WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

Special guest post by Mike Paetzold

One of the best and easiest ways to get traffic to your blog is by taking advantage of the various free resources available on line.

Caveat: Your main or as I call it money blog needs to be on YOUR server and on a domain YOU own. You should be using a WordPress blog there.

Now that we have gotten rid of the caveat, lets look at some of the free tools that are available.

• Squidoo - my absolute favorite
• Hub Pages
• Blogger
• WordPress.com
• MSN Live

For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Bumble Bees. (Hey I am old and bald bare with me here.)

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Turning an occasional visitor to your blog into a loyal reader is one of the ultimate goals for every blogger. The variety of tools we put into use to accomplish this goal is quite amazing when you analyze them closely. Multitude of plugins, subscription forms and of course - Content!

Content Is The King! But can I perhaps suggest just one more thing here - usability? And no, I’m not talking about “look and feel” of your blog but rather about providing an option to your visitors to get your content in different format. A Free Tool to pull your visitors by the ear and making them loyal readers…

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This morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise - my RSS Subscribers chicklet displays a 600% of growth OVERNIGHT! And no - it is not a fluke, not a glitch in the system - these are real results.

Going from 500+/- subscribers to 3400+/- might seem like a huge jump but reality is much simpler then you think…

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Thieves come in many forms and shapes and stealing intellectual property is one of the oldest forms. Widespread of internet self-publishing in form of websites and blogs brings this issue to a new level. Now thieves can earn money by stealing YOUR content! While I can understand that some might do it out of lack of knowledge - I don’t care!

Anyone stealing my content will be taken actions against! Information I write is designated for my blog visitors and for my RSS readers ONLY. I have never given permissions to anyone to take my RSS feed and post it on their blog. Yes, it is easy to do and I don’t care if I get a backlink or not - a link from a blog that has no original content has no value to me but even that is besides the point - my RSS Feed is clearly marked as copyrighted material and anyone stealing my posts will be taken action against! And In this post I want to share how you can do same - effectively!

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Part 3 of the mini-series of posts dedicated to RSS technology and its benefits will build upon information shared in 2 previous posts:

• What is RSS and How You “Feed” It
• What Is RSS And How You “Eat” It

… and in it I will not beat around the bush and want to concentrate directly on what is “near and dear” to every blogger - monetizing the RSS feed without loosing integrity of the blog and annoying our most precious readers - our loyal subscribers!

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This is Part 2 of the short series on RSS and expands on information provided in my first post “What Is RSS And How You “Eat” It“. But this time I want to discuss details that are more relevant to bloggers and how you can use RSS technology to promote your blogs.

In this post I will cover 3 specific areas:

• Optimizing your RSS feed
• Announcing your RSS feed
• Promoting your RSS feed

So dive in for details…

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RSS is one of the Web 2.0 technologies most widely used and yet, least understood. To add to confusion RSS, while providing a similar functionality can mean different things. Dan Libby developed original RSS (RDF Site Summary RSS 0.9) for Netscape and after a couple of months, produced a simpler and easier-to-use version called Rich Site Summary or RSS 0.91. Later in 2005, Microsoft developed Really Simple Syndication in relation to its Simple Sharing Extensions.

Today, RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, and it has the following 7 existing formats or versions: 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 2.0 and lets not forget the Atom format created to address all the short comings and incompatibilities of the multiple RSS versions. But we will make this simple…

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