's content, you're essentially allowing people to use the content on their website or through their feed reader. In either case, you're also providing links back to your website, which is good for search engine optimization purposes-it will also get visitors to visit your website. Providing an RSS feed of your site's content can be tricky to set up-or it may not be appropriate if you don't have a lot of content on your website. I'll discuss your options later on in this article.

If you're a website owner, then chances are you want to keep your website's content fresh. By updating the content on a regular basis, the search engine spiders will take notice-they'll visit your website more often and index the new content and new web pages-which can ultimately bring more visitors to your website. 

For example, if your website is about real estate, you might consider including the latest real estate news on your website. Users typically search for topics that are related to items in the news, so if those topics and keywords are included on your website you can typically be found in the search engines for those terms. It's like having your own real estate news staff on hand, 24 hours a day, adding the latest news on your website.

Residual Income Online Business Ideas

By; Cynthia Minnaar

There is an extremely important factor that determines success or failure as an affiliate marketer and that is whether or not the company pays you once or pays you residual income for a single sale. This is a major factor you need to consider before you join any affiliate program.

As an affiliate, you need to work with companies that put you first. You are, after all, the one driving the traffic to their site and they do not have a lot at risk since they only pay you when you generate a sale. Many affiliate programs do not understand that. In fact, many programs out there are paying 5-15% commission on products they should be paying you a lot more for.

If you are promoting products from affiliate programs that only paid you one time for a sale, you would still need a job somewhere else to cover your basic living expenses. You need to work exclusively with programs that pay you residual income.

Residual income, on the internet, is basically selling a subscription service. When someone buys the product you get paid up-front one time and then each month when that person's subscription renews with the company, you get paid again, every month for as long as that person continues using the service.

It is a fact that 90% of the people fail at generating any significant residual income online from affiliate programs because they are promoting products that do not pay a substantial residual income. You need to exclude any program that does not pay you residual income.

Affiliate programs that pay only one-time for a single sale are not good for your financial health. Think about it. It takes the same energy on your part to promote something that pays you only one time as it does to promote something that pays you every month forever. So would you rather spend a day to make a sale that you get paid for that day and that day only or would you rather spend a day and make a sale that pays you for the rest of your life?

There is only one right answer to that question. You should only focus on programs and products that pay you residual income.

Examples of products and affiliate programs that pay residual income online:

1) Internet Membership Sites

There are many sites on the internet that charge people a monthly membership fee to gain access to their services. As an affiliate you earn up-front when one of your prospects joins the program and per month for the life of their membership.

2) Web Hosting Services

For those who want to have their own website on the Internet a good web host is required. The great part about promoting hosting services is that when people get a website host, they usually stick with it for a long time. Promoting website hosting services is a great way to generate residual income online.

3) Online Business Opportunities

Online business opportunities offer another great way to get paid residual income online. The reason for this is simple. Millions of people are flocking to the Internet every day looking for a reliable way to earn extra income, so online business opportunities have become a huge industry.

The great thing about online business opportunities is that they are much easier than offline business opportunities. All you really need to do for these is find out where the people are searching for these online business opportunities and position yourself in front of them. You do not even have to sell the opportunity. People are going to join these opportunities anyway so all you do is setup your marketing in such a way that people find the opportunity through your link instead of someone else's.

The key is choosing the right programs.

If you are promoting the wrong program, one of the following things will happen:

You will find that people will not join. Some will join and then quit and you won't make anything. You will get lots of people to join and then not get paid fairly for your efforts. You will get lots of people to join, get paid well for a few months and then the company will go out of business. Sometimes you will get people to join and never get paid.

To ensure that you have the best possible chance to succeed as an affiliate marketer take heed of this online business idea. Focus on promoting five or six affiliate programs that pay residual income online. This is often the biggest difference between success and failure for most affiliates.

How Can the Integration of LinkedIn and Microsoft Outlook Affect Email Marketing?

written by; Gary San

Outlook, Microsoft's popular desktop email software for professionals, has become one of the latest tools to help bring email marketing and social networking under a single umbrella. This was all made possible through integration with LinkedIn, the increasingly popular business-oriented social network. Thanks to an add-on by the name of Outlook Social Connector, the mail program can now provide both professional and social context to enhance the everyday email experience. When users receive a message from a member of the LinkedIn community, Outlook automatically displays an expandable pane housing details on the contacts most recent activity on the social network. The partnership offers tremendous potential to email marketers who want to reap the benefits of LinkedIn using Outlook.

Features and Capabilities

The social connector tool comes with a host of interesting features, the most obvious and significant being the connection of the two platforms. Thanks to this integration, you can open the Outlook client and view important information about your LinkedIn contacts, which is pulled directly from their profile. This includes their profile photo and the people they have recently connected with on the network, as well as status updates. You can also view the latest professional details such as the contacts most recent job, and where they are located. Perhaps the most intriguing attribute is that even if you are not connected with someone on LinkedIn, the add-on allows you to easily connect with that person via Outlook.

Another added bonus is seamless synchronization of your Outlook and LinkedIn contacts. Outlook automatically consolidates the data for your existing contacts, and the people you connect with on LinkedIn. You also have the ability to email your social contacts directly from the mail client. When composing a message and tying in the name of one of your contacts, their information will be logged into the system and automatically appear just like anyone else in your address book. If that contact happens to change their information on LinkedIn, it will be automatically updated in Outlook as well. To make the deal even sweeter, the social connector add-on lets you invite people to join your LinkedIn network by simply clicking a button in your email program.

Although the Outlook Social Connector is included as part of the Microsoft 2010 Office Suite, email marketers do not have to purchase a new software bundle to enjoy the new social-friendly features. The add-on can be downloaded and installed to work with both Outlook 2003 and 2007.

The LinkedIn Outlook toolbar has been on the market for a while now, but this integration represents the first major partnership between the software maker and professional social network.

The Next Great Email Marketing Tool

Considering the dependency on email and social networking, the Microsoft-LinkedIn partnership will likely prove valuable for both parties. Outlook receives an instant boost with social networking features that put it light-years ahead of any webmail system, and LinkedIn finds itself in the inbox of millions of professionals that use Microsoft's email program. While Outlook may not be the tool of choice for large-scale campaigns, marketers who realize its value will be able to take full advantage of the integration.