If you own a blog or website that gives out information on a daily schedule, then you know how important RSS feeds can be. But what are RSS feeds? RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a content subscription technology that was created over the past few years and slowly became a natural part of the internet. By subscribing to your website RSS feed, your viewers can remain updated about anything that has changed, any news or any other information that they need. Now, when it comes to increasing your RSS subscribers, the steps are no different from the ones that you have in relation to increasing email subscribers.

How effectively are you using your RSS feeds?

Unique content is critical

One of the most important things to remember is that unique content is critical, meaning that your audience should only receive original information, no matter whether you post it on a website or a blog. You will get even more subscribers if you offer top notch content that can’t be found anywhere else, no matter which niche you are in. The main reason why you need to understand how RSS works is that your customers may want to use it as a subscription method to your sites updates. And that’s only possible when you’re able to give them that kind of leverage.

Quality is significantly more important than quantity

When it comes to RSS feeds, quality is significantly more important than quantity. Although it is important that you post content on a regular basis, but if your posts don’t make any logical sense, there’s no real use of making them. You will find that subscribers will try to unsubscribe as quickly as possible and they will then look for other feeds they can subscribe to in the same niche. You won’t be able to build up your subscriber list if you don’t have everything set up right because the competition online is quite fierce. You will find you will get more subscribers and they will stick around for longer, when you post top notch content. RSS can do a lot for your blog.

Avoid having too many feed options

Finally, avoid having too many feed options. This will just make things very unruly and confusing. You have probably encountered a website that have numerous ways to subscribe to a feed. This can really make things confusing. If you really want your visitors to subscribe to your feed then make it easy for them, not complex. Providing to many options can make your website look unorganized. This can drive people away instead of make them stay. So the simplest way to handle this is to select the most well liked feed options and situation them above the fold of your webpage.

Create a sturdy foundation first

So, if you want to consistently get more RSS subscribers and take you list to the next level, then you have to create a sturdy foundation first. Provide your visitors a reason to continue getting updates and advise them of what they are missing if they don’t subscribe to your RSS feeds. You will have to convince them, but ultimately it will be worth the effort. When you have a few thousand feed subscribers, getting the word out about the rest of your web marketing plan activities becomes buch more simple.

Still not sure? Have a look at this ‘RSS in Plain Engish’ video:

The 43rd edition of our podcast brings you week #11 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video shows you how to submit your blog to blog & RSS directories.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The 40th edition of our podcast brings you week #8 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video shows you how to market your business using WordPress RSS.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The audio version of our interview about blogging with Yaro Starak is only available to Inner Circle members. If you’re already a member, click here to listen to the interview now.

Yaro Starak

D: I’m fortunate to be joined today by Yaro Starak, founder of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. Yaro, pleased to talk to you.

Y: Thanks for having me, David.

D: Could you possibly begin by telling me a little bit about how Entrepreneurs-Journey came about, and really how your internet life evolved before that?

Y: Sure, no problem. Before we start, though, just to clarify: people have trouble spelling ‘entrepreneur’ so I like to tell people just to Google my name, ‘Yaro’, if they want to check out my blog and the other sites I run.

Entrepreneur’s Journey, well, it started back in 1998, although I should say that I didn’t start the blog back in 1998, that was when I built my first website. That was during my first year of university when I was given a free internet connection. By my second year I think I was well and truly interested in the internet, and I started doing a bit of website design using the free tool called ‘Geocities’ – which probably a lot of people will remember if they have been online since the late 90’s, maybe the early 2000’s.

Geocities was a fairly rudimentary WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for websites and you could have your own host of website. It was, I guess, a precursor to the current MySpace fad: a lot of people use those sort of services just to have a hobby or a personal website.

I used it to do a hobby site for a card game I was playing at the time called ‘Magic: The Gathering’. I became very frustrated with the Geocities tool; and, discovering the next step forward would be to learn HTML, I went out to the bookshop and looked for a textbook to learn what this HTML language was all about. I have to admit I was quite apprehensive because I was studying at university and I hated textbooks so the idea of actually purchasing one that I intended to read and study was a bit of a foreign concept! But I did manage to get to the bookshop and purchase the ‘Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours’ book.

From that point I was able to do things with my website and actually get a design that I was happy with, at least to a certain degree; and that website became the number one hobby site for that card game – in Australia, at least. That was my main focus for quite a few years: during university I devoted a lot of time to it and made some money from advertising. It was the first way I made money online. That was before anything like Google existed, so I was selling banners and so forth.

The natural progression for me then was to actually get serious and build an internet business. I came up with an idea to start an editing and proofreading service that connected university students with PhD editors and university professors, and retired university professors, who would do the editing through the internet. I created a company called ‘Better Edit’ which I still own today. I registered that in the year 2000: I built the website myself, and my family at the time helped to do the editing initially until we brought on some contract editors.

Then I retired from the project for a while. I took a break while I completed my degree. I graduated in 2003, then went travelling, came back in 2004, and I was back home with nothing to do. My intentions were always to start a business of some kind and I really believed in the editing and proofreading business as being potentially significant so I decided to devote myself to that project and started working on it full time.

During that time, someone told me about blogs. I had no idea what a blog was, but this person told me that blogs were doing really well for search engine rankings – and that was a marketing tool which I thought I’d like to have for my editing company. So I went and did some initial research into what blogging is all about. I’m the type of person who learns best through implementation, so I did some research, found out there was a piece of software called ‘Moveable Type’ which I downloaded and installed on my BetterEdit.com website/blog. The intention was to use it as a marketing tool for that business. So I started writing about editing and proofreading: which turned out to be a very, very painful experience, because I wasn’t interested in editing and proofreading. I enjoy writing, but the topic of editing and proofreading is not something I really have experience of, or interest in. I liked running a business from a business point of view but I was not an editor!

So after a few half-hearted attempts with those sort of articles I eventually got on to a topic which I really enjoyed: internet business and entrepreneurship, and internet marketing – those sort of topics. And I started talking about my journey to that point: about how I had run an initial hobby site, and what other businesses I had started on the way to going into my internet editing and proofreading business. And that took on a life of it’s own. It was pretty clear that this was a topic I enjoyed writing about so about six months after launching that side blog I converted it to a stand-alone project and registered the domain name Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. I didn’t realise it would become quite as big as it has; I have to admit at the time I thought it would be maybe a hobby, and I’d see what happened. I probably should have chosen a better domain name, one that people can spell! But I’ve still got it today, and I keep writing on a near daily basis so I’ve been blogging for two and a half years now.

D: Wow, yes. That’s an incredible story, thanks for that. I actually once looked up the domain name EntrepreneursJourney.com without the dash at all. Just one question possibly pertinent to that: going back a couple of years ago, would you have actually chosen a domain name without the dash in it if you’d known it was going to be so big?

Y: Oh yes, definitely. It’s not a bad brand name, I don’t dislike it. It passes though the mouth well; it’s just hard to spell, and the dash is not great. In general now when I choose a domain name I try and find one where I can get the dashes and also the name without the dashes. Obviously, without the dashes first is the most important thing. And if you can get the dashes then you’re safe and you have all the possibilities. With the power of hindsight I now know what the blog has become, what sort of audience I want to attract to it; and therefore I could come up with a much better keyword-rich / branding / explanation domain name that actually tries to tick all those boxes. And maybe use a shorter word that people can spell, without a dash – that sort of thing. But you don’t know when you’re starting a blog: I was planning this to be sort of a rambling journal at the time, and it became much more – or maybe not much more, it’s still a rambling journal in a lot of ways!

D: It’s ranked about 15,000 on Alexa so it’s certainly quite a bit more I would say…

Y: It’s a popular rambling journal.

D: So if you’re talking about domain names with people who have their own businesses; if someone, for instance, has a business that’s just focused on a particular country, would you still encourage them to go for ‘.com’ or would you say no, a regional domain’s more appropriate for that kind of business?

Y: It depends who your target market is. If you are targeting a local audience, then definitely get yourself a local domain name as well as local-based hosting because that means you’ll rank better in your Google local search and other search engines for people coming from your country and that’s what you want to do. So if that’s you… BetterEdit predominantly gets business from Australia so when I first launched it I made sure I acquired the ‘.au’ as well as the ‘.com’. The rule of thumb here is get every single version of the domain you can, so that you’re getting all the traffic and you’re not running the risk of missing out on something. That being said, the ‘.coms’ are saturated so you can’t always get what you want, and sometimes that means getting another one instead. What do they use in Scotland ‘.sc’?

D: No, no, it’s still ‘.co.uk’ – we’re still part of the United Kingdom at the moment!

Y: Right, you’re still lumped with that one! Well, in that case I’d be registering the ‘.co.uk’. We actually have BetterEdit.co.uk as well because we get some clients from the UK. But, if you can get a nice, short – maybe even one word, or two words – domain in your local country and you’re a local business I’d opt for that over trying to struggle to get a ‘.com’ in a good domain name.

D: OK, and you tend to go for a brand as opposed to key words within a domain name?

Y: There’s a debate there. There’s a longstanding debate. The ideal situation is both, but you can’t always get that now. I remember when I first studied this I was looking around for people’s opinion on the best type of domain name to get, and there was the search engine marketers who would say the most important thing is keywords. Try and get your first, or your primary or secondary keyword in there somewhere.

BetterEdit, in this case, got the word ‘editing’ so although that was unintentional it turned out to be a great domain name for both keywords, as well as being a good brand, it’s got nice cadence in terms of the word. With Entrepreneur’s-Journey, I don’t mind people searching for the word ‘entrepreneur’ but it’s not a very highly searched phrase. If I could go back, my sort of targeting now is internet business – so I’d probably try and find a way to get in the phrase ‘business’ or ‘marketing’ or even ‘blogging’, or ‘blog’, or something like that. Those are the areas I’m heading towards now.

Personally, I’m more inclined to lean on the search engine optimization side of the fence and get the key words in there. The only reason why that’s good is people link to your website using the domain name very often, and if you have your keyword and they are also linking to your site using that keyword, then that’s giving you some ranking for that keyword. So it’s not specifically because you have registered a keyword in your domain name, it’s because of the way people link to you as a result of that. That makes it good for search engine rankings.

The other side of the fence is the pure exposure, memorability and branding point of view. Now if you’re a Google or Yahoo, you know, that’s obvious, those keywords mean nothing, but, they’re fantastic brands and they’re so well established that they’re easy to remember, and they’re catchy, that’s fantastic… Most companies are not planning on having that kind of size exposure but that doesn’t mean branding doesn’t count: branding counts at all levels. So I’m probably more like about 60% on the search side and 40% on the catchy domain name that’s brandable.

D: That’s really interesting. Obviously you’re doing an excellent job positioning yourself as an expert in terms of blogs, blog consulting with your blog mastermind and blog traffic school, but obviously there are a lot of businesses out there that have heard of the term ‘blog’ but aren’t actually sure exactly what it means. How do you actually define a ‘blog’ to a business that isn’t too sure what a blog actually is?

Y: To a business? Well, ok, you’re using business language to talk to business folk and if that’s the case I’d say it’s actually another marketing channel, and I highlight the reasons that make a blog perhaps different from a traditional website.

We are talking about using a website to market a business – that’s what a blog is. What makes it different is the language it speaks to users. Blogs are inherently more personal so you don’t get the static corporate image that a website has. A blog by it’s nature, and by the way people interpret it in internet culture, is always more personal, and you get that relationship with readers that’s a bit different to a static corporate blog. So that’s probably the most important thing from a marketing-centered point of view: you foster a much more natural relationship with your users and can then soft sell by using your expertise and demonstrating expertise to people through the blog.

Then I’d say that there are some very cosmetic differences that you’ll see in blogs that you might use to differentiate them from other websites: the chronological ordering of articles, the ability for users to make comments on articles… So, once again, these are two very distinct differences from very static websites. You’ve got an ability for your customers or potential customers to interact with you and give you direct feedback on what you’re doing, as well as to influence them – demonstrating you know what you’re writing about and talking about so you actually are good at what your business does. And of course the fact that you’ve got content coming on a regular basis: it’s not just the same sales page I see every time I come to your website.

So that’s a bit more intrinsic and you probably need to sit down with someone and show them a few blogs so they can understand. Show them, in particular, small business blogs, and how those people are using them to make product sales, or to make sales of a consultancy service – something like that. Just to demonstrate the interactivity, the community nature… But really we are talking about a marketing tool. That’s what it is.

D: That’s interesting. So if, for instance, a business was actually starting a website for the first time would you say it’s worthwhile for them to consider just using a blogging template/blogging technology as a base for their website or should they have a separate website and a blog that is just part of that?

Y: It’s a question of resources there, really. If you’ve got the resources to do both I would recommend having both. I’m a blogging evangelist so I’m always going to say: if you’ve only got resources for one, I’d still recommend a blog just because I know how powerful they are as a means to communicate and if you’re using a fantastic system like WordPress – which I think you want to talk about in a second – it allows you to create those static sales pages as well as have a blog. So I’d be inclined to say to people: use the blog as the main website for making sales.

I have some friends who are into internet marketing, and they often believe a direct response website is the best way to go if you are selling a reasonably standardised service or something where you can’t necessarily… you can write about it, and they would probably argue: use an email list instead of a blog and use, you know, some sort of ongoing communication through email – some sort of course or newsletter – as a standard, stand-alone, lead, you know, generation tool to warm up users. That’s the same as what a blog is, but it allows you to do it on an ongoing basis.

So my recommendation is to use a blog, and I think in an ideal situation is if you set up your website as a dotcom/blog, then you have the blog additionally as, again, the marketing channel for the website.

D: OK, you’ve talked a little bit about ‘Moveable Type’ and ‘WordPress’ as blogging software options. Could you talk a little bit about what your personal preference is?

Y: What happened was that I was using Moveable Type initially, but I became frustrated when I found myself having difficulty making changes to the theme, the template, the look of the blog. And I was also hearing a hell of a lot about an open-source piece of software called WordPress which seemed to be really gaining attraction among many other bloggers and the general blogosphere of everyone else. So I did some initial investigation: I was actually concerned about search rankings again because my Moveable Type blog was ranking really well and I was concerned that switching to WordPress might harm those rankings because they use different engines. I don’t want to get too technical but then I went through the process of making the move and never looked back.

D: Now people have an option to have their blogs hosted for free on a bloghosting service like Blogger.com rather than downloading WordPress from WordPress.org onto their own server…

Y: And actually there’s a service called WordPress.com which is a similar software engine to what I use for my blogs with WordPress, but its externally hosted so you create a user account the same way you do in Blogger and they host the account for you and you just log in and type.

Now the problem with that is that you don’t own your blog and in this case with Blogger, Google, being the owner of the Blogger service, owns your blog and at any point in time if they’re not happy with what’s going on there, they can shut you down. So there are some horror stories I’ve heard from people, you know, making some good cash from their blogs – maybe even $2000 a month from advertising – and then something triggers a penalty they think your blog is a spam blog and it’s switched off.

There was one case in particular where this happened to someone who had a collection of blogs, making about $2000 from, I think, Adsense, from that, and the next day they woke up and their blogs were switched off and they complained, didn’t get any respite from Google and that was it – that money was just gone. So they learnt the lesson, they then moved to WordPress.org, downloaded the software, installed it on their own domain name, on their own rented server, and then they owned their web property which is, you know, the main thing I’d recommend to any blogger: business bloggers, new bloggers, people currently blogging on Blogger to move away and get onto WordPress.org, and own your own blog. It’s very important if you’re serious about what you’re doing.

D: OK, so WordPress hosting your own server is the way to go. One of the great things about WordPress is that it’s open source, which means that anyone can provide design themes. Do you use one of these publicly available themes?

Y: What I did… About a year and a half ago, I was happy with my theme but I really wanted something unique and a little bit more polished so I did get an outsourced designer to create me a unique theme. It’s a fairly simple system for designers to make use of if they know what they’re doing. So I spent under $500 to get a custom theme done; however, given my background of at least knowing HTML I can do basic modifications – so I can add sections to the sidebar, change headings and that sort of thing. So to that degree I can hack my blog in that regard. But anything major, any major design elements are outsourced.

If I’m starting a new blog (there are a couple of blogs that I’m starting that I don’t write myself – I’ve got other people writing) we’re just using modified versions of existing themes. So if you go to Google and type ‘WordPress themes’ there are literally thousands available of which a lot of them look pretty good. I think if you’re resource limited you can grab one of those and just add your own graphic header to it, customise the basic elements and the footer, the navigation in the sidebar, and you’ve got yourself a quite nice looking blog that’s customised the way you want it.

D: So where would you recommend people going to get their own personalised WordPress theme?

Y: Elance.com, RentaCoder.com, Guru.com, and there’s another one called AgentsforHire.com where you can actually get people to work full time for you and all these services are just clearing houses for freelancers that connect with people who need things done. So you’ll get many, many people who can do WordPress designs for you, or WordPress changes for you, even create plugins for you, and that sort of thing.

If it’s something minor – if you really just want something added to your side bar and you can’t do it – join a community or even go to the WordPress.org site where you download the software, where there’s a fairly large support community in the forums. If money is tight for you, do some interaction, make some friends and you can ask someone to just come in and make that slight change for you. Maybe if you’re good at something else you can do a contrary arrangement and do something for them in exchange for that work.

WordPress.org has that community, there’s probably plenty of other webmaster-style forums: Webmaster World is one good one, Digital Point, Site Point… These are forums where a lot of webmasters hang out and you can get nice people who do the basics for you. But if you do want the custom work, the high-level work, then try those freelance clearing sites. Ask friends, go to other bloggers who already have a blog design you like, email them, ask them who did it, maybe you could get hold of the same designer, that’s one way to find the ideal person. You might spend more that way!

D: Now another advantage of using WordPress is the large array of plugins available that provide additional functionality. Can you talk a little about plugins and tell people about your favourite plugins?

Y: Yeah, there’s a huge list. Plugins really do almost anything. It depends what you’re trying to do. The most important plugins I think are the search engine optimization plugins since we’re talking about getting more traffic to your blog; and there are a few really powerful ones that I think all blogs should have. One of them is called ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’ which allows you to add tags to your blog. If you google ‘ultimate tag warrior’ you’ll get that plugin. It’s a little bit complicated to install sometimes but once you get it going you can add… I added technorati tags and internal tagging which are a means to, you know, label your content and ping technorati if you use technorati tags for those keywords, or to create internal search links if you use internal tagging. So both those two things can benefit your search engine rankings quite significantly.

There’s another one called ‘SEO Title Tag’ which is a fantastic tool for creating custom titles and if you know your HTML there are a few different types of titles when it comes to web page design but the most important one is the one that appears in the top of the browser: the title of that website. So this plugin allows you to determine where the titles appear. Either: does your blog name come first? Or does the name of the article come first in your title? It also allows you to customise that title so that it doesn’t default to just the name of the article. And there are many comment plugins of a similar nature you can get that allow you to add little avatars – which are little pictures of people – so you can see the faces behind the people that leave the comments. ‘My Bloglog’ is the plugin for that – it’s actually called ‘My Avatars’ but it uses the My Bloglog pictures to populate those images.

There literally are so many different plugins available that really you think, ‘Hmm, what would I like to see in my blog’ and you can go and find a plugin that does it. From very small things like just changing where you place images… there’s one that lets you manage Adsense called ‘Adsense Deluxe’ and if you’re a person who can’t maybe put the Adsense code where you want it into your blog design, this plugin allows the maintenance of that to be very easy. It’s a fantastic plugin for those bloggers looking to make money from Adsense.

There are plugins that manage banner campaigns that you can get some statistics from; the banners you run through your blog – there’s one I use that tracks internal search phrases: what people type into my blog search engine, what they’re looking to find an answer to. That one’s good for research if you want article ideas – what people who come to your blog and type into your search engine is generally a need they need solving so if you can get that data from your blog you can then go and perhaps solve that problem so that’s another plugin that you might find helpful.

D: OK, some really excellent specific advice there. Now, I consult to various marketing managers and organisations. Do you think it’s first of all important, and secondly reasonable, to expect marketing managers to take time to understand specifics behind WordPress plugins?

Y: It depends how big your IT department is really! It’s more from a marketing standpoint? You want to understand conceptually how this impacts the marketing side of things?

Well, you don’t need to know the implementation of it, that’s what your tech people need to do. I find I’ve had potentially an impediment to my development because I’ve been such a hands-on do-everything-myself kind of guy: it slowed me down, and because I’ve learnt how to do certain things it has meant that I’ve gone and deliberately done them myself. So I’m inclined to tell marketing managers to understand conceptually why this is working in the market place to increase exposure for your company, and understand why maybe certain plugins will help with that goal. But, you know, it’s a case of: ‘ooh, this website’s got this plugin that changes the title barrel, to be able to do custom titles, IT person – go and find out how to do that and get that done for me.’ That’s if you’ve got the resources in your IT department.

If you’re a solo or a small business and you don’t, it then depends on which way you work this. Are you doing tech things by yourself at the moment? Then this is probably something that’s not too hard to learn. If you don’t do it yourself you’re probably outsourcing your website management already, and that’s what you’re probably going to keep doing with your blogging as well – outsource that element of your marketing. Your search marketing consultant, they understand the power of blogs for search engines as well. They install the blog, they optimize it for you, they may go even as far as content creation for you, as well, and they’ll do the keyword research.

And that’s a consultant. So they’re doing a hell of a lot and they’re charging a hell of a lot as a result. Perhaps that’s the smartest way, you definitely get expertise that way, if you pick a good company then you’ve got the good experts in that industry. But like you said, there is, I think, a general lack of awareness of the effectiveness of blogs or how that effectiveness works. And to just pass it off to IT to handle is not going to get you the results you want – unless of course you’ve got some very savvy marketers working in your IT department.

D: I’d like you to talk a little bit about blog design now. For instance: two columns, three columns, and whether or not less is actually more sometimes?

Y: Well, ‘less is more’ is good; two columns is good. If I was to do a brand new blog now it would be a very simplistic design, focused on the content, using the main content on the left and just the right sidebar for some sort of navigational element. You know, the internet is based on a text medium, and we want to make the text as easy to read and that’s the same rule for blogs as well. So if your message is being confused or you’re distracting people with other bells and whistles then you’re not getting people to do what you want them to do. So provided you know what your blog is about – if that’s about building a relationship through the written word – then you want the attention to be captured.

So the first thing is clear and simple design. The second point is content copywriting: it’s not a sales medium per say, it’s a relationship-marketing medium. You are providing valuable content, but we’re talking about business here too. So this is making a subtle sales pitch – for want of a better way to put it – so we still need to use the same elements that go into good copywriting.

D: Absolutely. Another aspect of blog design for people to think about: fixed or fluid width according to the user’s monitor. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Y: So you want a blog design that actually changes with the size of the user’s resolution so it’ll fill the entire screen versus a fixed width, which doesn’t change depending on the resolution?

It’s interesting, I know two years ago when I was doing internet marketing and researching it and trying to become good at that topic, the discussion going on in what design resolution you should be designing for, two and a half, three, four years ago I remember hearing – probably even six, seven years ago – the common thought was make sure it can fit in an 800 by 600 screen. And that usually meant if you were on a much larger monitor size then your site was quite small, and my first site certainly looked long and thin when viewed on anything else so it’s a difficult question to answer. I think look at your majority, which is usually the 1024 by 768 pixels-wide resolution: if your site fits in that, you’re looking good on the next two resolutions up.

D: Of course an 800 pixel-wide monitor now isn’t that common at all!

Y: My service stats probably show that maybe 5, less than 5, % of people have that resolution any more. They get a horizontal scroll bar but in fact my content will still fit – they just won’t be able to see the sidebar so, you know… You can drive yourself nuts!

D: Have you taken any steps to optimize your blog for mobile internet devices like 3G cellphones?

Y: I haven’t. I’ve been approached by a few third party services that do that for you, but it hasn’t been on my priority list as something that important to do yet so I’ve never really had anyone talk about mobile devices as, you know, complaining about not being able to read it. I think my blog’s probably got way too much content on the top at the moment that would look horrible on mobile devices so… But, you know, again, you want to be read by as many people as you can, so you’ve got to work on compatibility issues and try and solve every issue.

D: Now RSS feeds are obviously an integral part of blog promotion and reader interaction. What would you say are the main issues that bloggers have with RSS feeds?

Y: OK, well there’s two big issues with RSS feeds that most bloggers get wrong and they complain that they’re not getting a lot of readers but the number one is the audience not knowing what it is, so there’s an education gap there that really is the responsibility of the blogger publishing the content to help fix at least. RSS is not mainstream and it may never get mainstream just because of how technically challenging it can be for most people – it’s not email. So what you can do to help that, especially if you’re not in a tech industry is get people who don’t use RSS’s to create a video, create a how-to guide, a very clear one, and explain how you learnt how to use RSS or a very clear and simple language process to subscribe to your blog . The next problem is visibility of an RSS feed: a lot of blogs, and the theme designs can be at fault here, they tend to hide the RSS button or they use a very small icon on the sidebar and it’s just not being highlighted in enough places so make it big, use a fat orange RSS button.

D: And what would you recommend to use as your RSS feed address? Specifically I’m thinking about ‘Feedburner’ here.

Y: I love Feedburner. I’d definitely recommend it as a great service. Some people have concerns about losing control of their feed using that – you do relinquish some control. Feedburner has got some services where you can maintain your domain so that people are actually subscribing through your URL and not Feedburner’s if that’s something your worried about. But, the trade-off for me – it’s too good I no other means of collecting statistics that’s so comprehensive and provides so many extra features that Feedburner does. And actually one of the ways I monetize my blog is I put advertisements in my feed and they pay me a commission through it so I’m all for Feedburner.

D: Now I start to get strange looks from non-techie people when I start to use terms like ‘pinging’. How do you explain ‘pinging’ to somebody who hasn’t heard of it before as a blogging term?

Y: It’s a difficult one. Pinging and trackbacks and those sort of things – it’s almost impossible to understand without actually doing it. Pinging, I like to put it as just a means of notifying sites of an update of content. So it just sends a little slap on the shoulder, hey I’ve written a new article here’s maybe the keywords that go along with it or maybe the title and the link to it and add it to your updated list of the the latest articles in this category or under this keyword. So it’s just an automatic thing that blogs do: can broadcast to blog aggregating services. That being said, it has never been a huge traffic driver for me. I think it’s important that it’s a sort of ‘set and forget’ thing. If you’re using WordPress it has a ping-o-matic service–a url that you can set up within the pinging section of the WordPress control panel and that will just handle pinging for you – it will just send out a ping every time you add an article. If it’s something that’s easy to do then you’re not going to get a lot of reward for it because there’s a little resistance, it’s a barrier to entry there’s a low resistance or a low barrier to use something then your reward for using it is usually low so I’ve never come across a pinging service that rewarded me with significant traffic so I don’t pay much attention to it.

D: I’ve had a few bloggers telling me that they’ve had a bit of success with a service called ‘ping goat’ – you haven’t used that one?

Y: I can’t really comment as I have neglecting pinging as it’s not the most effective marketing tool for my blogs. I’ve been approached recently by a couple of third party aggregation services who tell me to try their service and obviously want me to promote it. I’ve replied to these people saying, ‘Well, what do you do that ping-o-matic, the default service, doesn’t do?’ and they usually say ‘ah, well we just have a better list of sites we ping that ping-o-matic doesn’t do’. So maybe I’m talking a little bit without having tried enough pinging services but, like I said, if anyone can join this service I just don’t consider it something very powerful – you’re much better spending your time and limited resource on those methods that reward you much more significantly.

D: I’d like to talk a little bit about ‘tagging’ now. I remember that you used to have technorati tags on Entrepreneur’s Journey a few months ago but I don’t think you have them any more

Y: No, I don’t. I took them off.

D: So what were the main reasons behind that?

Y: Ok, a couple of reasons. I’m sort of thinking of putting them back on to be honest. Why I took them off is: I put them on, on recommendation it’s a good thing to do. Again, it’s one of those low barrier / resistance things. You can do that easily and then everyone does it. It used to be the first people to do it found it effective, but to be honest, the indexing of a blog is not hard. Technorati tags is something I installed and I also installed Internal Tags. This was using that Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin that we talked about previously and I just started noticing fantastic search results from my Internal Tags – so when I say that I mean, the Tag Warrior plugin creates links in my actual website structure so that’s Entrepreneur’s-Journey.com/tag/whatever the tag word is so if were to write about David Bain it would be Entrepreneur’s-Journey.com/tag/david-bain and every article I tag with that keyword is the content that’s underneath that link

D: Something else that’s closely linked with blogging because of the RSS subscription methods is podcasting. I hosted a podcast for 30 episodes that I stopped doing around two months ago and I’m amazed that I’m still getting the same amount of downloads today as the day I stopped recording them. Now would you advise businesses to consider podcasting as a marketing medium?

Y: Oh, yeah, I love podcasting – like we’re doing right now! If I didn’t have to worry about money I’d probably sit down and do podcasting my articles all day because I just love the content creation part of the whole process. I mean that’s a creativity thing for me; in terms of marketing standpoint it is a fantastic tool it is another way to create exposure a different communication medium – we’re talking about audio which is a nice compliment to text so the more different communication methods you can use the better you’ll be at getting your name brand out there. It’s nice to put a voice to a face; it’s nice to put, you know, the way someone expresses themselves to how they educate and teach people and doing like we’re doing now with audio really gives you a better feel of what the person’s like. So I’m all for doing podcasts, doing interviews, even just using it as a monologue tool to create a lesson. I’m also keen on videos – I’m using Camtasia at the moment which combines the visual with the audio: you can then run tutorials and show people how you do things so all the different communication mediums I think are great. Podcasting is in itself something completely powerful and separate in a lot of ways to blogging it’s – I wouldn’t call it equal to blogging – but it’s got as many support systems in place. And people like to listen to audio and sometimes they don’t want to read – I don’t know which way you’re more inclined. I think I like both but some people just hate reading so give them an audio product or service and they’ll just prefer it! They seem to have more staying power than articles do: maybe because there’re a little bit more unique the web is full of content in text but not so much in audio. People also like the time-shifting part of that: they can take it wherever they are travelling. I don’t have an ipod but I have an iRiver which is an iPod and I listen to a lot of mp3 podcasts, you know, interviews and educational materials while I’m on the train or sometimes driving the car or even riding the bike or something like that that’s just a fantastic way to use time very effectively to do two things and it’s pretty cool.

D: So, are we going to reach a point soon when the amount of blogs on the internet will start to level off? Can I also ask your opinion about the best way of protecting yourself from blog spam?

Y: In terms of the saturation point I guess I could see where that might occur it’s certainly already an issue with spam, I mean it’s amazing how many blogs are pure spam-based products focusing on ripping off content and filling all of our browsers with disinformation. It’s terrible. I’m inundated with the number of spam comments I get on my blogs. So, I mean, this is a problem with email. At the root of it that’s where the biggest issue is with spam and you know, how well are we dealing with it with email. Arguably not very well yet, really. So unless we find a way to curb that issue it’s going to proliferate online all the time. So it could just be the nature of the way humans – some humans – like to manipulate communication tools like that.

D: So what’s the biggest tip you could offer businesses thinking of starting their own blog?

Y: Um, my biggest tip from a business point of view is to actually why you’re going to do it. Like, have a clear purpose behind it – is it a lead-generator? Is it a publicity tool? Is it something to create exposure? Are you going to going to be using it as direct marketing? We’re talking about lead generation, are you collecting all things or making sales of products directly from your blog? So you can have some real accountability to your why, the reason why you’re doing something. Because a lot of people start blogging without necessarily understanding why. From a business point of view you do need to go in with very set goals otherwise you’re going to get poor results for everything and you might be very discouraged from what you’re doing. But if you have an end game in mind then it makes the process of getting there a lot easier – it’s very helpful.

D: Well, you’ve offered some excellent advice there, Yaro. I really appreciate you giving freely your vast blogging knowledge – can I ask you to give out a little information about how people can reach you and I know that you’re planning to launch a blog mastermind programme soon, so if you can tell us a little bit about that too?

Y: Number one, like I said at the beginning of this, if you’re looking for anything by me the easiest way is to google ‘Yaro’ – that will get pretty much all my sites and certainly my blog at the top of those results. Like you said I have a mentoring programme which, depending on when you’re listening to this, may actually be already out. It’s called ‘BlogMastermind.com but it really is focused on people who want to set up a blog, start making some money, and even eventually start making a full time income from just writing part time their blog which is basically what I do now so I’m teaching people how to replicate what I’ve done. A couple of hours a day of writing, and the rest of the day whatever you want!

D: Well, I’m sure that’s a very popular sentiment among many. So, what about the future? Is there a time when you see yourself retiring from this blogging business?

Y: Well, tough to say. I have to say that at the moment I’m so knee deep in this with a lot of goals to kick still that I can’t even say, uh, one of the nice things about anything on the web is that you do have assets and you’re building assets while you’re doing this so as much as my blogs’s pretty much tied into my name I don’t think I’d ever sell it – it’s a little bit too focused on me. Some of the other blogs I run, like Small Business Branding, are not – that’s a sellable asset so if I ever decide to leave just sell it, I might quit everything and decide to go open a chocolate shop in the real world I don’t know!

D: Well, I can’t think of a business much more different but why not!? On that note I’d like to thank you again. Yaro, it was a pleasure talking to you.

Y: Well thanks for having me, David. It’s been a pleasure.

Blog technology is how I prefer to describe the marketing benefits of business blogging. I view a blog as a great piece of technology rather than an online journal or diary. Many businesses dismiss blogs as informal online diaries in which people voice opinions. However, the technology behind a blog can be harnessed as a powerful Internet marketing medium for business – and the communication style can be any style you like.

Pillar #3 Blog Technology covers a guide to business blogging, including:

- What a blog is

- A review of some of the different types of business blogging software available

- How to quickly and easily personalize a blog with the use of themes and plugins

- What Pinging and RSS feeds are and how they impact internet marketing

- Why Podcasting is so closely related to blogging and how to use a blog to start your own podcast

What is a blog?

Wikipedia describes a blog as being a website with entries made in a journal style, however, this is not necessarily the case – I don’t like that description. While the vast majority of blogs may be presented in reverse chronological order, the content topic and style is entirely your choice. Your blog can include news stories, or have formal content. It could be targeted internally within your organization.

How useful is a blog?

A good piece of business blogging software is also a great content management tool. Blogs are an excellent way for non-HTML literate workers within an organization to upload new information onto a website.

Search engines tend to rank websites higher if you continually add new content to your site. You should not think of your website as being a static entity – it should be continuously updated with content regularly added to your site.

When sites are updated regularly, then search engines are more likely to consider it current and therefore more relevant than a website that has not been updated for a period of time. A blog makes it very easy to add new pages to your website. It makes it much easier to keep your website current.

Popular business blogging software

- Blogger

Blogger is software that you can use that isn’t hosted on your own server. I would not recommend it for business use. If you are new to blogging it can be useful to register and create your own account to see how blogging works. It is owned by Google and free to use.

- WordPress

The software that I recommend for business blogging is WordPress. (Figure 3.1) It is open source blogging software and it is also free to use. WordPress.org can be downloaded onto your server and installed on your website. As you can use it on your own domain a typical address for your blog may be YourDomain.com/blog.

WordPress themes

When using WordPress you can also use WordPress themes, which allow you to personalize the look and feel of your blog. Anything relating to the layout, design, look and feel of the blog itself is derived from a WordPress theme, and there are thousands of free themes that you can use.

WordPress

Figure 3.2 is an example of a website that is giving away a theme free-of-charge is Copyblogger. At the time of writing Copyblogger has over 100,000 RSS subscribers, so it goes to show that giving away a good WordPress theme for free can be a very effective form of internet marketing.

Copyblogger

Even if you decide to download and use the Copyblogger theme, you do not necessarily have to stick to the same color scheme. You can use a theme as a base for your blog and then amend it according to your brand or website colour scheme, if required.

You can even get a personalized WordPress theme. If you want to install your blog on your domain, then the blog can be tailored to look exactly like your site. Your visitors will probably not be aware of the fact that they’re viewing pages which have been delivered via another content management system.

You can search for a free theme to suit your individual needs at WordPress.net. Search by style, colour, general look and feel, or browse to view different themes that are appropriate for your business.

Content management

Blogs are a great content management tool as they don’t require you to be technically literate to post pages or manage the publishing of new content. All you have to do is enter your title and content within the blog post, choose your category and press ‘submit’.

If you install a WordPress blog on your server you can give different levels of authority to different users. You can limit access to particular categories, or allow certain users to only create posts, as opposed to authorizing them to amend the look and feel of the blog.

Adding an entry to the WordPress blog

Figure 3.3 shows the back office of www.PurpleInternetMarketing.com, which is a site completely designed and managed via a WordPress blog installation. If you want to write a post, all you do is click on ‘write’ to add and entry to your WordPress blog. (See figure 3.3)

Click ‘write post’ and enter the title and post text. Then select the various categories you want the post to be associated with (if you want more than one category press ‘add’) and then press ‘publish’. It’s as easy as that to add new posts and therefore add new content to your website.

WordPress plugins

WordPress has been specially designed to be ‘lean and mean’ in the way it operates. This is because they understand that different WordPress users certain features and not other features.

In order to cater for everyone’s needs, they made the sensible choice of designing WordPress to be a world-class core product without any extra ‘bells and whistles’. However, because WordPress is open-source it means that independent coders can add additional functionality to the software in the form of ‘plugins’. This means that users aren’t lumbered with downloading a bloated core product which has features that they don’t intend to use.

To provide these different features and functionality there is a wide range of plugins available of which the majority are free-of-charge. All plugins are are small software programs which work together with your standard WordPress installation.

You can search for plugins in the plugins directory on the WordPress website. (wordpress.org/extend/plugins) Search by what you want your plugins to do. Whatever additional feature you are looking to add to your blog somebody else has probably had the same thought – and perhaps built a plugin to accomplish the required task.

Perhaps you want to amend your graphics or the look and feel of your blog, or even amend your linking structure. You may want a plugin which will allow you to help you build a revenue stream into your blog.

Recommended plugins

At the time of writing there are many plugins which I use on one of my blogs – the Purple Internet Marketing website. The following are 5 plugins which I currently use and that I am comfortable recommending.
(Please note that these kind of recommendations change all the time.
Visit http://www.13pillars.com/resources/pillar3 for an up-to-date list of plugin resources + links to 2 highly recommended professional WordPress themes.)

1) Akismet is a great spam filter if you have ‘comment posting’ functionality at the bottom of your blog posts. Some businesses may choose to disable the comment functionality but it can be useful to encourage interaction within your website. Comments can provide up to date content for your site, while it also makes your blog more of a community that people are more likely to come back to and listen and read other comments.

The Akismet plugin should disable around 90% of your spam comments and save you a great deal of time in comment moderation.

2) aLinks is a tool to control links within a blog. One of the potential issues with blogs is that people can ‘steal’ your content via your RSS feed (we’ll get to what that is in a bit) and automatically publish it on their own site. You may not necessarily want them to be able to do that.

aLinks allows you to build in automatic links within your blog posts. For example, if I mention the phrase ‘business articles’ within a blog post I might set it up so that the plugin automatically generates a link to the home page of www.BuildYourOwnBusiness.biz. If people republish that post which contains that link, then the link will probably now be on the other person’s website pointing back to your site. At least is somebody steals your content you gain by getting a link on their site.

3) Popularity Contest is a tool to make popular posts easily available for your visitors to view. As previously discussed, blogs commonly display posts in reverse chronological order which can make it difficult for users to find old posts that still have good content or are of interest.

What Popularity Contest does is to provide a listing of your most popular posts of all-time in a sidebar within your blog navigation. Because the chances are that this is your best every content, it will give you a greater opportunity to retain new visitors on your site.

4) Get Recent Comments is a plugin that shows the most recent comments that people have made on all of your blog posts in a widget in your sidebar.

If you are encouraging people to comment on your blog to build up community interaction, one way of doing that is to publish the latest comments made on every post within your menu system. You can display the five or the ten most recent comments made by people on your blog. This is beneficial in a couple of different ways. You are encouraging your blog to be more of a community and if people can see their latest comment in the main sidebar it will encourage them to post a comment again.

The Get recent Comments plugin has additional benefits too. By being able to see a comment on an archived post, this may well encourage a user to visit the original post. One other way that this plugin adds value to your site is that you’re improving the search engine optimization as these links point directly to the comments at the bottom of different posts and not to the posts themselves. This drives alternative search engine crawls throughout your site.

5) My Avatars is a plugin that’s associated with a website called MyBlogLog, a very popular blogging community. When users register at MyBlogLog, they upload a small picture, or avatar of themselves (perhaps even a company logo).

After somebody has uploaded this image to MyBlogLog, in addition to the avatar image displaying on MyBlogLog, whenever a blog has the MyAvatars plugin installed, the avatar image will also be displayed next to comments by that registered MyBlogLog user on the blog.

This again encourages your blog to become more of a community and more interactive as people can see their own avatar images beside any comments made.

If you register with MyBlogLog, you can of course have your own image at the bottom of any comments you make on other blogs. An additional service that you should register with is called Gravatar.

Blog pinging

Pinging is a process built into WordPress that automatically tells other blog directories and news portals that you have added a new post to your blog.

Within your WordPress back office if you click on Options and then select ‘write’, if you scroll down you will see that by default WordPress has a pinging service called ping-o-matic built into it.

There are other pinging services, but ping-o-matic works well and is already incorporated into WordPress. You don’t need to visit the ping-o-matic website for it to submit your posts because automatically whenever you add new content to your site it will automatically be ‘pinged’ to many major blog directories and news portals.

When you publish a post, this pinging mechanism will be aware of your post title, your post description and the link back to the original post.

One of the major services that will be pinged is called MyYahoo. Anyone who searches MyYahoo for a particular topic; (if you have made a recent blog post within that topic yourself), then your blog post will come up there in the search results. This is one of the many automated internet marketing tools that make blogging such a powerful part of your online strategy.

RSS

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication is another great automated marketing tool built into blogging software. It is a tool which lets people subscribe to the latest content published on your blog.

RSS feeds are also features of many other types of website but it is probably most commonly found on blogs.

The main advantage of RSS on blogs for your readers is that it allows them to see when you have updated your blog without having to directly visit your blog. It is an easy way for them to be made aware as soon as you publish a new post.

How do RSS feeds work?

Your RSS feeds are the website URLs that people can use in order to subscribe to your latest content. WordPress automatically generates as many RSS feed URLs as you require. By default there is a main feed and a feed for each of your blog categories.

When someone subscribes to your RSS feed in an RSS reader (like Google Reader), the software will display your latest blog post title, and possibly some of the content depending on the RSS reader settings. People will then have an option of visiting your blog post if they think the full content will be of interest to them.

RSS feed format

Instead of retaining the default RSS feed URLs from WordPress, you should register with a free service called Feedburner (figure 3.4) and submit your original feed URL to Feedburner.com.

Feedburner will then give you an alternative feed URL to use. They call this service ‘burning’ your feed. The advantage with giving your subscribers your Feedburner feed URL instead of your default feed URL is that Feedburner will be able to give you lots of statistics such as how many subscribers you have and which software your readers are using to subscribe to your feed.

Submit your URL at FeedBurner

How to find and burn your feed

Let’s take my old WordPress blog www.PurpleInternetMarketing.com/blog as an example. As the folder /blog/ is where WordPress has been installed, you’ll be able to find the original feed at http://www.PurpleInterentMarketing.com/blog/feed.

I took this URL and submitted it to Feedburner (I ‘burned’ the feed). The feed URL I chose at Feedburner was http://feeds.feedburner.com/purpleinternetmarketing.

This feed URL delivers exactly the same content to a user when they subscribe to updates, but using this version lets me gain access to really useful statistics about my subscribers when I log into my Feedburner account.

A glimpse at Feedburner stats

Feedburner will provide you with a breakdown of the stats for each feed that you decide to burn. The feed below (Figure 3.5) is from a podcast feed that hasn’t been promoted a great deal. As you can see there are 30 subscribers to that feed, i.e. 30 people going to be told as soon as another episode is published.

It doesn’t take too much promotional work to quickly build up a few hundred subscribers to your feed. After that you’ll start to naturally gain more subscribers as people tell their friends – as long as if you consistently deliver quality new content on a regular basis.

It is important to use the Feedburner service to ‘burn your feed’ prior to publishing your feed URL and making it available for subscribers. The service lets you gain access to lots of important statistics about your subscribers including how many subscribers you have and what kind of software people are using to subscribe to your feed.

Viewing statistics on FeedBurner

In addition to Google Reader, another example of an RSS feed reader is in fact iTunes. iTunes is an RSS reader that specializes in reading podcast RSS feeds.

Subscribing to an RSS feed

How do you subscribe to RSS feeds? Do you subscribe to RSS feeds at the moment? (If so you need to subscribe to some feeds so that you’re fairly comfortable with how the protocol works.) If you’re subscribing to a standard RSS feed, not a podcast, the chances are that it will be text based updates. One of the most popular RSS feed readers at the time of writing is iGoogle or the personalized Google home page (Figure 3.6).

Take time to visit iGoogle. This is the personalized Google home page. You can personalize this page by adding your own RSS feeds to display content that interests you.

The ‘Add Stuff’ link on the iGoogle page is where you can search for different small widgets and feeds to add to your personalized page. At the bottom left hand side of the ‘Add Stuff’ is where there is an option to add an RSS feed. Once you add your chosen feed, you should be able to view the latest content from that feed on your iGoogle page.

More RSS reading software

Remember that there is a great deal of free RSS feed reader software available if iGoogle or Google Reader doesn’t suit your needs. Simply search online to find something more suitable for you. (www.google.com/search?q=free+rss+software)

Using an RSS reader will let you quickly scan the latest headlines within a blog without having to visit the blog directly. You might find only 1 in 5 posts on a blog of interest, so by subscribing to the feed using an RSS reader, you can easily judge if it is worthwhile for you to visit a blog page, saving you a great deal of time.

RSS readers are a popular medium for people to use to subscribe to updates, a method of website update subscription which is growing in popularity and one which is going to become more important in the future.

It is therefore important that you build an RSS subscription option into your website, also utilizing the Feedburner service as explained above.

The personalized iGoogle home page

Podcasting

Many business bloggers wish to publish a series of MP3 (audio) or MP4 (video) recordings online. It is wise to associate these media recordings with an RSS feed so that people can subscribe to updates and be made aware as soon as you have released a new media file for consumption. This use of RSS feeds is called podcasting.

Another benefit with broadcasting a podcasts is that subscribers tend to be very ‘sticky’ – that is once people subscribe they will generally stay subscribed. If you stop producing podcasts for a while, and decide to start again a few months later, then you will probably find that you still have around the same number of subscribers – the people that had previously subscribed will simply be notified via their subscription software (possibly iTunes) as soon as your new episode has been released.

Creating your podcast

It is relatively simple to use a portable MP3 recorder to create your podcast. You could also record your audio with a microphone at a computer with tools such as Skype or Google Talk with HotRecorder. A great free piece of software called Audacity can be used to edit your recording.

Recording and editing audio

Recording and editing your own audio – or even video – is not as difficult as you might think. HotRecorder is software that works in conjunction with Skype (an online VOIP / telephone service). HotRecorder can be used to record any call you are making online using your computer. It only costs about $15, (around £10) for the software but it can be used to record hours of conversation if required to do so.

I have used HotRecorder to record Skype based interviews with people from all around the world and have got great quality recordings from using the service. One tip I’d share with you is to use the setting that records both voices on separate tracks (stereo). This will let you edit each voice separately at the end of the recording which is especially handy if you find that one person’s voice has been recorded at a louder volume that the other person.

To edit the audio recording I use some software called Audacity. Audacity is open-source and free-of-charge although I’d always recommend making a small donation to such projects.

In figure 3.7 you can view a screenshot of Audacity in action (editing a recording). The software allows you to manipulate the audio recording – you can highlight a section (perhaps if there has been too big a pause or a stutter) and remove it by selecting edit, highlighting the section in question and then cut.

Sample screenshot of Audacity

Publishing your podcast

Having recorded and edited your audio, the next step is for you to publish your podcast. One of the easiest and most effective methods of publishing a podcast is to release the episodes in a category on your blog, and use the category RSS feed as your podcast feed.
There’s an excellent free WordPress plugin called PodPress that’s dedicated to helping you publish your podcast via your WordPress blog.

Once you install the plugin, all you need to do is upload the MP3 or MP4 file to your blog via PodPress in your WordPress back office. The PodPress plugin provides a flash-based MP3 player where your blog visitors are able to play the track directly from your blog. It also provides a direct download to the MP3 or MP4 file for users to download and play the track directly through a media player device such as an iPod.

Remember to use the Feedburner service

If you’re going to give this a go, remember to ‘burn’ your blog category feed that you’re using for the podcast through the Feedburner service – and remember to select the ‘podcast’ option on Feedburner.

(For example, I used http://www.purpleinternetmarketing.com/blog/tags/podcast/ as the category on the Purple Internet Marketing website for an old podcast, but instead of using the feed address http://www.purpleinternetmarketing.com/blog/tags/podcast/feed as my podcast feed, I burned this address with Feedburner to create http://feeds.feedburner.com/InternetMarketingStrategyPodcast as the new podcast feed URL.)

Creating a new podcast feed with Feedburner gives you two distinct advantages. First of all, as with your blog feed, you get access to a lot of useful statistics such as the number of listeners you have and what software they are using to subscribe to your feed. Secondly, Feedburner will also submit your podcast to various podcast directories.

Don’t commit to a schedule before you try podcasting

Podcasting is a marketing medium which is worthwhile trying. The great thing about it is that you don’t have to commit to a regular schedule. It could simply be delivered on an ad-hoc basis as part of your blog posting strategy.

If you find out that podcasting suits your communication style then perhaps you can publish episodes on a regular basis in the future, but the important thing is just to give it a go.

An added benefit to podcasting – transcripts

If you do decide to publish a podcast, then you may also want to create audio transcripts. This way, you can provide written content in your blog from the podcast and search engines will pick this up as fresh new content, helping you significantly with better search engine results.

Another positive with offering transcripts to your podcasts is that you’re also catering for people who struggle with hearing your audio, or simply prefer the written word as a communications medium.

Of course you can outsource the transcription of your podcasts. One such place is CastingWords.com, who will transcribe audio from only 75 cents a minute. This can ensure that you use your own resources in a much more cost efficient manner. (Note: Additional transcription services are listed at http://www.13pillars.com/resources/pillar3)

Pillar #3 – Blog Technology Summary

• A blog doesn’t necessarily have to be published in a journal style and displayed in chronological order. The content of a blog can be anything from articles to opinions and the most important aspect about business blogging is the technology – the inbuilt automated internet marketing capability
• Wordpress.org is probably the most appropriate blogging software for most businesses. It’s free to use, state-of-the-art and offers bespoke design and functionality
• Plugins are small software programs designed by independent coders that add additional functionality to your blog. There are thousands of plugins to choose from and most of them are free-of-charge.
• Pinging and RSS feeds can be used to help to automate your blog marketing. Pinging is the process that makes a blog and news directories aware of the fact that you’ve just published a new post. RSS Feeds let people subscribe to your content and allow them to view the content without actually visiting your site.
• Podcasting can be used as a way to augment your blog posts. Podcasts are generally audio (or video) files, and they are published using RSS so subscribers are alerted as soon as a new episode is published. Tools such as Audacity and Skype can be used to create and edit podcasts. iTunes is the most popular software to use to subscribe to a podcast feed.

This week on the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan covered business blogging – all the essential aspects of why you need to incorporate a blog as part of your business website and how to do it.

Why we recommend Hostgator as a business blogging host

If you’ve studied all of the material that we’ve published so far this week, hopefully you’ll now agree that you must have your own business blog – and agree that it should be a WordPress blog hosted on your own server.

The website hosting that we thoroughly recommend for business websites which incorporate a WordPress blog is called HostGator.

7 Reasons why we recommend Hostgator

1) 26WeekPlan.com is hosted on HostGator – and we’ve tried lots of other hosts. From our experience we firmly believe it’s the best option four our needs – and probably your need.

2) They have easy, one-click install of WordPress available through their pre-installed control panel (CPanel) making it extremely easy for non-techies to install.

3) Some hosts have problematic security settings, meaning that they don’t support features like automatic WordPress updates. HostGator has no problems with the likes of this.

4) Their website hosting packages start at just $4.95 per month. That’s not the cheapest host in the world, but it’s not far off. (If you go for the cheapest then naturally you’ll be compromising on reliability)

5) Taking about reliability, they guarantee 99.9% uptime. In addition, according to our tests their server response times are a lot quicker than many of their competitors. This speeds up the time it take for your website to load.

6) They have a great 24-hour chat support facility, and they’re extremely supportive. So if you ever have any hosting-related technical issues, you’re not left on your own to sort it out.

7) They offer a 45-day guarantee and $50 free Google Adwords advertising credit, so what are you waiting for? Visit the Hostgator website for more information.

Here’s a quick recap of what we covered this week on the 26-Week Plan

This week on the 26-Week Plan we focused on Blog Technology – the art of putting the technology behind blogging to work for you as part of your internet marketing campaign.

Here’s what we posted…

Blog Technology Podcast Episode

Our blog technology podcast episode (Internet Marketing Pillar #3) provided an audio overview of the necessary parts of blogging that impact your internet marketing campaign.

Blog Technology Presentation

For those more visual ones among you may prefer to watch our Blog Technology presentation. This is an audio recording of the original 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar added to the original slides.

Blog Technology Video

We also re-published our Blog Technology video, which were recorded at an early version of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar.

View the entire Blog Technology Presentation below via the Slideshare website. This is an audio recording of the original 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar added to the original slides.

This Blog Technology video is the third pillar in our series of internet marketing videos which were recorded at an early version of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing seminar. Enjoy!

This fourth episode of our internet marketing podcast looks at Internet Marketing Pillar #3 – Blog Technology.

Remember, if you haven’t done so already, before going any further make sure you download the free 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook which accompanies this blogging podcast.

Click here to listen or subscribe for free using iTunes

Click here to go to listen or subscribe using other software

Blog technology is how I prefer to describe the marketing benefits of blogging. I view a blog as a great piece of technology rather than an online journal or diary. Many businesses dismiss blogs as informal online diaries in which people voice opinions. However, the technology behind a blog can be harnessed as a powerful Internet marketing medium for business – and the communication style can be any style you like.

Pillar #3 Blog Technology covers:

• What a blog is
• A review of some of the different types of blogging software available
• How to quickly and easily personalize a blog with the use of themes and plugins
• What Pinging and RSS feeds are and how they impact internet marketing
• Why Podcasting is so closely related to blogging and how to use a blog to start your own podcast