How Do i Create a Blogger Feed?

1. Enter your blog's web address in the "Ready to Burn?" form found on FeedBurner's homepage and at the bottom of the pages in the Blog and Podcast sections. If you plan to publish a podcast with your Blogger feed, check the "I am a podcaster" box. Click Next ».

   

   The Identify Feed Source page should appear.

2. On "Welcome", make sure the title and FeedBurner address (URL) of your new feed are values you prefer.

   

   The Create or Sign In To Your FeedBurner Account page should appear.

3. Also on this page, create a FeedBurner account by picking a username and password and supplying your email address.

   When you've supplied all the required information on this page, click Activate Feed ». A "Congrats" page should appear.

4. Read all of the information on "Congrats", then click Next » to continue with the setup process.

5. If you selected "I am a podcaster" on the homepage, configuration options for our SmartCast service will appear. Here you can supply categories and other information for iTunes, append a copyright message, and submit your podcast to Yahoo! Search.

   

   When you are finished, click Next ». Configuration options for FeedBurner stats services should appear.

6. On the stats configuration page, select the level of feed stats detail you want.

   

   Click Next » to finish the setup process and enter our feed management interface.

   You're now ready to make your FeedBurner feed available on your Blogger site!

Tracking 100% of your feed traffic: Redirecting your Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed

Blogger can make sure all feed traffic for your blog content goes to your FeedBurner feed. This helps make sure your FeedBurner stats are comprehensive and accurate; even subscribers to the 'Original Feed' are routed through FeedBurner. To redirect your feed:

1. In a new browser window, sign in to your Blogger account.

2. From the Blogger Dashboard, click the Settings link for the blog you want to promote.

   The Settings page for your selected blog should appear.

3. Click the Site Feed link under the Settings tab.

   

4. Type your complete FeedBurner feed address into the Post Feed Redirect URL text field. Make sure you type in your entire feed address including the "http://" portion.

   

5. Click Save Settings.

   You should see the message "Settings were Saved Successfully".

6. Blogger will now redirect all feed traffic for your blog to your FeedBurner feed.

   Note: If you are using the redirection feature within Blogger to send all of your feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed, you may want to modify the code we provide in order to keep your subscribers with you, even if you leave FeedBurner.

Done!!

-MZA-

What is Feeds?

Why use it: User to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers.

What it can do:

• Feeds permits subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email.
• Feeds make possible for site content to be packaged into 'widgets,' 'gadgets,' mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news [sports, weather and etc] whatever headlines just about anywhrere.

Why is this good: Online publishing has made it really easy to not only publish regular updates to web-based content, but also keep track of a large number of your favourite websites or blogs, without having to remember to check each site manually or clutter your email inbox.

Example: Live Bookmarks by Fire Fox

Whether it’s news from CNN and the BBC, or posts on your friend’s blog, the Web is updated continually. Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature automatically keeps track of these updates for you, so you always know when new content has been added to your favorite sites.

With Live Bookmarks, the content comes to you. Instead of constantly checking Web pages for changes and additions, a Live Bookmark delivers updates to you as soon as they are available.


Popular Feed Readers

Applications

* NewsGator - FeedDemon 2.0
(Windows, more info)
* NewsGator - Inbox for Microsoft Outlook
(Windows)
* NewsGator - NetNewsWire
(OS X)
* Firefox
(via "Live Bookmarks" feature)
* Safari
(feed support in the Apple OS X native browser)
* Pulp Fiction
(OS X)

Online Services

* Google Reader
* NewsGator
(Online)
* My Yahoo!
* Bloglines
* Pageflakes
* Netvibes

Podcast Readers

* iTunes
* Juice
* Doppler
* FireAnt


Terms:
News Aggregators; feed reading applications for text ad podcatchers for podcasts.

-MZA-

Make Money on The Internet

How to Make Money



Got it!!


Regards

-MZA-

How to Market Your Blog

For those bloggers out there who have decided to start their blogs you also have to know on how to market your blog

Get Your Own House In Order

1. Write well, write consistently, don’t give up: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.
2. Become an expert on something: Develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will grant you this informal title; bloggers will seek you out, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted (see below)
3. Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 Wordpress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.
4. Get Your SEO On: An entire post in and of itself — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.
5. Publish full feeds: A controversial topic. Publishing full feeds puts you at the mercy for content scrapers who will scrape your RSS feeds and repost your content, create traffic, and reap adsense bucks. On the other hand, some data suggests that it can also increase your traffic, and a few pundits swear by it. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.
6. Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.
7. Break important stories: See the post on how to find news. Long story short: if you have an interest in an area, it is still possible to do this as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.
8. Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.
9. Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and “publish it”. For fun, I asked myself “How many of the Top 30 Diggers actually blog?” And I just went through their profiles and created a table of how many blogged. I then talked about what it meant, and tried to answer the question “why?” [answer: not many do blog, its because being a top 30 digger requires a huge time investment]
10. Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)
11. Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.
12. Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: Of course you have enabled comments on every post, right? So, when you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend and contact.
13. Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.
14. Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way): MyBlogLog — know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has the potential to explode all over the blogosphere. The two sentence run down is that it offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can “add” friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages. I wrote a complete review over here.

Getting the Word Out

1. Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.
2. Join blog network: Between 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one. Goes back to tip #1 — don’t forget to keep up your blog.
3. Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog
4. Participate on larger blogs in comments: Like number three, except that by participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site (”hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … “). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.
5. Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. That’s right, you could get a post syndicated on Reuters. Trust me — it can happen . Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your mom that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top100 publishers only.
6. Participate in Darren’s contests: He has enough of them, and often publishes links to all of the participants.
7. Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.
8. Submit to Google sitemaps: Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster. Tip: for Wordpress fans, this plugin is particularly useful.
9. Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.
10. Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.
11. Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news. Hint: some news aggregators will actually accept submissions if you ask them nicely; double hint: try and get listed by linking to a top story within your first 100 words.
12. Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.
13. Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.
14. Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com

Connect, Connect, Connect

1. Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of “networking” (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more “adds” into their MyBlogLog network, more “ads” into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.
2. Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.
3. Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.
4. Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional “doors” … because now that you’re getting paid? You’re a “pro-blogger”, mate!
5. Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. Remember, you didn’t know me before Problogger, but I met Darren in person at a function in Toronto that played a part in me writing this. Think about that.
6. Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.
7. Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.

Make Social Media Work For You

1. Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. But, unlike other social networks (as far as I know), you can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead? Update: Myspace also allows this function, i believe.
2. Join Helium: Helium is a new site that is actively looking people to head new categories of content. Think a paid “about.com” — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.
3. Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a “signature” is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent “gaming”, but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.
4. Create a Squidoo Page Lens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog.
5. Use MySpace Marketing: Far beyond the confines of this post, but in a similar fashion to Squidoo, the idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic.
6. Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously. ‘Nuff said (for now).

Done !!

Regards

-MZA-

Twitter - Micro Blogging

Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Why Twitter is Useful for Organizing
In short, you can communicate with a large number of people by sending one short text message. In order to fully utilize the potential of Twitter, you need to encourage people (especially your members) to follow your group on Twitter AND to enable mobile device updates for your tweets.
Here are a few specific ways that Twitter can be useful for your organizing efforts.

Group Updates
First, you need to set up a Tweet Group which you can do in a few easy steps using Group Tweet (http://grouptweet.com/). After you set up a Tweet Group, you can send your members useful information that pertains to your chapter’s work and the issues on which your chapter is focusing. The key is to be very judicious in deciding when to Tweet this way. Even though you’re limited to the 140 characters per tweet, you can shorten longer URLs using Tiny URL (www.tinyurl.com), embed pictures through TwitPic (www.twitpic.com), or send video with Twiddeo (www.beta.twiddeo.com).

Meeting Planning
If all of your chapter members are following your group on Twitter (www.grouptweet.com to set up a Tweet group), you can tweet folks to remind them about upcoming meetings or do Twitter polls (twitter.polldaddy.com) if you need to decide when to schedule meetings. Even if you send emails about meetings, people can forget about them hours or minutes after they’ve read that message. A quick Tweet might be all they need to remind them.

Actions
Twitter can be a great tool to organize actions, especially at the last minute. Although everyone has e-mail, everyone doesn’t check every e-mail message every day. Text messages are read by many more people. If you’re able to get a large number of people following your group, you could tweet them about a rally and ask them to RSVP by calling a number, emailing a specific address, etc to get a hard count of people. While at that rally, you could tweet folks to let everyone know to assembly at a certain place at a certain time to march in unison somewhere else or to get more leaflets to distribute, etc. A perfect example of this is when San Francisco activists used Twitter to organize and coordinate a rally/march to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

Track Your Progress
Once you commit to using Twitter, you can use the following resources to track your progress.

• Intwition (www.intwition) tracks what links are, were or will be popular on Twitter.
• Twitterverse (www.twitterverse.com) is an at-a-glance source for finding out what users are most commonly tweeting today.
• Tweet Clouds (www.tweetclouds.com) tells you what a given Twitter user most commonly tweets.
• TweetStats (www.tweetstats.com) provides colourful graphs on month-to-month Twitter use, daily and hourly tweets, people replied to most, interfaces preferred, for individual Twitter users. (It has been used in the past to identify bots — one good reason to avoid playing dirty on Twitter.)

Helpful Links for More Twitter Info
Twitter Tools for Journalists (really anybody)
http://www.newmediabytes.com/2008/01/18/best-twitter-tools-resources-and-clients-guide/

San Francisco activists use Twitter to organize anti-war rally
http://www.marketingvox.com/sf-activists-use-twitter-to-coordinate-war-protest-037478/

Using Twitter to build brand identity
http://www.marketingvox.com/how-to-using-twitter-to-build-brand-integrity-038162/

101 Must See Twitter Resources
http://www.askowlbert.com/about-the-topic/101-must-see-twitter-resources-apps-tools-how-to-plugins-extensions-and-more/

Useful Twitter Commands
@username + message - A message directed at a specific user - be careful, everyone can see this!
D username + message - A direct message to a specific user that no one else can see!
WHOIS username - get profile info from any public Twitter user
GET username - see latest tweet of the specified user
NUDGE username - remind a twitter user to update their tweets!
FAV username - "marks a person’s last twitter as a favorite. (hint: reply to any update with FAV to mark it as a favorite if you’re receiving it in real time)"
STATS - returns your number of followers, how many people you’re following, and which words you’re tracking


Regards

-MZA-

Online Ideas Your Never Tought Of

Web Department- Which collaboration tools is for you?

Twitter.com

What you can share:Messages, links and public and private replies

How to use it: Create private work accounts to keep info in-house, then share via web, mobile or desktop app

Who sees your posts: Your 'followers' or the general public, per your update settings

Why to use it: The short posts allow for quick info exchange' public accounts are good for PR and crowdsourcing answers

Yammer.com

What you can share: Free for basic service; RM1 per month per user for businesses to take more control of their network

How to use it: Follow collegues, tags and discussion threads via web, mobile, IM or desktop app

Who sees your posts: Those within your business who have a company e-mail, or selected departments and groups

Why to use it: This insular network becomes a light and mobile intranet replacement

Campfirenow.com

What you can share: Messages, images, documents, videos and computer code.

How to use it: Converse with collegues and clients via the web.

Who sees your posts:Up to 1,000 invited members in a chat room

Why to use it: Themed chat rooms help focus discussion, and you can review date and room archives.

You can log on to http://www.thedreamsoft.com for courses and short seminar on New Media marketing.

Regards

-MZA-

Blog

What is a Blog?

A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

According to Pyra Labs Blogger, "A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal." The term is actually weblogs coined by Jorn Barger in 1997.

The boom of weblogs happened in 1999 when several companies & developers made easy blogging software and tools. Since 1999, the number of blogs on the Internet has exploded from a few thousand to over 100 million.

Blogs can fall into two general categories.

Personal Blogs: a mixture of a personal diary, opinion posts and research links.

Business Blogs: a corporate tool for communicating with customers or employees to share knowledge and expertise.

Business blogs are sweeping the business community. Blogs are an excellent method to share a company's expertise, build additional web traffic, and connect with potential customers..

What does Blogging Provide to Small Business?

• Blog software is easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software companies such as: Movable Type, Blogger.com and Typepad all offer easy blogging tools to get started.
• Blogging is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company's name out on the Internet.
• Updating the weblog is a much quicker process than contacting a web designer with changes or doing the coding and uploading yourself.
• Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. A powerful benefit for consultants and knowledge workers.

Examples of Business Blogs

Research Buzz is an excellent resource tool for Internet research. An information provider, Research Buzz provides advertising and a special paid edition of their newsletter.

Gizmodo is a weblog about everything about gadgets and gizmos for those who want to remain on the cutting edge of consumer electronics. As a web magazine, Gizmodo is quickly building a specialized audience in consumer electronics with an advertising business model.

Happy Blogging


-MZA-

Web Blog

What is a Blog?

A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

According to Pyra Labs Blogger, "A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal." The term is actually weblogs coined by Jorn Barger in 1997.

The boom of weblogs happened in 1999 when several companies & developers made easy blogging software and tools. Since 1999, the number of blogs on the Internet has exploded from a few thousand to over 100 million.

Blogs can fall into two general categories.

Personal Blogs: a mixture of a personal diary, opinion posts and research links.

Business Blogs: a corporate tool for communicating with customers or employees to share knowledge and expertise.

Business blogs are sweeping the business community. Blogs are an excellent method to share a company's expertise, build additional web traffic, and connect with potential customers..

What does Blogging Provide to Small Business?

• Blog software is easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software companies such as: Movable Type, Blogger.com and Typepad all offer easy blogging tools to get started.

• Blogging is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company's name out on the Internet.
• Updating the weblog is a much quicker process than contacting a web designer with changes or doing the coding and uploading yourself.
  
  
• Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. A powerful benefit for consultants and knowledge workers.

Examples of Business Blogs

Research Buzz is an excellent resource tool for Internet research. An information provider, Research Buzz provides advertising and a special paid edition of their newsletter.

Gizmodo is a weblog about everything about gadgets and gizmos for those who want to remain on the cutting edge of consumer electronics. As a web magazine, Gizmodo is quickly building a specialized audience in consumer electronics with an advertising business model.

Happy Blogging

Regards

-MZA-