Money Blogger

I’ve already dealt with RSS. One very common question is what to put into a RSS feed.
RSS feeds, in fact, are composed by the news title and usually by a summary of the news. Sometimes, however, this summary is the whole news.

As in every field of life, there are people thinking that feeds should contain only a short summary, and other people thinking that the feeds should contain the whole news.

Personally, I tend to prefer the first hypotesys, which is better for many reasons:

• first and foremost, with a long text on the screen people tend to skip it, since it would be boring
• the way news aggregator and browser present the feed, moreover, is very boring: it’s just text, text, text
• feed-subscribers should go to your site/blog: if they don’t, they won’t probably click on advertising, since advertising inside RSS feeds is still at an embrionic stage and has lower click-throughs than ads displayed on the site

As always, do not summarize too much the news: people should understand what you’re talking about in the summary, and get interested by the first lines of the news, so that they click and go to your blog. If you can’t summarize well, let your blogging platform do it for you, by extracting the first words of every post.
And this is why I go for short RSS feeds.

Dave Taylor has published on a web-site excerpts of a book he has written, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google.

Excerpts of the book can be found here.

No matter which niche you are in, you are probably not alone: there is certainly somebody out there already doing more or less the same you do. Or, if you’re the first, there will be somebody following your steps.

To be updated on the moves of the other competitors, on interesting posts and so on read them periodically or, better, subscribe their feeds. In this way, if they publish a news you haven’t published, you can always mention it and put a reminder to the competitor’s site: this, in the blogosphere, is a very nice sign, as I’ve already explained in this post.

The work of every blogger is searching information. Google News helps, however.
I’ve made several searches on Google News related to the topics I deal with in my site and I have subscribed those searches with the Google Alerts.

By this, I get all the useful information in my inbox, and making posts with latest news has became easier than ever before.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a common way of giving people a feed of your news. People that subscribe these news can easily be alerted by their browser or news aggregator if a news is published on your blog, and thus they can read it.

Since RSS is a service to your users that doesn’t cost you too much, you have to go with it.

The blogosphere is really a world apart. Once upon a time, when I had a commercial site, I avoided putting competitor’s links on my site: I didn’t want people go to them. That’s obvious!

But today it’s different: not only because I deal with a niche - i.e., blog owners wanting to promote themselves and earning money - but also because certain rules in the blogosphere are not valid anymore.
I do not see anymore putting a link in a post, or on my blogroll, a possible way of users to go away; and this is because blogs are just reminders, quick notes to other articles, sites, newspapers, blogs.
If you avoid to put a link, you’re getting trouble: first, because the information you’re dealing with typically is not yours. Secondly, because visitors expect links in a blog: if you don’t, people will be tired of reading your voice only and won’t believe your truth.

Are you going to lose visitors if you put links to other sites and blogs on your site? No. If you give people information, people will recall that in the future, and will seek information again on your site.

Blogs are the most democratic expression on the Internet.

Are you going away for a week or a month, on holiday or on a business travel? State it clearly in a dedicated post!

And, if you please, put also an image related to your trip, so that people knows that you are away. State also clearly when you will return, and when you will, restart posting immediately.
In my country, when stores close for holidays the owners stick a sheet of paper stating that they’re on holiday and when they will be back: your blog is not different, so please, do the same.

How many blogs there are out there? Tons.

How many blogs are useful to you? Few.

Among these blogs, how many always have fresh content? Very, very, very few.

This is exactly the problem of blogs. Go to Google and try searching for some blogs. Let’s say that we want some gossip, and we search for dating blogs. Have you noticed the first result? As the time of this writing, the blog in question is last updated at Sunday, January 09, 2005.
8 months. Eight.
I’m not going to deal in why the guy has not updated the blog anymore: however, he has not. Now, would you return to an outdated blog? I certainly wouldn’t.

You may then ask which is the right update frequency, and how many posts you should make every x days.
There is no single answer to this question, however: it depends. Take my blog, for instance: what I’m trying to do is to make one or two posts a day, so that people knows that there is always updated content. There are guys out there that make even 5 to 10 posts every day: personally I find it too much, but if you can you could do you too.
For a blog dealing with the show-biz, the update frequency might be dictated by the news: if no news is coming in, no post should be made.

In all cases, however, there should be at least 1 post per week or so, or otherwise you’re going to lose visitors.

You’ve built a blog, you’ve been updating for a few months. You have a nice traffic, and your visitors start commenting your posts, and writing you emails. Nice.
Should you worry about anything?

Of course you should! The first rule is to always reply to questions, no matter how dumb they could be! I have run and currently run other sites aside from this, and what I’ve learnt is that people tend to ask nearly the unimaginable. Every 100 mails/comments, only 5 to 10 of them are useful to you: the others are just congratulations, insults, people asking for things they’ve not understood, requests for enhancements and so on.
How would you deal with that? Be polite. No matter what you’re selling or saying always keep well in mind that there is always somebody out there with different ideas, that thinks with a different mind, that may not understand what you say or - worst - may not understand you if you’re doing humor. There may be also somebody that doesn’t fully understand your language!

The rule for all these cases is always the same: don’t ignore them, and be polite, even if it might be stressing. If somebody writes to a blogger or to a site owner and does not get a reply probably doesn’t care too much: however, getting a reply is seen as a very good sign, and people will notice it.

Put in another way, would you be pleased to walk into a store, ask for something and be ignored? Would you return to the store?

I was just thinking… once we had sites, now we had blogs. What has changed in 2-3 years?

We have experienced at least three transitions:

• sites
• portals
• blogs

Not a long time ago anybody wanting to make an online enterprise had to build a site: that meant that people had to buy a WYSIWYG editor - or just write plain HTML code - and continue to update pages in order to sell their products, promote their ideas or sell services.
If you had no graphical skills or good taste, the output could be horrible, in the best case.

Then it was the time of "portals", such as PHPNuke: everybody had access to an easier way to maintain his/her site, and people could somehow interact with it. Very few sites built around this technologies had a lasting success, since it was rather difficult for people to understand what to do, how to interact, where to find contents. I’ve always hated them.

Now it is the time of blogs: almost everybody has one, and user-interaction is far easier. Blogs also have the advantage of having nice skins, but unless you personalize them you will get not a very nice and unique out-of-the-box experience.

The main problem of a blog - but also of any other site built upon any other technology - is content. Unless you present your users updated content, the blog won’t be read by anybody. But I’ll dig into this matter later on.