So I was looking at one of my blogs and it had a HUGE subscribe to our RSS button on it and it got me thinking…RSS submission is still vitally important to your blog syndication. But I don’t think most people care much about it or take it seriously enough to leverage it properly, hence this post. Or they just don’t know enough about it to know how powerful it can be. I wanted to review a few ideas surrounding RSS and why you should submit your feed and syndicate your posts onto directories and into people’s readers. I’m definitely no expert on the subject, but I know a lot more than the average Internet Marketer, so I’ll take a stab at breaking it down.

1. Robin Good – this guy IS the guru of RSS and there is no one else that has been focusing on it as long and as well. Here is the definitive list of where to submit your RSS Feeds. It’s a daunting task to hand submit to all those directories, so hire someone to do it or delegate it, but it does get your site more exposure. However you need to do it, get it done, because it helps get your content syndicated and listed in RSS directories which people search through looking for different kinds of content. I have feeds that have hundreds of subscribers just from the directories, depends on the feed title, category, and content as to what types of people might subscribe potentially. But they definitely won’t find you if you aren’t listed. Kind of like the new search engine submission of years ago…

2. RSS Submit – here is a quicker way to submit your RSS feeds to numerous directories and sites, I have been using it for years. I think I have the paid versions..pretty cheap..totally worth it. You can resubmit feeds every so often and it stores all the feed info so you can re-submit. Also, they have a manual plug-in which takes you through and helps submit your info into the forms so you can get through the manual submissions quicker.

3. FeedBurner – Google owns this handy too to manage your RSS feeds. Google has put together a really nice page on RSS here. The point is to get a ton of subscribers that access your content through their “readers”…this tool keeps track of it all for you and has statistics. You can even monetize your RSS feed through FeedBurner and Google Adsense. Kind of fell out of vogue, was huge 4-5 years ago, but still a great tool you should use…I do.

4. Pushing it hard – See, people in general don’t use RSS readers that much, so you have to encourage them to use them. Definitely make sure to have a decent size RSS orange button on your site/blog. You can even have a page on your site all about how to use Feed Readers with your RSS feed! The more RSS subscribers you have the more your content will get pushed directly to them in their reader, which creates repeat traffic and loyalty. They have to use the readers of course. Readers have gained in popularity over the years, i don’t know the stats but I’m sure its in the millions of people using them.

These are but a few suggestions about RSS and why it’s important to submit your feed to the various RSS directories. The nice thing is, once you’re submitted for that feed to all of then, you’re done! No real need to resubmit. Yes it’s time consuming, so delegate it, outsource it, or just bust it out yourself! I know I’ve done my fair share of submissions, but there are companies that specialize in this, although I think it’s best handled in-house or with a very specific process to it. Let me know what your feelings are about RSS feeds! Also, make sure to promote your blog’s RSS feed and encourage people to subscribe…it will create more repeat traffic! Thanks for reading…let me know your thoughts…and have a great day!

Hi all! Today I wanted to discuss some easy ways you can increase how effective you are as an affiliate marketer. As some of you may know I’m primarily into free methods for traffic generation, so nothing here costs money…usually just your time and effort. Let me know if you have any feedback on these ways to make your affiliate marketing efforts more productive.

1. Writing Articles, Posts, Content – Probably the best way to increase your affiliate earnings is to produce a lot of content on the topic or niche your are promoting. Writing frequent articles or blog posts can really ramp your traffic because the search engines like Google really value frequent, original content posting. Another great reason is the more physical pages you have on your site, the more “indexed” pages you will gain in the search results thereby increasing your overall traffic. It’s also a good idea to post unique version of those articles on sites like ezinearticles.com which can rank well in Google and add an inbound link to your site, which helps your site rank better. Over time, these are very effective ways to increase your free traffic and hence your affiliate earnings.

2. Social Bookmarking – Once you have posted articles or blog posts, you can then “bookmark” your posts to the top social bookmarking sites. This is important because it allows you to syndicate your content more broadly and get it shared and bookmarked by others. Please refer to my social bookmarking article for more detailed instructions on social book marketing techniques.

3. Social Networking – I’m sure you are already on Facebook and Twitter, so you need to leverage these sites to get your content shared, liked, commented on, and retweeted. By sharing your article pages and blog posts on Facebook and Twitter you can increase their syndication and possibly even make that content go viral if it’s compelling enough. Make sure to spend a great deal of time liking, sharing, commenting, and retweeting other people’s content so they will be more likely to share yours to others. Otherwise they won’t or just a little and that won’t get it done. When people share, like, comment on Facebook, their friends see that and it gets more traffic. Some of the top social networking sites you should be joined to are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FourSquare.

4. Forum Posting – a great free way to increase your traffic is to join relevant online forums to your site’s niche and set-up your forum signature with links to your sites. Most forums allow a few links in your forum signature which people see and could click, not to mention it helps build up inbound links to your website which is good for your organic rankings. Being an active forum member can be great because you can build links quickly and easily if you comment a lot and start a lot of topics on the forum. Make sure to add valuable comments and topics or you will be banned. To find forums search “your niche forums” like pet forums and then join a bunch, set-up your signature in your Control Panel and start getting active!

5. Blog Commenting – Every niche has a ton of related blogs that you can post comments on to build your inbound links and traffic. Frequent blog commenting can really ramp your links and traffic because you are continually being pulled back to the blog by other’s comments and reminded to reply back by email. So you are always a click away from adding another comment. You can use Google Blog Search to find high ranking blogs that you can post comments to and link to your site. Make sure to leave really good comments or they won’t be posted to the site by the blog owner.

6. Build Your List – You should always be building a list of email address on your sites that can be messaged later with specials and promotions from your Affiliate Advertisers. There are many free plug-ins to handle the subscribing process, there are even pop-overs that launch when your site loads to prompt the visitor to join your list for valuable updates. There are some great WordPress blog plugins you can use to facilitate this here.

7. Learn to Type Faster – Typing speed can’t be under-valued in Affiliate Marketing because the faster you type the more content you can produce. Work on your typing speed by practicing typing articles and going as fast as possible on the keyboard. Also reading a lot can improve your ability to write easier and you will be better and busting out content and articles.

8. Learn from Others – a great way to make yourself a more effective Affiliate Marketer is to look at what other successful affiliates and bloggers are doing and emulate them. You can always find affiliate sites ranking in Google for various search phrases is you just run some search and see who is ranking. You can usually spot affiliate sites because they have affiliate banners on them, although not all sites run affiliate banners. Make sure to check out real affiliates and not those guys that claim to be able to teach you how they got rich with affiliate marketing because more of them are full of crap. So be careful of that.

These are a few suggestions to make you a more effective Affiliate Marketer. I hope you can employ these techniques to increase your website traffic and thereby increase your affiliate earnings. Please let me know if you have any questions at all. Thanks and have a great day. Now go out and build out the web with content!

Affiliate marketing is an ever growing industry that allows people to earn income through their websites and blogs primarily. Now with the advent of social networking, affiliate marketers have another method for generating traffic to their websites and blogs. Here are some of the ways affiliate marketers, regardless of experience level, can leverage website content and social networking to dive traffic to their websites and generate commissions. Here are 5 great, free ways to generate traffic to your sites or blogs:

1. Content Posting – whether you do it on a blog our website (I personal think blog posting is quicker and more efficient), content or article posting is the best way to generate free traffic from the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Some affiliates build “niche” websites or blogs that focus on a particular topic or theme, which can make coming up with article ideas easier. If you run a site/blog that is more general in nature like a coupon website, you can post unique “merchant reviews” which describe various Advertisers that you are affiliated with and their current coupon codes. So content or article posting is an extremely effective way to generate free traffic to your site, but make sure it’s all original and unique, otherwise it likely won’t be valued as highly by the search engines or ranked as well in the free traffic listings. I recommend daily content posting to be most effective.

2. Social Bookmarking – this is one of the most under-appreciated methods of marketing online and leveraging your website’s content. Social Bookmarking is basically submitting your article or blog post urls (page addresses) to various websites that have been known as web 2.0 sites. Some of them include Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit. Once you have posted a new article on your site you can then submit the url of the page to these sites and they will then become listed on the site. You have to join each site first before you can post links. Then, other people can bookmark them as well which can increase the popularity and traffic each article receives. If you are connected to other people that do social bookmarking you can bookmark each other’s articles, or in the case of Digg you can Digg each others articles which can get them more visibility and rankings. The bookmarked articles will build up their own inbound links through the bookmarking and may even rank on the bookmarking sites themselves which can lead to additional organic rankings.

3. Blog Commenting – One of the best ways to generate inbound links to your site or blog is to comment on other people’s blog posts. You really have to do a good job when leaving comments because they will be “moderated” which will determine whether the comment will be published to the site, so make sure to leave a quality blog comment and have something valuable to contribute otherwise it will be a waste of time. The nice thing with blog commenting is you can list your name, email, and site url, which adds inbound links to your site. You can use Google Blog Search to find related blogs to yours that rank well and then comment on those. Another nice feature is that you can usually select to receive an email when someone else comments which will lead you can to leave another comment which allows another link to be posted. Doing this in high volume is a must and it takes effort, so make sure to go about it right and it will pay dividends with improved organic rankings and additional traffic. how many links and clicks you build is in direct relation to how much you do it so do it in volume and make it part of your daily routine if possible.

4. Social Networking – social networking is taking over the Internet so why not get into the fray and leverage it for all its worth? Facebook and Twitter and the 2 big social networks and where you should probably be spending the bulk of your social networking. Make sure to add friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter as much as possible because it only expands the number of people you can exposure your content and articles to. Also, when people “Like” your articles on Facebook their friends see that and could like it themselves which allows it to go viral. Similarly on Twitter, the people that are “following” you can “retweet” your content and it gives it more exposure. Another aspect of social networking that is a must are Facebook Fan pages. Fan pages are great because it allows you to build up your own community on Facebook that can grow over time. You can message all your Fans via email and through message posting through “status updates”. So go out and add a bunch of friends of Facebook and followers on Twitter so you can leverage your content to them and generate more traffic to your sites or blogs.

5. Online Forums – joining online forums is a great way to connect with others like-minded people in your niche and learn more about whatever you’re interested in. The really cool thing about forums is that you can set-up your “signature” which gets posted under every forum comment you leave or new topic you post on the forum. Most forums allow you to add a few links to your websites or other personal information like your Facebook profile link or Twitter name. Therefore, the more posting you do on the forum the more links you can build up to your site, Facebook friends you can add, Twitter followers you can add, and clicks from other forum members to your site. Forums are also great because you can learn so much from other people and generally have a great time. Similar to blog commenting, forums will send you an email when someone responds to your comment or topic which encourages you to return to the forum to comment again, which adds more links to your site. Inbound links to your site tend to make it rank higher in the “natural” or free traffic listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

These are some free ways to increase your website or blog traffic. All of this takes work and the more you put into it the more effective it will be. All of these methods work in conjunction with each other and should be done as much as possible to increase your traffic. Over time, you will build up a tremendous amount of content on your site, inbound links, and organic rankings which will lead to affiliate commission via the banners and links on your site. Please let us know if you have any questions about these free traffic generation methods. We look forward to hearing from you! Now go out there and build out the web!

Technorati Tags: blogging,blog software,blogger,weblog,website,wordpress

If you are new to blogging or have heard all the buzz about blogging and want to know more about blogging then sit back and relax and read this blog post which will cover all your blogging queries.

What’s a blog anyway?

A weblog, also known as Blog for short is a type of a website. Blogs are not like a static website, as blogs tend to be updated more often than a traditional static website. A blog page consists of a blog post and author name. You are reading a blog page right at this moment. Blogs also allows readers to comment on the post and share their views and opinions on some blog. Some blog owners are more snooty about it and don’t allow comments.

All the above factors work as a unit to make blogs the most famous and popular form of a website and online community building. If you are keen to start your own blog, here’s how to get started:

First, decide the main topic of your blog. It can be anything you want it to be really, like if you want to keep a diary of your daily life for your friends and family, or you can write about your favorite team/sport. Blogs are a great way to get started publishing content on the web. You can share and discuss you interests with others and visitors will even comment on your blog if they are moved by your writing style.

Once you are done with selecting your topic, you will need a blog software program. The good news is, there are several popular programs and blog services which are free.

Several blogging services are based online such as blogger.com and Word Press. You can visit these type of sites and register with them. They will even give you free web space and other goodies to get started with your personal blog.

If you are really serious about blogging, then you may consider a personal domain name for your blog. If that’s so, you will have to install server side blog software. They are also free and many webhosts have these kind of blog softwares which comes with an automatic installer called Fantastico. It will make the installation process very easy.

Server side blog software is easy to find and WordPress and B2Evolution are probably the most famous and regularly used blogging platforms. Doing a search for any of these will get you the free downloads if they aren’t available through your webhost. You will have to install the software manually. It’s very easy to install and you just have to read the instructions.

Blogs are very useful for building different types of websites such as corporate sites for keeping employees and customers up-to-date with company news. Sites with topics such as travel, health, personal diaries and others can be easily managed via blogs. The ease of posting and editing your blog posts makes blog software even more useful for novice webmasters. If you want to learn more about getting going with blogs let us know!

Technorati Tags: seo,affiliate marketing,blogs,bloggers,make money online

You really want to learn from other gurus who are already making money online and optimizing their websites in search engines if you want to do the same, without any doubt there are so many names which would come in your mind if one asks you about SEO and affiliate marketing top blogs on the internet. With that in mind, we have compiled a bunch of blogs which belongs to the most highly acclaimed bloggers. Take a look below:

1. Murray Newlands Affiliate Marketing Blog

Murray is a true heavy-weight in the industry. He is extremely proficient with his writing and is regarded as an expert in the industry.

2.  ProBlogger.net

This blog is owned by Darren Rowse who is very experienced in both SEO and affiliate marketing, he is also explaining others about how to make additional income using Adsense, Chitika etc. He is making a lot of money by using various online methods.

3. JohnChow.com

A blog owned by none other than John Chow himself. John Chow is the real deal in-terms of making money online, you will find multiple scenarios on his blog regarding SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing and more. He is also the founder of TTZ Media.

4.  ZacJohnson.com

Zac Johnson is the founder of this blog and he is not very much renowned about SEO Marketing, but if you really want to learn a lot and a lot more regarding Affiliate and Pay Per Click Marketing then we would highly recommend Zac Johnson because, he genuinely explains his tactics and methods publicly.

5.  JimKarter.com

Jim Karter is the owner of this blog. Although he is an Indian but he is really working up with is blog and he already have more than 1000 RSS and 250 E-Mail subscribers in a very short amount of time. Visit his blog to learn about how to make money online using Adsense, Text Links, Brokerage, WidgetBucks and more.

6.  JimKukral.com

This is the official blog of Jim Kukral, who not only discusses about SEO, Affiliate Networks but he also discusses about Social Marketing, latest Social Bookmarking websites and a bag of other online goodies.

7.  MattCutts.com

Matt Cutts is the owner of this blog and he is currently working with Google, if you really want to build up your SEO mind, then visit his blog daily where he discusses about how you can gain SEO traffic and what are the basic and hidden SEO tips which you are missing.

8.  ExperienceAdvertising.com

How can we forget our blog? We discuss about Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, SEO, Pay Per Click Marketing and a lot more. We also do SEO Consultancy services which are simply unmatchable with others, visit our blog daily if you want the flavor of different marketing methods.

The best part of having a blog is the fact that you can syndicate your content all over the Internet to various blog cataloging sites like Technorati. Most experts agree that “pinging” the RSS directories after each post is a must to alert them to your new content. This does a couple of things. It gets the blog posted listed on the sites you have pinged and also allows the search engines to find your new content faster than they normally would. I really love Pingoat.com. It pings the top directories as soon are you hit the bookmarked page you have setup, so it makes content creation and pinging really easy. Go ahead and give Pingoat a try…you will be glad you did. I recommend submitting your new blog entires right after you are done posting them…this is what I am about to go and do…off to Pingoat! Now go out and create some great content!