Whether you spend a lot of time on the Internet or not, you have probably heard the term RSS feed somewhere before. Popular sites such as The New York Times have an option to receive RSS feeds. Many people who are familiar with the Internet still don’t really know what exactly an RSS feed really is. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Just as the acronym states, they are pretty simple to use and help simplify some of your web usage. The basic idea of an RSS feed is to receive frequently changing content (like blogs, podcasts or news updated) in one place so you don’t have to re-visit your favorite websites over and over to get the latest news. They also update almost instantly so when a new post or article is available, it can be found right in your RSS feed reader. RSS delivers the blog post or news story as an XML file which is called the “RSS feed.”

RSS is a very popular way to receive feeds but it is actually not a new concept. Other companies like Apple Inc. have attempted to do what RSS does now. Although other companies have created these feeds, none have become as universally accepted as RSS. Today, competing companies recognize the RSS feed icon (orange square with white radio waves) as the industry standard for RSS. Due to the increasing popularity of RSS feeds, large companies like Microsoft, Apple and the open source project Mozilla Firefox, have incorporated RSS feed readers into their Internet browsers to better accommodate their users. Other popular services like the peer to peer file sharing service, BitTorrent, have also incorporated the use of RSS feeds. The use of RSS feeds have become so standard that all the big players in the Internet news industry like CNN.com are also giving users the option to receive news updates via RSS feeds.

So you have somewhat of an idea about how and what an RSS feed is, but how do you go about receiving one? To receive an RSS feed, you have a few different options. You can use a web based feed reader or one specific to your computer platform that is a standalone program. One of the most common and easiest to use feed readers is Google Reader. This one is simple because all you need is a Google account and you are ready to go. No separate programs or services to sign up for. To start receiving a RSS feed in your feed reader program, you can enter the feed address right in the interface of your feed reader, and the latest news, posts or podcasts will instantly show up. If you come across a new site that you really enjoy or are unsure of the feed address of your favorite websites, look for the RSS feed logo or text link and it will direct you to subscribe to the RSS feed. It really is simple. When you use Google Reader, you can log in to the Reader service or have your feeds displayed on your customized homepage.

Google definitely recognizes the popularity of RSS feeds. The search giant, Google, just recently purchased a RSS management company by the name of Feedburner for $100 million dollars. This company is still fairly young but has had a big influence on the RSS world. Google will benefit from this acquisition by getting a better idea of what kind of feeds people subscribe to and which ones are the most popular. More importantly for Google, they can now advertise in the RSS feeds which is one advertising market they have yet to dominate.

WordPress is becoming the king of the blogging community because of its amazing capabilities. It features options for the most advanced users but is also very easy to use for beginners. The ability to customize it to your needs has made it increasingly popular. But how do you customize it to be popular with the search engines? Everyone wants their web site to show up high in Google and other major search engines. Here are some must do tips to make your WordPress blog search engine (and user) friendly.

1. Content, Content, Content. That’s the whole purpose of your blog, right? Too many people neglect web site visitors when trying to optimize their web sites for search engines. You must remember that your site is intended for human eyes and it must be natural and reader friendly first, before making it search engine friendly. Using spammy SEO techniques may bump you up a little bit in the search engine results but if you notice the top results, they are always reader friendly.
2. Your first step towards making your WordPress blog search engine friendly should be to change your Permalink structure. The default WordPress setting is anti-SEO friendly. A typical blog post with the default Permalink structure looks something like this:
   

   http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

   Within your WordPress settings, they have some other Permalink structure options. You will want to select an option that uses the title of your posts in the URL. For example:

   http://www.yourdomain.com/2007/04/27/sample-post/

   This is one of the options provided to you but WordPress also gives you the option of creating your own structure. This is necessary for your blog’s SEO success because it makes the URL much friendlier to search engines, and also can provide some keywords in your URL which will always help your ranking status. It helps your web site visitors also because it gives them a rough idea about what your post is about. They are also more likely to link your blog postings if they have more readable URL’s instead of the “/?p=123” situation. It is important to change your permalink structure in the beginning stages of your blog. But if your blog has been around for a while with anti-SEO-friendly url structure, and now you want to switch to SEO-friendly Permalinks, you can try Permalink Redirect plugin, which will automatically redirect existing blog urls according to your new permalink structure by means of 301 permanent redirect. This plugin is useful when you want to switch to a new permalink structure without losing existing SERPs of your blog contents.

3. Page titles are a very important factor in search engine rankings and your blogs page titles are no different. The default WordPress setting automatically generates your titles to look like this: “Blogname – Blog Archive – Post Title.” To optimize your blog for search engines, you should switch the Post Title and Blog Archive positioning. When people use a search engine and come across your blog, this title is the linking text that they click on. The words they searched for will be bolded so you want those words to be to the far left as possible. Swapping these two positions will do that for you. In order to change this, you will have to edit your header.php file. You will want to find the code that looks like this:
   

   <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

   and replace it with this code:

   <title><?php wp_title(’ ‘); ?><?php if(wp_title(’ ‘, false)) { echo ‘–’; } ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title></li>

4. Sitemaps are a necessary part of any search engine optimization campaign. Sometimes creating a sitemap can be tricky with frequently updated contents. Fortunately with WordPress, there is a handy sitemap plug-in that will do all the work for you. All you have to do is install the plug-in.
5. Many bloggers using tagging as a way to list their posts in different social networking sites. The Ultimate Tag Warrior is another WordPress plug-in that will assist you in creating these tags. These are similar to the categories that are already implemented in WordPress but it is an additional form of categorizing that will help you in the “Web 2.0” sites like del.icio.us and Technorati. You will also want to take advantage of the Meta tags by inserting relevant keywords and page descriptions.
6. After you have optimized your WordPress blog with different plug-ins and options, you will want to get your blog listed in many of the blog directories available. Search engines count links to your sites as votes towards its popularity. You only want links (or votes) from sites that have similar content to yours. There are many blog directories out there that meet this criterion. Also, if you enjoy reading someone’s blog who has similar interests to yours, send them and e-mail and request a link to your blog. Listing your web site in your forum signature or e-mails may not give you credit for a link but if readers enjoy what you had to say, they may be more inclined to visit your web site and possibly link to it in the future.

WordPress has taken the blogosphere by storm. Anyone who is familiar with blogging probably has heard of WordPress. One of the greatest features of WordPress is the ability to customize it to your own tastes and liking. One of the easiest ways to personalize your blog is with plugins. With a million choices of WordPress plugins out there, here is a short list of the best plugins that every blogger should have.

Akismet Spam Catcher

This is the number one plugin tool out there that most bloggers are using. If you have a popular blog with lots of readers and comments, you’ve probably received some comment spams. Spammers are a widely faced problem by bloggers no matter what blogging platform they use. Due to its popularity, WordPress is the most attacked blog platform by manual and auto-spammers. To resolve this problem, the default Wordpress installation file is bundled up with the Akismet Spam Catcher. When enabled, Akismet checks the comments you receive against their database of common spam and blocks it from reaching your Web site. It stores it for a certain amount of time so you can double check and make sure you’re readers comments aren’t getting blocked. You can maintain the professional look of your blog without spending hours wading through the comments for spam.

Google Sitemap Generator Plugin

This tool creates an XML sitemap file that is good for Google, Yahoo and MSN search. Providing the search engine bots with a sitemap of your blog will get more of your web pages indexed in the search engines. The more web pages you have indexed in the search engines, the more likely your Web site is to get found from searches. This is another free tool available for your WordPress blog. If you are trying to generate extra income from Google AdSense or just trying to gain readers for your blog, this sitemap generator plugin will help you in your attempt.

Gravatars

This is a fun plugin that will spruce up your comment section and invite readers to personalize their involvement with your blog. The Gravatar plugin lets your users upload a picture or image that will show up next to their name when they comment on your blog. Any time you can involve your readers in your blog, it will make them want to come back and keep reading. People are always looking for interesting blogs to follow.

WP-Cache

This may not be the most exciting plugin available for your Wordpress blog but it may be one of the most important ones you use. If you’ve been keeping a blog for a long time, you know how the blog posts can add up. WP-Cache is a very efficient WordPress caching system that will make your site a lot faster and more responsive. It caches your WordPress pages and stores them in a static file for requests in the future. WP-Cache is another free WordPress plugin that is a must have. If you have hundreds of blog posts, it may take a while to gather that data when someone searches for information on your Web site. With this free caching utility tool, you won’t loser visitors with slow response time.

WordPress Database Backup

Like the Akismet plugin, this plugin is also bundled up with any WordPress installation and can be easily activated like the Akismet plugin. Database backup is a very useful tool for protecting a blog’s database from file corruption. It is advisable to backup Wordpress databases on a regular basis, and most especially when doing a WordPress version upgrade. This plugin allows saving of the backup file on the hard disk or can be sent as a file on a specified email.

Related Post

This WordPress plugin is very useful when highlighting previously posted articles which have related topics to the currently posted post. This plugin enables blogger to display other related posts via a title list, other previous posts. It is a good way to highlight previous posts as well as increase search engine hits.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

The UTW plugin as it is commonly called is the best way of tagging individual posts of weblogs. The tags generated by UTW provide a useful navigation for other related contents on the blog. The UTW also provides a way for the blog to be indexed by Technorati and other tag-enabled blog directories.

Recent Comment

Like the Related Post plugin, the recent comment plugin is a useful utility for displaying the most recent comments made by blog readers. This is good way of encouraging users to participate on the discussion on the different posts in the blog. First time commenter will be encourage to come back again in the future and comment on future blog posts. The more commenter in a blog, the more successful that blog is.

There are other useful plugins that can be installed on WordPress powered blogs and each has its own functionality and purpose. Installing most of them is very useful and yet should be done conservatively so as not to slow down the performance of the blog. Install only those plugins which are useful depending on the niche of your blog.

Blogs are the perfect arena to make some extra cash with Google’s AdSense. If you understand AdSense a little better, you can optimize your blog to maximize your AdSense revenue. AdSense is driven by content – the more content, the more targeted ads you will have. How can you generate that much content? It could take years to come up with thousands of pages of content. One of the best and quickiest ways to pump up the size of your blog content is to include content from outside sources. But there’s a little more to it. You should comment on the stories and put your own ideas in your blog. This will make your blog postings unique and avoid duplicate content across the web. You will need interesting and informative content to draw visitors to your web site who will in turn click on your AdSense advertisements bringing in extra money. People will not be interested in your blog if you just throw any random information on there. Try to focus on a single topic or niche and draw visitors in with interesting stories, articles and your own personal commentary.

The aesthetics and usability of your site have a much bigger impact on your blog’s AdSense revenue than most people think. Internet users are becoming more aware of Internet advertising and the common techniques marketers have been using to get them to click on their ads. Also, it takes Internet users very little time to decide if the Web site they are looking at is credible, reliable or worth looking at. You must have an attractive page that won’t have Internet users reaching for the back button. It is easy and fast to throw together an ugly web page with useless content and you may get a few clicks on your AdSense ads. However, spending extra time to put together a great looking web site with good, quality content will pay off in the long run. It may take you a little longer but it is a time investment you will have to take to reap the best rewards.

Placement of the ads in your blog may seem like an obvious choice but considering alternative placement can really show big results. Bombarding your web site visitors with ads is not a good idea. If an Internet user opens your page and sees nothing but ads, they will turn and run. Most Internet users are also starting to recognize the typical AdSense bars in the usual locations in the header or sidebars. There are some instances where it might be good to include those locations for your ads but the best option is to include them near the content. They will blend in with your content and after a user reads an article with your interesting commentary at the end, they will find some ads that apply to exactly what they are thinking about. Maximizing your AdSense revenue doesn’t have to be tricky, just think like one of your visitors and it will all pay off.

One thing that I find somewhat surprising is that there are so many bloggers who completely disregard blog feeds. Making it easier for your readers to access your blog content, blog feeds are a great way to expand the readership of your blog. With feeds, readers can “subscribe” and get constant updates in the “Feeds” section of their Internet Browser. The feed is updated automatically when a new post is made so there is little need for maintenance. You can set the feed to only include the first half or so of the post so that visitors must actually visit your blog to get all the information, rather than only reading the feed and never visiting the blog again.

FeedBurner is the biggest of the “Feed Providing” sites, and since it is used on virtually every large blog that uses feeds, it’s the best network to use. They take care of everything for you and it only takes a few minutes to create an account, and get full access to a user panel of the account where you can manage every aspect of your blog feed. If you have never seen a blog feed, here is an example: Romow Internet Marketing blog’s blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RomowInternetMarketingBlog. FeedBurner has also started a new CPM based advertising program that we will go further into in a upcoming post. If you have a blog and don’t have a feed, go to FeedBurner.com and get one, you will be glad you did.

Although feeds can help increase readership, the one thing that webmasters care the most is monetization: how they can make money through their web sites. FeedBurner runs an advertising program, known as the FeedBurner Advertising Network or just simply, FAN. This advertising network, unlike that of Google or Yahoo!, is not run on a CPC basis where publishers are paid each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Rather, they are paid on a CPM basis where advertisers are paid $x each 1,000 times advertisement is viewed. With big name publishers such as Reebok and high payouts of $5-$7 per 1000 views, sites with decent traffic, 5000+ unqiues a day, can earn as much as $35 a day per ad unit using FAN. If multiple ad units are run, one can easily earn over $100 daily.

However, there are some restrictions. First of all, FeedBurner can only be run on blogs so if your site is not a blog, I suggest you create one. The other major obstacle is that to get accepted into the program, you need to have many people subscribing to your feed. Having a few thousand visitors daily and over 800 feed subscribers should be able to give you a good chance to be accepted. Like any high paying advertising network, you need to have a decent site to get accepted and paid. If you think your blog qualifies, try out this opportunity!

A few weeks ago, I made a post about PayPerPost type sites such as ReviewMe that were in their “prelaunch phases.” Well, ReviewMe recently launched and after having some time to look through the features, I have to say that I am impressed. The web site is a more “professional version of PayPerPost.com.” Unlike PayPerPost where anyone can submit an entry on their blog (provided that it meets their very low standards) and get paid, ReviewMe allows advertisers to pick and choose what blogs they want to advertise on so that they get the most out of their advertising dollar.

ReviewMe says that prices will vary from $40 to $1000+ per post and prices for a post are set by an algorithm that takes into account various rankings including Alexa ranking and then sets a cost for each blog. Hence, the service does not allow individual bloggers to set their own prices.

From my personal testing, everything appeared good and working well. There were a number of blogs already listed and I completed one opportunity on one of my blogs and made $20. The entire “blogger dashboard” is very nicely organized so it is very easy to keep track of all my information.

The only downside of ReviewMe is that they take 50% so if they set the price of a post on your blog to $40, you only earn $20. But I cannot complain that not all the money comes to my pocket. :)

Overall, if you are looking to create a random blog and be paid $5-$15 for a post, then you are better off using PayPerPost; however, if you have a blog with traffic and a high page rank and think that advertisers would genuinely pay $40+ for a blog post, than ReviewMe is the way to go.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion regarding paying for blog posts as a means of advertising. In the summer of this year, PayPerPost, a new web startup that allows bloggers to earn by making posts about company’s products or services, was launched. Since its launch over 4 months ago, the site has created a rift in the online blogging community between those who think paying for blog posts is ethical, and those who think not.

Many argue that their service is not ethical since bloggers do not disclose that they were paid for the post. Others argue that it is the blogger’s individual right to choose whether or not they want to display advertisements in the method of a post and whether or not they want to disclose that they were paid for the post. We will stay out of the politics of the issue and instead focus on how this service has sparked interest in “Paying for Blog Posts” as a primary way of monetizing weblogs.

Over the past few months, many new web startups such as ReviewMe have followed the PayPerPost model, but created their own variations. ReviewMe allows advertisers to choose certain blogs to advertise on, while PayPerPost allows bloggers to choose which “opportunities” they want to blog about.

PayPerPost recently reported that they have earned over $100,000 since their launch and that tens of thousands of posts have been made using their network. This and the fact that they recently received $3 Million in VC Funding should lead to a great increase in the “paying for blog post” market of web advertising over the next few years. The industry is definitely one to keep a close eye on.