The Launch of WordPress MU and What It Means to Niche Marketers

Have you heard the news? WordPress MU 1.0 is officially available to public at no charge. WordPress MU is a blog script that let you run a blog hosting service like WordPress.com. This is a great news for us the niche marketers. Things you can do with this powerful script is [...]

RSS Industry Night Roundtable II: About RSS Adoption

Pheedo, iUpload and PRWeb hosted the 2nd RSS Industry Night Roundtable last week, taking place next to the Ad:Tech event.

This time unfortunatelly I wasn't able to make it, nor will I be able to make the next one at the Syndicate Conference May 15th:(, since I'm speaking at the ACCM conference in Chicago next week and just don't have enough time to stay in the US for 2 weeks.

A pitty ...

Anyway, this time round the industry night focused more on RSS adoption and how IE7 is going to influence it.

The most interesting comment comes from David Gillmor who believes that people won't really use RSS via IE7, but will rather opt-in for web-based RSS Readers.

Also much discussion about RSS advertising, where the people from ClickZ shared concernes that RSS advertising just isn't worth selling ... yet.

For more coverage visit Pheedo's blog, ClickZ Blog and The 360 blog.

To get the scoup on the 1st roundtable, click here.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book
E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

The Corporate Blogging Book
Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.

Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader?
Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.

What Happened to the Site?

Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)

1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.

2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.

3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.

4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.

5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.

So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.

But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

What s Limiting You?
It’s 5 am and I still can’t go to sleep. I was talking to my friend who is in deep financial trouble. I was on the phone for about 4 hours trying to help him out. He devoted 10 years in college education and he just got fired from a firm that [...]

So Which ISP Blocks the Most Permission-Based Emails?
For many year, I thought AOL was leading the show with the highest email block (permission-based) rate, but boy.. I was so wrong. Return Path, a email delivery firm did a study on this topic recently and published very interesting numbers. They reported that overall, the delivery rate has been increased to 19.2% [...]

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

Please Share the RSS Marketing Survey

Please help us make the RSS Marketing Survey as comprehensive as possible. All participants get the full survey report, and all the key data will be shared publicly.

1. Please take a few minutes and participate by clicking here.

2. Please share this URL (http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net) with as many people as you can. Post it on your blog, send it out in your newsletter, mention it to your RSS peers ... :)

Really, the more data we get, the better results we'll be able to provide to you.

The goal of the survey is to research the RSS marketing landscape, collect top RSS marketing case studies and best practices, and find which key factors make successful RSS strategies successful.

BTW - the survey is getting alot of support from many marketers, such as Christopher Knight, RSS Ray, Lee Odden and may others (full list will be published after I return from Chicago).

And today we've just been covered by MarketingSherpa as well:
"If you've tested offering RSS and have any results to share, author/researcher Rok Hrastnik is seeking your input for the second edition of his report on the topic. We like Rok -- he's a genuine and enthusiastic researcher on the topic and worth supporting so the whole community can learn together."

Great thanks to everyone that's helping make the survey a success!

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Podcast Recommendation
I recently found a great marketing podcast whi is better than some of the paid seminars that I’ve listened to. Make sure to add this podcast to your bookmark! Enjoy! Internet Business Mastery

PARTICIPATE: The 2006 RSS Marketing Survey

Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers?

Are you interested in the RSS industry average benchmark metrics?

Would you like to get top RSS marketing tips from those that are actually doing it?

Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, share your own insights, experiences and data ... and then receive a free copy of the report with all the data to compare your numbers, as well as receive RSS marketing best practices.

Also, if you care to share your own RSS marketing case study, it will be featured in the 2006 edition of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, critically acclaimed as the "best and most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers".

For more information and to participate, please click here now.

And, if you can, please share this survey with as many marketers as you can, since that will provide us with a much better research sample ...

... and at the same time provide you with much better benchmark metrics, as well as more comprehensive RSS marketing tips and experiences.

Simply share this URL:
http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net

Participate by clicking here now.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Use RSS To Increase Your Traffic Now, Part 1

Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.

While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.

It will help you:

• increase your traditional search engine rankings;
• improve your online visibility by making your content available where people are increasingly searching for new content, such as RSS search engines and content aggregation sites;
• drive traffic from other websites covering your topic, by helping you make your content available at these websites more easily.

Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites

The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.

Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.

Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.

But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?

Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.

The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.

Google and Yahoo! know it too their own news engines are among the top of breed.

But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?

Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.

And so on

Why this matters to you?

If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.

And the RSS connection?

Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.

In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.

And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Don t Make This Adsense Mistake
One of the common mistakes that Adsense publishers make is using wrong labels above Adsense units. People think it’s a hot trick, but it’s really not. Google doesn’t like to see wrong labels right above Adsense ad units. let’s review Adsense’s TOS. Publishers may not label the ads with text other than “sponsored [...]