eAction

We’re up to the third feature in this series on RSS feeds. This time about how
to syndicate your own site’s pages and your writing, for other sites to pick up
and display.

Next week, we’ll see just how simple blogs are.

Speaking of simple… I thought I had meant to keep this blog/ezine simple. But
I’ve found myself doing research online all morning, MOST mornings. I’m
learning just heaps of things! Sometimes off topic too.

Like today I discovered the Will and Mari Bontrager site again. I’ve come
across it before and even got free scripts from them for my sites. Today I
found a great tutorial on this syndication topic, PLUS, I followed a link when
I saw they were switching to a new web host, and I explored that one. I really
like what I saw, so now I know where I want to move my sites when I can afford
to. Site5 is the place to go!

See? You can learn the most interesting, beneficial stuff when you go looking
for something else.

As a matter of fact, the method I showed last week for putting other site’s
content on your site wasn’t really RSS feeds. The method I described has been
around for a long time already, and is perhaps easiest.

In my most recent research, I find there are a few places popping up that will
create a code for you to insert a RSS feed to your site, or for others to put
yours on their site. http://www.originotions.com/whyrss.php nd
http://www.originotions.com/install.php

You can even buy software that will do this for you. I saw one called nooked,
but don’t know whether to recommend it. Master Syndicator V5 and Master
Syndication Gateway V2 look better; they are by Willmaster.com

Since I haven’t prepared such content files myself yet, (aside from my blogs)
for others to use on their sites, I’m sharing links with you that will explain
this in more detail.

This link opens up an PDF book that explains how to do it create that code by
hand - which you provide to others who want to syndicate your web pages.
http://willmaster.com/master/gateway1/support/CreatingSyndicationContent_letter.
pdf

Just now there is a syndicated article with the above info condensed, on this
page; http://homebiztools.com/syndication.htm It is by Will Bontrager, the
author of the above PDF book.

So basically, you create a master content file that you’re going to update
regularly, and you give it a name with a .js ending (if using JavaScript) and a
.php ending if you are going the .php route.

Then you create the code snippet that others will need to place on their site
to show off your “content page” somewhere on one of their web pages.

There is another way. The XML page.

This is the one I’ve been using a few months. When I don’t forget, to fill in
the key data items on my xml template page, it works very simply.

1. Once I have some pages , or my blogs updated, I pull up my xml page, which
is RoseBouquet.xml
I delete the dates and titles between the < item > tags and put in a short
paragraph excerpt from that article or page to give people a clue as to what
they’d find if they click on the link.

2. Then I upload that page to my site. At the beginning I listed it on some
RSS feed agregator sites, so whenever my .xml page changes, they know about it
immediately.

3. Anyone who has that url: (http://ruthes-secretroses.com/RoseBouquet.xml)
pasted as a bookmark into their RSS feed readers, will see as soon as they
check their reader and click on my RoseBouquet title, whether I have new links
and descriptions showing there. If they are intrigued enough - they click and
go have a quick read!

This, you’ll notice, doesn’t put my content on their web site, but right on
their computer, which they can check as easily as scanning email subjects in
their email program. Rather than having to roam all over my site to FIND new
stuff, they can zero in on what appeals to them at the moment. When it is fresh.

Just a quick announcement. I finally buckled down yesterday and set up my
sellers’ account at eBay. There are no bids yet (I just checked!) but I
understand that often doesn’t happen until nearly the last few hours. So I’ll
have a better report to share next week.

Want to peek? Go to eBay, or more precisely, ebay.ca, and do a search for “A
Godly Inheritance.” That takes you right to that one.

However, I’ve been adding sales pages to my business site. As I learn to do
this auction business right, I’ll set up some of these other items for sale too.
You can see the full sales page I have made for this handmade 4 lb. family
history book here; http://BouquetofEnterprises.biz/auctions/AGI.shtml

If you’ve never tried online auction selling, you might want to watch me as I
get my feet wet and learn this business!

Has the fall mood, “Let’s start afresh” come upon you and made it easier to
buckle down to your online business efforts again? It is a hectic time if you
are sending kids off to school, and signing up for new activities on a weekly
basis, but if we apply the same mode of thinking to our business, we can made
strides forward.

I’ll keep this part short as our second tutorial on RSS Syndication has become
rather long. I hope it is a great help to you.

As I said last week, there are four main aspects to RSS;

The RSS Reader - so you can read teasers of syndications you want to watch.
Putting syndicated columns on your site- a guest column spot for others.
Syndicating your site’s pages/writing for other sites to pick up and display.
Most blogs are automated for easy syndication - good start for techno-phobes!

We’ve covered the first one about installing the RSS Reader and lining up the
feeds you want to watch and visit. So today, let’s look at how to insert the
syndicated columns of other writers’ on your site.

Why would you want to do that?

When visitors come to your site they are hunting for information and slurping
it up as fast as they can read. If it looks like there is no meaty information
there, they get distracted and click away. You’ve lost them. If they see that
you have excellent articles on the topics that brought them to you in the first
place, they will linger to read. The longer they stay the more likely they are
to notice some well-placed words about your own products or those of your
affiliates’. If they click on those, who knows, they may buy! Profits for you!

If people discover that your site is choke full of good stuff, they will
bookmark it and come back. Or, as we’ll show in future installments of this
tutorial, if you prepare a RSS feed they’ll know whenever you have added more
good stuff.

Now, how do we add syndicated pages from other good writers?

Step 1. find a site like -
www.writingcareer.com/freecontent.shtml#syndicate
This one offers collections of articles on various writing related topics.
Click on “View Sample” on a few of them to get the general idea of what they
look like. Read some articles to make sure they are of the quality you want on
your site.

Step 2. When you’ve found some you want, click on the “Get Code” links
underneath them. On the next screen you are asked for your name, email, and the
site and URL where you will place this content. It’s a good idea to open
another window to your site, and to create that page perhaps from your
template, and name it something close to what this syndicate is called. Give
that information. (Some syndicates will just give you the code snippet to copy
paste, but most want to know who is using it and where).

Step 3. You create the web page leaving the largest article space free for the
syndicated column or content to appear. All you do is give it a title between your header codes.

I provide some formating code so it will look like the rest of my pages; which, unfortunately, is refusing to show up here. Basically the codes for the margin settings, the font face, color and size….

Then you paste in the Java Script code snippet; which is really a link beginning
with “script language” and ending with the close-script tag. Nothing more.
(Sorry, it wants to insert the page here if I put the script in here).

You can still have your usual side bars, or columns with links, and your own
backgrounds, and colours. The only thing different is that whenever that other
site puts new content up on that page, your web page will show it too,
instantly. If you set the font size and color and margins the way I did, people
will not necessarily notice that it comes from somewhere else.

To see samples of my draw-in pages for these syndicated sources, you might want
to check out the following pages;
Writing4Success
EbookPublishing
SpilledCandy
devotional
BibleMinute
Evangelism Guide

(By the way, in checking these over I see that I really need to renovate all the
pages in my Sharing Library. I’ll try to get to it soon)!

Have fun adding lots of good stuff to your site in a matter of minutes!

Just yesterday I discovered that there is a new business model starting on the
net. Those that have tried it in recent months are bragging on making $1000s a
day. Neil Shearing, whose Scamfreezone products I’ve promoted with banners and
links on my site for at least five or six years, first sent me this handy
software at this site,2jump2.com. It allows you to make long affiliate link into a short one.

Next he sent me a link to his NEW money-maker. Not that he needs to; he’s
making over $300,000/year, and likes to spend time with his family. What he
describes there seems so new I had to do some research. What are others saying
about this?

Almost immediately I found two other similar sales pages. By reading between
the lines I picked up some clues. The sales patter has a lot of sameness but
some folks let things slip out with their examples.

So far I know this involves software to generate similar sales pages, with some
room for personal choices in colour, graphics, and testimonials. The idea is
that you set up with payment processors like ClickBank, buy keyword ad space
from Google, which sends you enough qualified traffic, and in a matter of hours
or days, the money starts being deposited to your account.

I plan to continue to watch this. If you want to do your own research you might
want to start from here; Auto Income
Secrets. A similar one is http://www.moneyinventor.com/

I predict we’re going to see a wave of these popping up. But I think I’ll build
my own….

I was so blessed and encouraged after I got my inspirational RoseBouquet blog
published yesterday, to have two friends write to say they were praying for me.
I must remember the powerful impact that has on any of us.

Do you realize it? When you take time to say “Thanks” for something you read
that touched you, or to tell someone, “I’m praying for you,” - it just does
something special to the recipient. If it does that for you, try doing it for
others too!

Special thanks to Tess who gave me suggestions for tutorials to work into this
eAction blog/ezine. I appreciate that so much, because some week’s I’m grasping
for ideas. I don’t think I can whip anything in depth on short notice this
morning, but a short introduction and sorting of terminology should be
possible.

I’m STILL on my learning curve to solve my email sending problem, and my niece
arrives with her baby tonight and I want to give them some undivided attention
for a few days.

Really Simple Syndication, known as RSS, is all the NEW Internet thing that is
making waves and ripples everywhere. It’s going to be as big as email has
become, and perhaps even bigger. It skirts around that s-p-amm-y plague filling
our Inboxes.

But, there are several aspects to it. Because of the way the term RSS is
bandied about, it is easy to get confused as to what they mean.

You know that local and regional newspapers have syndicated certain comic
strips, or humour columns, or even Ann Landers, or her twin, Dear Abby’s advice
columns for years. They provide their material to a central distribution point,
which sees that each item gets to the local papers that sign up for them.
That’s syndication; not just showing up in one paper, but in hundreds.

RSS is a system that makes that possible on the internet. The technology - once
you catch on to it, isn’t that hard. Your jaw drops and you say, “Huh! Who’da’
thunk it?”

There are four main aspects;

The RSS Reader - so you can read teasers of syndications you want to watch.

Putting syndicated columns on your site- a guest column spot for others.

Syndicating your site’s pages/writing for other sites to pick up and display.

Most blogs are automated for easy syndication - good start for techno-phobes!

I figured them out after studying the pages on this site;
http://rss.sitesell.com/provision.html and trying out the steps. However, there
Ken focuses on how to publish your own feeds. I think it makes more sense if
you get an RSS Feed reader set up on your computer and go visit a bunch of
other sites with it first.

You can, of course, if you have money to toss around, purchase a deluxe
(cusinart multipart) software package to read RSS feeds. Why you’d want to
though, when there are so many free one around, I can’t tell.

In fact, if you have a fairly up-to-date email program, and you poke around,
you may find that it already HAS an RSS feed reader! You just have to fill it
with bookmarks to the feeds you want to keep tabs on.

If you use Firefox as your internet browser, you can do as I’ve done (several
times now with all my re-installs of operating systems). That is to go to the
mozilla site, search for Sage, which is a plug in. The software will install
itself. All you do is close Firefox and open it again, and click on the Tools
tab at the top, and practically your first item there is Sage.

Whenever you click on that, you open a side bar to your browser window.
At the top of that side bar, on the right, just under the close the bar button,
is one called Options. When you click on that a menu drops down. Go to Manage
Feed List. This brings up your bookmark window. (Any other feedreader will have
similar steps).

Now, when you come to a site that has a red RSS button you click it, and a new
window will pop up with .xml text. You don’t need to read that. Just copy the
URL of that page, into your bookmark window of your feed reader. Or if someone
gives you one like mine, http://ruthes-secretroses.com/RoseBouquet.xml you can
paste it in without having to visit it.

Now you can click that title, RoseBouquet in your side bar, and presto, there
are teasers for three of my articles in my blog — (Oops, of last week. I guess
I didn’t get to updating that page yesterday).

The idea is; that much like you skim over the subjects of your emails when you
first download them, you can skim over the titles and teaser excerpts from the
sites you want to watch. When you see there is a new article that you’d like to
read, you click on the title, and whoosh! There you are.

Soon you will have that feed reader full of links, and can learn to get quite
fast at deciding which links you want to go check out further and which ones
are not of interest to you.

You could visit all your old favourite sites, and see if they have such an RSS
button. That indicates that they’ll try to keep you posted on that page
whenever they have NEW material there. Instead of visiting and browsing all the
pages you’ve already read, and spending far more time than you can spare, now
you only need to go when there is a NEW page announced, and only if it really
interests you.

Hmm. I thought this was going to a short piece today!:) But I’ll try to get
another feature done next week on one of the other aspects of RSS.

In the last twelve days or so, I’ve done a lot of searching for specific help
information on the net. I’ve discovered that one of the smartest tricks is to
put in Google: topic + tutorial. That is, for instance, I want to learn how
to set up and run a mail program called Mutt. So I enter in the search box;
Mutt + tutorial. Then I’ve got pages to read for a day or two. Or three and
four!

When I wanted to know how to fix a certain file called kmailrc, which seems to
contain key info for the KMail program,I put in kmailrc + troubleshooting. Not
nearly as much help, but some clues. Once I knew what else to look for, I had
new words for the search box.

If nothing else, I’m learning to be far more resourceful in my search for
specific information and training. You can too. Just don’t wait until you’re
desperate to discover these tricks.

It is harvest time all around us. If you are in North America, you’ll see harvest scenes in the fields and gardens too. Does it make you think of the Law of Return on Investment?

It goes like this; one kernel of corn produces one cornstalk. Each cornstock produces four corncobs. Each of those corncobs can have as high as 700 kernels of corn. Multiply 4 x 700 = 2,800 kernels. All from one kernel that was put in the ground at the beginning of the growing season!

Now if you invest of yourself, your time, and your resources in your business or career, even a slow-producing investment is bound to pay off for you eventually. Nurture that harvest!