New Site for Blogging Advice and RSS Guides

Hey, I get to plug my own web sites in my blog, don't I?

I just opened a new one at www.blogging-guides.com.

It sells ... you guessed it ... blogging guides!

I've also got the best RSS guides available, too, as well as a couple of handy software tools that will make your blogging life easier. I'll be adding some RSS tools shortly.

I started the site in part to have another outlet for my own blogging advice ebook, Blogging Bonanza! but also to showcase the other physical books and ebooks that are available in the rapidly expanding field of blogs and RSS.

I'm especially impressed by Unleash the Marketing Power of RSS, which is also available through my new site. This ground-breaking ebook (already in its second revision after only a few months) is considered by many to be the authoritative reference on RSS and its uses in marketing.

For those of you who still don't know, blogging and RSS are the hot new marketing platforms in 2005.

They've both been around since the late 1990s, but didn't really catch on and gain any widespread use until about 2002 or 2003. In 2004, the internet marketing crowd began to catch on, and now blogging and use of RSS feeds is spreading like wildfire.

In a nutshell, blogs and RSS give you many of the advantages of email marketing, with none of the risks. They allow you to "tailor" your message to your audience. RSS even allows you to use it much like an autoresponder.

In addition, blogs and RSS can help you to get another web site spidered and indexed much more quickly and thoroughly than would normally be the case.

The advantages of using RSS feeds and blogging are huge, and their uses are sure to expand even further as more people catch the wave.

If you sell ANY product or service online, you owe it to yourself to learn about blogs and RSS, and how they can be used to boost traffic and sales.

Visit my new site, and grab one or two blogging guides today!

Increase Your Visibility With Non-Reciprocated Links

You've probably heard recently, as I have, that some search engines give greater weight to "one-way" links to your site than they do to reciprocal links.

Personally, I don't know whether this is true or not, but it seems reasonable, since links are viewed as "endorsements", and a one-way link seems more like a true endorsement than a two-way link which suggests a mutual admiration society.

Some people who own more than one website have taken to doing "three-way" link exchanges, in which they will link to from Site A to your site, and ask you to reciprocate by linking to Site B, which they also own. I've done this myself more than a few times, especially when I'm trying to build the page rank of a new site.

The other technique that I've recently stumbled upon is even simpler. Go to the search engine of your choice and type in one of your preferred key words or key phrases. Then just start clicking through to the top ten or twenty sites in the results. Look for their "add your link" (or similar) page.

A surprising number of sites will let you add your link to their directory without requesting a reciprocal link from you. For some search terms, I've found that one out of five or so of the top-ranked sites will do this.

Why would they be willing to give you a one-way link? By doing so, they establish their credibility with the search engines as "authority sites". Such sites tend to have either a large number of outgoing links and less incoming, or the other way around.

The imbalance tips the search engine bot to the fact the site is an "authority" on some subject. Either the site is one that redirects people to other high quality sites on that subject, or it is one that is highly regarded by other sites within its niche. Either way, it's an "authority".

Regardless of the theory behind it, taking a little time to go through the process of finding these sites that will give you one-way links can give a big boost to your site. You're getting an incoming link from a site which most likely has high Page Rank, and a link from a well-established site with high search engine results page listings.

In my own experience, the latter, in particular, seems to be especially potent. Emarketingman.Com
has quite a few highly ranked pages. When I've linked from those pages to my newer pages, or to new sites I've developed, I'm amazed at how quickly and how well-placed the new pages show up in the search listings.

One-way links work, and they aren't that hard to find. Try it yourself!

Monetizing Your Website or Blog

I have to admit that I resisted using Google's AdSense program for a long time. I really can't explain why - I just did.

Recently, however, I decided to experiment with it. What a pleasant surprise!

It took me a few hours to put the code on all the pages of several websites that I own, but since then, all I have to do is check my stats once in a while to see how I'm doing.

How am I doing? Without going into specific numbers, let's just say that I have a nice additional stream of monthly income from several websites that otherwise generated sales on an erratic basis.

Now those sites kick off enough monthly income to cover a significant percentage of my own PPC ads. The click-throughs and income vary quite a bit from day to day, but I'm still quite happy with the results.

In implement the ads, I came across an invaluable resource that teaches all kinds of tips and tricks to improve the revenue from these ads. I've recently reviewed AdSense Secrets.

My review of AdSense Secrets is posted here.