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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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Volume 1 - Issue 13 7-07-06 For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this
issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I13_070706.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. Table
of Contents for this issue..... 1.
Author’s Comments 2.
eBay Store and About Me page 3.
Real Simple Syndication - RSS 4. Site Build It
Author's
Comments Wow! Where did the week
go? The July 4th holiday
scrambled my week. I hope that you
had a great holiday. We have so much
for which to be thankful in our great country and yet, so many people “bad
mouth” it. Last Saturday, Linda
and I were listening to “Prairie Home Companion” which is a radio show on
PBS. (We are long time fans of
Garrison Keillor and the PHC). Garrison
talked about how great the eBay
About Me Page My friend and mentor, Jim
Cockrum, developed the concept of using eBay for more than an auction site.
He uses eBay to generate traffic to his auctions and then directs the
traffic to his ‘About Me” page where he signs them up for his “Creative
eBay Selling Newsletter”. His
auction is really “bait” for his back end selling. We all know that
attracting traffic is the largest challenge of doing business on the Net.
Very simple --- no traffic, no shoppers, no revenue, frustration and
failure. I have been working on
setting up an eBay store and an “About Me” page.
The store frame work is set up, but I have not posted any items for sale
yet so the “shelves” are empty. Go
take a look for yourself at http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE.
The main focus of this store will be to attract shoppers to our “About
Me” page. The initial items that
will be on the shelves will be books that appeal to the Boomer Generation. You can view our “About
Me” page at http://members.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=e--boomer.
It has audio so turn on your speakers (or turn them off as wish J).
Its main purpose is to entice the reader to subscribe to this newsletter. As a quick FYI on eBay,
when you are looking at an auction page or eBay store, look next to the
seller’s name for a red and blue “ME”.
Click it and you will see the seller’s “About Me” page. Also,
look for an icon that looks like a doorway.
That indicates that the seller maintains an eBay store.
Click it and you will be taken to the store. For more details on how
to fully utilize eBay, I recommend that you go to Jim Cockrum’s site on
ClickBank and sign up for his free “Creative eBay Selling Newsletter”.
Follow this link to get there http://jvwh1.silentsale.hop.clickbank.net.
His weekly newsletter has a reader list over 100,000 and is considered
among the most successful newsletters on the Net. Really Simple Syndication - RSS This is the newest,
hottest technology on the Net. Whoa!
Did I detect that you pulled back
from just hearing the word technology? Don’t
be concerned about the “how does it work”, but let’s concentrate on what
it can do for you. Let’s discuss Really
Simple Syndication. What is
syndication? In the off line world,
I always thought of the comic strips or a particular feature writer in the
newspaper such as Ann Landers. The
comic or article was developed and for a fee was syndicated to any newspaper
that wanted to carry it. It would
appear simultaneously in many newspapers across the country. On the Net, most of the
syndication that I know of does not cost anything.
Most sites or companies that supply “feed” for syndication do so for
free because they are looking for the exposure from the information and
advertising that is carried in the feed. When you go to the home
page on Yahoo, Google, or MSN, you will see news, weather, sports, etc.
displayed on the page. This
information is coming from a feed from another websites and will automatically
update on the home page without the owner of that page having to do anything. What do you need to read
RSS? Simple answer …… You need
an RSS reader. The easiest way to
get one is to subscribe to “My Yahoo”. Sign
in on your “My Yahoo” page and it contains an RSS reader for you to use.
Go to www.yahoo.com and click on the
“My Yahoo” icon to sign on or to register. When get you’re “My
Yahoo” account set up and log in under your user name, look in the top left of
the window and click “Add Content”. You
will be presented a form to fill in for feeds by subject.
Don’t bother with this search box.
To the right of the search box in small letters is “Add RSS by URL”.
Click that link and you will be presented another search page where you
can set up the feed from a particular website.
I have set up an RSS feed from Retirement Jobs Online.com for you to use. DO NOT CLICK THE
FOLLOWING URL. Highlight it and
right click on it. Select copy and
then paste it into the search box on Yahoo.
Then click the “Add” box to the right of the search box.
You now have added an RSS feed to your “My Yahoo” page. http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/retirement-jobs-online.xml OK you say.
What is all the big fuss about RSS? Just
stop and think about what this can do for you as a surfer on the Net.
If you have particular sites that you check regularly for information,
you have to spend time looking through the sites to see if new info has been
posted. If you set up an RSS feed
from that site to your “My Yahoo” or any other RSS reader that you choose
(and there are hundreds of them) you do not waste time having to look for
changes, you are notified when a change takes place by the RSS feed and you can
click right to it. As we say in RSS is used extensively
by bloggers to monitor blogs for new posts. Now, on the flip side, if
you have a website or a blog and you publish information like Linda and I do in
this newsletter, establishing a RSS feed will put your publication on the feeds
on the Net so it can be picked up by additional people and these contacts will
possibly become subscribers. This is
a way to build additional traffic and it is free.
Anyone who has a website or a blog or publishes a newsletter should
establish an RSS feed. I will talk about how to
establish a feed using Site Build it in the next article.
Building a feed outside of Site Build It will have to be for another
issue. Site Build It #6 I have stated several
times in previous articles that I continued to be amazed with Site Build It (“SBI”).
Well, this last week clinched it. While I was researching
the installation of an RSS feed on the Retirement Jobs Online.com website, I
found that all I had to do was to click an option button and select a few
options and SBI would take care of all of it for me.
That is just too easy. By setting up the RSS
feed, SBI will automatically publish an item to the feed every time I add a new
page to the site. Also, if I modify
a page, there is a check box that I can check if I want the changed page put in
the feed. If I am just correcting
some spelling or making a minor change, I would not bother the RSS world with
that change. There are options in the
set up page to specify if you want buttons on your site that your reader can
click to set up your feed on their Yahoo, Google, or MSN home pages.
I elected to put those on the Retirement Jobs Online pages.
Also, there is an orange colored button that says XML RSS on it.
This indicates that this site has an RSS feed that you can tap into.
You do not click this button, but if you right click it and select
“Copy shortcut”, this will put the URL for the location of the feed on
Retirement Jobs Online.com on your clipboard.
You can then easily paste it into any reader to set up the link to the
feed. This appears to be a common
practice in many sites since I see that orange icon appearing all over the Net. Another feature of this
RSS option on SBI is that by one simple click, you can set up a site blog.
I did this and lo and behold, an instant blog was created with items for
the pages that were added or updated recently.
I added an entry to this blog on July 7 when I launched it.
Go to the home page of www.retirement-jobs-online.com
(RJO) and look on the left top of
the window. You will see the buttons
that I have described for Yahoo, Google, and MSN with the XML RSS button is at
the top. Click on the navigation
bar entry “Site Blog – RJO.com” and go to the blog page.
What you see on this page is what is shown to the RSS world.
SBI automatically puts entries on this page for the activity that goes on
in the RJO site. I can add a
personal blog entry when I feel that it is warranted. In fact, I am going to
make an entry when I publish this issue of Boomer eZine (If I can ever get it
finished. I have so much to say
about SBI that I could go on much too long). Let’s wrap this up.
To fully utilize the RSS feeds to Yahoo, Google, and MSN (the major
search engines) you set up accounts on all of them and then set up feeds from
the site to your home pages on each site. This
causes the search engines to index your feed and they will send a robot or
spider to analyze your site. This
will help raise your ranking with the search engines. The more feeds to your
site that are requested on Yahoo, Google, or MSN, the more interest the search
engines pay to your site. I request
that you, my readers, set up retirement-jobs-online.com on your RSS feeds in all
of your home pages with the three majors. This
will automatically notify you of changes to the site which helps you, and it
will help promote the RJO site. Thanks
in advance for your help. Conclusion I strongly recommend that
you read about RSS and follow the instructions in this newsletter to set it up
on your home pages with Yahoo, Google, and MSN.
This is the direction in which the Internet is going and you can easily
be an early adapter. It will make
your life much easier in staying informed on what is new content on the Net. That wraps it up.
I could go on about the RSS business, but I need to leave some material
for another issue. Till next time, Stay tuned (to RSS that is).
Administrative
Details ……………. If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want you to remain a subscriber to our newsletter! It is OK to go ahead and join our
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email will be blocked these days. The SPAM filters are getting tighter and
tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails. Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc. |
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