Purpose of this blog is to provide traffic…using RSS only!

Let’s see how well this works!

YORGOO Toolbar and RSS Marketing

Dear Friends and YORGOO Subscribers,

it's ammmazing what our toolbar can do! You Click on the Icon "Gadget" and up comes a TV screen… you can select from hundreds of TV programs from over 100 countries! And all while you surf!

Or, if you prefer, you may just use the radio tool and select amongst most any online radio station…

How about using the YORGOO chat to communicate with friends and meet people from all over the world? If you think about it: as the YORGOO toolbar proliferates you create links with thousands of people who have one thing in common: they are all interested in online business and in making money online… what better can we offer to all YORGOO subscribers than access to a huge network of selected online business builders?

Please read my article about RSS III, I have posted a while ago: the most important part of it is titled: Community Marketing". It gives some insight into today's most powerfull and advanced marketing system. YORGOO is at the forefront of Community Marketing since 2005 and all those who have taken advantage of YORGOO have been able to build solid online business, networks and sales.

Get your Toolbar from HERE and test it. Let us know which features you like and what you don't think is useful and tell us what else you would like us to add.

 Today's Tasks for free traffic and free leads:

Surf 50 pages on Hit2Hit

Surf 50 pages on TrafficG

Surf 100 pages on Webbizinsider

Join Tonight's call and learn how your RSS feeds help your Google Ranking and therefore your sales!

9 pm GMT (London) at http://yorgotalk.com

Make it a great day!

Yorgo

Marketing with RSS

Marketing without email makes getting targeted quality traffic to your site the most important element of your marketing campaigns. That is, however, a very general statement and something that even email marketers want to do, although they go about it in a different manner. What direct-to-desktop marketers do to get traffic is different from what email marketers do to get traffic.
Email marketing is based on the assumption that you have or are building a reasonably large listof subscribers. Five thousand or more is the usual standard, and it is assumed that this list is comprised of legitimate contacts who actually receive and read your marketing messages. I am not going to argue the validity of that assumption here other than to say I feel that is not a valid assumption most people should be making, given the state of email today.

Email marketers work to build the number of subscribers on their list and they send marketing messages to their lists on a regular basis. This can be in the form of solo mailings, classifieds in their newsletters, or what are euphemistically called "press releases" by some email marketers. All of these options tend to be "in your face" advertising, comparable to the advertising you see on your television or hear on the radio or see in the local newspaper.

These ads might get someone on your list to visit the appropriate page on your web site. That gets you what is called a "click thru." Once on your page, you might even convince that visitor to buy. You make a sale.

But, whether your visitor clicks thru, buys, or does what most people seem to be doing with advertising email: delete it, there is no long-term marketing effect of that email. Even if a few people save your message for future reference or bookmark your page, either being highly problematic, your advertising mess is gone until you send it again. If you send it too often, you could easily irritate some of your subscribers. Then they either unsubscribe, or, more likely, they will just ignore and delete your advertising.

This whole process is based on the assumption that the people on your list are interested in what you have to say and/or what you are selling. The validity of that assumption is based a great deal on how you built your list. If you used the free subscribers provided by the email advertising co-ops, that assumption, as well as the assumption in the first part of this discussion, goes right out the window. First of all, and I know this for a fact from my own experience both as a member of several of these co-ops as well as being an administrator for one, a lot of people subscribe to the ezines in a co-op with a junk email address.

Secondly, most of them are only interested in getting their advertising in front of your subscribers and have little or no interest in reading your messages, especially your advertising, except to make sure you sent their ad. They think everybody else on your list is waiting with anticipation for your every message. In other words, they think they are smart and the rest of us are stupid! Feel free to add whatever comment you feel is appropriate here!

To make a long story short, email marketing is not a good way to get targeted traffic to your site unless you are willing to do a lot of research and more than likely spend a lot of money buying advertising from one of the really big publishers that does have a responsive, legitimate list. That, in most cases, does not fit into the budget of a small mom-and-pop business and that is why the co-ops appear so attractive. You get to send your ad to so many people for so little money. But you are actually throwing your money away.
There is a better way to market your business. Use direct-to-desktop marketing.

One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is to get decent listings on the search engines, especially Google. You want as many of your pages listed as possible for all the relevant key words. But your sales pages, if they look like the sales pages the gurus of email marketing use, will not get the job done. The reason for that is that Google is looking for content, meaning useful quality information, not a page that says "Buy Now" a hundred times!

If you want to get decent search engine rankings for certain key words, then you need to have a web site with lots of good articles that provide high quality information but also sells your product or service at the same time.

So you put lots of content on your site and you use links to those articles in your email newsletter. That is a good start, but think about all the work you put into your newsletter. You are not really getting any traffic benefits for all that work. Why? Because your articles are not being indexed by the search engines!

What you need is a newsletter that will be spidered by the search engines. What you need is a newsletter with content that is easily syndicated. What you need is a newsletter that uses the power of information sharing - community - to build not only your own traffic and rankings, but to build up the traffic and rankings of the community as a whole. The power of community is the major reason I do not recommend going it alone as a direct-to-desktop publisher.

Let me wrap this up by saying again that the most important thing you need to make sales online is, first and foremost, high quality, targeted traffic to your web site. The best way to get that is by offering your visitors information that they need and will use, not a lot of "in your face" sales copy. It is that content that will get you ranked with the search engines if you use key word rich content. But your content must be relevant to your key words and your key words must be relevant to what you are selling.

The most effective way to do all that is to use direct-to-desktop marketing and direct-to-desktop publishing for your newsletter. That will make your newsletter something that the search engines will love. And if you integrate your newsletter with your web site through syndication and links back and forth, both your newsletter and your site will benefit in the rankings. There is no way for email marketing or email publishing to do that for you. The search engines could care less what you send via email.

Use key word rich content in both your newsletter and your site - key words that people use to find the products and services you sell. Doing that on a regular basis will make your site and/or your newsletter content the listings people will see first when they go looking for those key words. That means you will get traffic that is interested in what you offer and they will be more likely to buy.
The funny thing is that you can do this for a lot less money, time and effort than you can doing email marketing!

The Power of Community

The most important part of marketing without email is that you cannot do it alone! That is true of any form of marketing but most especially with non-email marketing. The days of the lone wolf are over.

The thing to remember about any community marketing efforts is that this is not referring to the usual crap most email marketers refer to as Joint Venturing. The type of cooperation that email marketers promote is intended to mainly benefit one person - the person at the top of the pile. The people at the bottom get a little bit of trickle down effect. Sort of like Reaganomics, and we all know what that did to the US and world economy.

Community marketing seems to be a concept a lot of present and former email marketers have a real problme coming to grips with. In a community, all the members of the community, at least in an ideal world, work at whatever they do best. But they do it within the framework of the community. What does that mean?

Look at your arms. Your arms do "arm things." They pick up things, they hug people, they put food in your mouth. Your arms work within the context of your body. They do not go off by themselves and act like a spaceship or a locomotive.
Same goes with your legs. They do "leg" things. They walk to the mailbox. They bend, they straighten out, they follow your feet. They do not go off on their own and act like a rabbit or a goose.

But, and here's the hard part to understand, your arms or your legs do not and can not exist on their own. They are part of an interconnected whole called you. Your arms or your legs do thingsm not just to benefit themselves, but to benefit the whole body. What your arms do affects your whole body. What your legs do affects the rest of your body too.

Whether we really choose to believe it or not, all human beings are interconnected in a similar way. What one of us does, good or evil, affects the rest of humainty as well. We may not "see" the affect immediately, but believe me, it is there.

Now, we can choose to pretend that this interconnectedness does not exist and act as if we were alone in the universe, or we can choose to participate as a member of the community. It seems to me that most of the human race acts as if each of us were independent of the others, or, at best, we limit the number of communities we want to participate in.

For instance, one cell on the fingernail of the little finger on your left hand participates in a nimber of communities. Ir is part of the community of that one fingernail. It is also part of the community of that one finger. It is also part of the community of your left hand, the community og your left arm and the community of your body. Suppose that one cell decided to not participate in one or more of those communities. You would enf up with an infected nail which would infect the finger, which would infect the hand, which would infect the arm, which would infect the body and you die.

That is how a community works. Our hands and legs do not work for the benefit of themselves, but for the benefit of the whole organism. When all the parts of the community work together, not only does the whole organism benefit, but so does each part of it. Each part of the community contributes according to its talents for the mutual benefit of each member and for the benefit of the whole.

Now, getting back to marketing, in a Joint Venture, even the best of the so called "win-win" situations are stacked in favor of the person at the top of the pyramid. Each participating member may reap a small benefit, but the lion's share of the benefits goes to the top.
That's how the system works for most people. But some of us belong to a community called YORGOOpublishing amd YORGOO and things are different there. For example. when any YORGOOpublishing publisher posts an article to their newsletter, there is an automatic submission made to weblogs that we have updated our "blogs." What that does is generate a listing on weblogs' daily reports of updated feeds. That is used by the major search engines in their rankings alogrithms. Sites that update regularly get ranked higher than those that don't.

When the search engine robots read that info, they go to the updated page to see what they have done. Now, as with any site, the robots will follow the links and scan the entire domain. Following so far?

Here's the neat part. Every YORGOOpublishing publisher is part of the YORGOOpublishing domain. Our newsletters are all subdomains of the the YORGOOpublishing server. So, the search engines will scan not just the post but other publishers' feeds as well, especially if there happens to be a link to one or more of them. The key here is that the robots will be looking for related content.

Now, suppose we publishers make a conscious decision to all focus on one topic on one given day. We each write an article about that subject which we post. Then we all go and read each other's stuff, post comments on each other's feeds with links back to our own feeds or our home sites, write stuff in our feeds about one or more of the posts by other publishers. What do you think the cumulative effect of that would be? What if we started doing that every week using a different topic?

The reason this works is because there is no YORGOOpublishing.com outside of the publishers themselves. We are YORGOOpublishing. We are what makes YORGOOpublishing work and we are the ones who reap the benefits. YORGOOpublishing is designed to be a community in the best sense of the word. The marketing potential of that is totally awesome. And that is how you market without email.
One of my favorite movies is Field of Dreams. To paraphrase Costner's vision in that movie. Build the community and they will come. Without email!

NEW YORGOO Communication and Traffic Toolbar

Dear YORGOO Subscribers and Friends,

yesterday we have released the Beta version of the YORGOO toolbar which will be a helpful tool for communication, traffic generation as well as fun to have on your desktop since you have access to gadgets, radio stations and much more.

The important issue is that all YORGOO subscribers will be able to meet each other irrespectiveof downline protocols using the brand new YORGOO chat; using this feature will allow also to have 24/7 access to helpful friends and support.

The new toolbar uses RSS technology for communication and we get around the problems linked to emailing. The toolbar is ads free and integrates smoothly into your browser.

There are two versions available, one for Internet Explorer and one for FireFox. Install and uninstall are easy and quick.

Please download this free tool from : http://yorgoo.media-toolbar.com/

Join tonight's call where we will continue with RSS issues:

Marketing with RSS at 9 pm GMT (London) at http://yorgotalk.com

We will also show you some of the possibilities of the new YORGOO toolbar and we will ask you to test and help us to select the final features and links to be made available on the bar.

Share with us your ideas about additional links and features we should integrate to make it a useful and fun tool to use on every Home Business Builder's computer.

Today's Tasks:

Surf all the SURFER letters at TS 25 and get the bonus traffic.
Surf 50 pages on TrafficBunnies.

Make it a great Day!

Yorgo

 PS: Last nights script about RSS can be found HERE 

Publishing with RSS

As we said in the first section, RSS is a only a tool and therefore I prefer to use direct-to-desktop publishing when discussing what most people refer to as RSS publishing. The reason for that is because, to effectively use RSS as your newsletter delivery system and to effectively integrate your RSS newsletter into your marketing, you will need to use additional tools besides an RSS feed.

You may use this content for your trainings and share it with users of The Magic Search Traffic Formula and the YORGOO Toolbar to help your team mated to understand the importance of RSS in Marketing and Communication in general. Yorgo

That is the point missed by many of those who claim to have "secrets" to RSS publishing. They explain how to set up your own RSS feed and then turn you loose to figure out how to market with it on your own. As you will see in this section, doing it that way is highly ineffective for reasons that will become clear as we go along.

Remember that marketing is all communications you have with your prospects and customers. That includes your newsletter as part of your marketing mix. Your newletter needs to be an integral part of that mix and needs to be integrated into your marketing efforts. You cannot separate your publishing from your other marketing.

To be an effective direct-to-desktop publishing, you must change how you look at publishing.

Email publishing and marketing is push marketing and push publishing. Push means shoving your messages into the face of your readers. You, as the publisher, control what content your subscribers receive. That is why spam complaints are such an issue for email publishers. They feel that they should control what content their subscribers see.

Direct-to-desktop publishing and marketing is based on the concept that your subscribers should be the ones in control. You, the publisher, must pull them to your content. By that I mean, your content must be both very high quality and very interesting to your readers. Sending out a lot of unwanted advertising will not pull very many readers to your newsletter.

That is the basic shift in attitude that becoming a direct-to-desktop publisher entails. There are both increased benefits and increased responsibilities placed upon the publisher.

Direct-to-desktop publishing means providing very-high quality content, much more so than email publishing. As much as possible, this content should be original (written by the publisher) content. Remember, you want to build your own credibility, your own reputation as an expert, not somebody else's.

We all use third-party articles and you will need to do so even as a direct-to-desktop publisher. Make sure that you select only articles that are highly informative and of the highest quality. The reputation of the author as a "guru" should not enter into your decision. Select the article on the basis of quality of content. Length is not important either. Long or short, always pick the thir-party articles you use based solely on quality and relevance. Too many email publishers use articles that have little quality to them. You cannot afford to do that because your content will be spidered by the search engines and will affect your ranking.

When you do use a third-party article, I suggest you the following.. Write a multi-paragraph commentary on the article. Post that in your newsletter with a link to the actual article, preferably on your own web site. That way, your readers will get your views on the subject as well as whatever the author of the article has to say.

Doing it this way also has some very positive implications for your web site traffic. More on that in the marketing section.

The change from push to pull means also means a shift in how you think about subscriber counts.

Email publishers are also concerned about how many email addresses are on their lists. However, it has been shown that many of these lists are full of "dead letter addresses" - email addresses where no one ever checks the mail. This is especially true of those newsletters who either offer free advertising for subscribing or belong to one of the email ad co-ops that require the advertiser to subscribe to every newsletter carrying their ad.

 When an email publisher makes the shift to direct-to-desktop publishing, assuming they make a clean break from using email as a delivery method, will see a significant drop in the size of their lists. This is to be expected and is not a cause for alarm. The people who will sign up for your RSS feed are those who were reading your newsletter all along, your loyal following. The rest are either freeloaders or the dead letter addresses. Based on personal testimonials and statistical evidence, on the average, 10% of the email addresses on an email publisher's list represent real readers. Yes, there are always exceptions. This is the statistical average based on the data I was able to collect from various sources.

If you have been providing excellent, original content as an email publisher and your list has been responsive, you should see a significant number of your email subscribers move to RSS with you. If you have been doing an average newsletter, then a very small percentage will follow you. Do not be discouraged. One of the real benefits of direct-to-desktop publishing is that, as you learn how to be an effective direct-to-desktop publisher, the marketing tools built in a good direct-to-desktop publishing system will help you do something that is very expensive to do as an email publisher. Your newsletter will be seen more and more by the people who are really interested in what you have to say. AND this will not cost you a dime extra.

The change from push to pull means also means a shift in how you think about customer service. 

There is one more adjustment you must make that really represents the difference between push and pull. We all have been taught to make the customer our first priority. But how that is practiced by email publishers is far different from how direct-to-desktop publishers make their customers their top priority.

First of all, all publishers need to realize that their readers are their customers. As customers, your readers have certain expectations, They expect a quality product that meets a need they have and they expect great customer service. If you are not providing those, your subscribers will leave. And rightly so. None of us do business with someone whose products are irrelevant or whose products are shoddy. Nor do we stay with a business that does not provide adequate customer service. And that is the way it should be.

Your subscribers should be free to leave if they feel that your newsletter is not for them. They should be able to leave quickly and easily.

However, email publishers, even the really big ones, make unsubscribing from their lists as difficult as possible. The more complicated the process, the more likely for things to go wrong technically. And if your subscriber has tried to unsubscribe and then receives another issue or ad from you, they are more than likely going to file a spam complaint. That could lead to some very serious repercussions.

Why do email publishers make it so hard to unsubscribe? They use all kinds of nationalizations for this. The most prevalent is for your protection. That is a smoke screen. Remember, email is push technology. It is designed to put the sender in control.

Most of them do it for other reasons, partly based on what list server they use. Some list servers, like Majordomo, need a special email code sent that is confusing, even for me, to make work right. If they wanted to make it easy for their subscribers, they would have picked a different list server, one much easier to use. The best email list servers provide an immediate unsubscribe link at the end of every message.

But even some of the lists that have a link like that, will tell you that it will be two weeks before your request is processed. Why do they need that long? We are using computers here, are we not? The unsubscribe should be instantaneous. If it is not, this is a publisher who is pushing you to stay.

Have you noticed something about the email unsubscribe process? You, as the subscriber, are not in control. Yes, you make the initial request, but after that it is out of your hands. Your request can be delayed at the discretion of the publisher or even be ignored due to "technical difficulties."

With direct-to-desktop publishing, it is the subscriber who controls what newsletters they receive and read. Don't want this one or that one? Just delete it from your reader. Much like the channel set up on your television and just as efficient.

Having readers who can leave whenever they want puts a tremendous responsibility on the direct-to-desktop publisher. We have to learn to provide content that will constantly pull both our present readers and new subscribers to read our newsletters. That means that the only consistent way to get and keep readers is content. The better your content the higher retention and acquisition rates you will see. For direct-to-desktop publishers, content truly is king!

To summarize all this: email publishing uses push technology and focuses on quantity for success. Direct-to-desktop publishing uses pull technology and focuses on quality for success.  

Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major shift in how you look at the purpose of your newsletter. 

It is my contention that some publishers, and most especially email publishers, are marketers first and publishers second. That means they see making sales as the primary purpose of publishing an ezine or newsletter. We all hope that our publications will achieve that goal, but it should not be the primary purpose of your publication. Instead, your publication should focus on providing content of the highest quality that establishes your credibility. You do that by showing your readers that you know your stuff, that you are, dare I use the word, an expert - a real expert - in your field.

This means you need to do as much writing of your own as possible. Yes, I realize that writing articles is hard work and time-consuming. That is why we publishers use third-party articles. but don't just run any article that you receive. Use some discrimination. Use only articles that complement your own content, that are appropriate to the focus of your own newsletter. And, whatever you do, do not just publish the article as is. Write a short introduction that gives your readers your own thoughts on the article. Remember, you want to establish your reputation, your credibility, not someone else's.

The received wisdom is that newsletters should be used to promote your own products and services. If you look at the vast majority of email newsletters, that is exactly what the publishers seem to think is the purpose of their newsletter. In most, including a lot of the most-well known, newsletters, you can hardly find the content among all the advertising. these publishers seem to feel the need to shove their advertising in your face.

However, let's look at what should serve as a model for all online publishers: your local newspaper. Most newspapers do not cram every page of their publications with so many ads that you cannot find the articles. Most of the good ones tend to have a separate section for advertising. And what ads do appear in the content sections are presented in such a way that they do not interfere with the presentation of the news.

How long do you think your local paper would keep its subscribers if they overloaded the news pages with ads? It's time we online publishers changed the way we think. We need to get away from the newsletter-as-vehicle-for-advertising model and switch to a newsletter-as-vehicle-for-quality-content model.

Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major shift in how you look at the design of your newsletter. 

Email publishers tend to publish discrete issues of their newsletters on a regular schedule. The most common schedule is once a week. Each issue contains all the information that publisher wants to communicate to his or her subscribers for that week. There are a couple of drawbacks to that format, beyond the basic problem that this publisher is using email as her delivery system.

The first drawback is the length. With a couple of articles and a half dozen or so classified ads, along with the regular information like the welcome, the disclaimers required with email, the unsubscribe information, etc., that makes for a fairly long message. Most Internet users just don't read messages of that length.

Yes, you could send out more frequent shorter messages, but that only compounds the problems associated with email delivery exponentially. The more often you email your subscribers, the more likely you are of getting shut down because of a spam complaint.

By using a weblog type of format, you do not do discrete issues. Rather you post an article or your advertising or an editorial on any given day. Let's say on Monday, you post an article about RSS publishing, then on Tuesday you publish an editorial about the upcoming election, on Wednesday, you publish a couple of classifieds, on Thursday you publish an article on holiday advertising and on Friday you publish a few more ads. Let's say this is the same content you would have published in a discrete issue, except for the disclaimers and the mast head - the stuff at the top that identifies your newsletter,

You do not need to publish the mast head because it is always there on your blog. You do not need to include all the email disclaimers because you are not using email. Things like advertising disclaimers and welcome messages can be integrated into the overall design of your weblog as a sidebar, so they are always there. Anyone going to your blog page will see them every time they visit.

Yes, even though you are using RSS as your delivery system for your newsletter, your newsletter will have an HTML page as well that your readers will visit whenever they read an entire item in your newsletter.

You see, the RSS feed will only carry the title as a link and the first paragraph or two of your item, say the article about RSS publishing. Each item will be listed separately in the same format. The RSS feed will hold up to fifteen items, the last fifteen items you posted. Any good RSS publishing system will set all this up for you and do all the necessary coding changes. Usually you post your item in HTML and the publishing system converts it to XML for you. Doing it all manually is not effective or efficient, so I suggest you not do that! The idea is to use RSS to make your life easier not harder. More on these systems later on.

With the better publishing systems you do not even have to know a lot of HTML because they will allow you to post your item as text and it will format the line breaks for you. As long as you put a double hard break at the end of each paragraph of text, your article will look fine. You can add bold or italics or underlines as needed. But, the better your HTML skills, the more creative you can be in how your posts will look.

Also, if you have the necessary expertise and tools, you can add graphics, Flash, audio, video, or anything else you want to jazz up your pages. Do NOT add executables (EXE) files to your posts. That creates all kinds of problems for your readers and is forbidden by most, if not all, publishing systems. Also, if you add multimedia to your newsletter, I strongly recommend you do in a way so that your reader can choose to view it or not. Not only is that the courteous thing to do, but it also will prevent you from locking up your reader's computer. Although most people have fairly sophisticated computers these days, there are still people who might not be able to or do not want to view these kinds of files. Remember, your reader is in control here, not you.

Doing daily posts, which I consider the ideal schedule, may seem like a lot more work, but, in reality and once you get the hang of it, it really is less time consuming than doing one big issue a week. Also, a lot of email publishers have gone back to doing text-based newsletters to avoid some of the filtering of email that is going on. HTML email is often blocked or the HTML is disabled unless you specifically ask to see it.

Text newsletters are dull and boring. The Internet is a visual medium first and foremost. Yes, it is for the transmission of content, but that content has to be visually appealing to your readers. There is nothing appealing about a long text message that uses rows of unimaginative characters like #,@, * or others to try to add some zest to all that text. If you want to keep your readers, yes, provide them with lots of great content, but also present that content in a way that captures their imaginations.

Finally, there is a very strong marketing reason for using a blog type of format. I will explain it in detail in the marketing section.

You want new subscribers for your newsletter, right? That means you need to get new people to see your newsletter, right? That means getting traffic to your newsletter page, right? One of the best ways to do that is to get the search engines like Google to spider your newsletter every time you add a new item to your weblog. What would you say if I told you there was a marketing tool that could do that? It's called pinging weblogs and I'll explain how that works in another article.

The change from push to pull means also means a shift in how you think about subscriber counts.

Email publishers are also concerned about how many email addresses are on their lists. However, it has been shown that many of these lists are full of "dead letter addresses" - email addresses where no one ever checks the mail. This is especially true of those newsletters who either offer free advertising for subscribing or belong to one of the email ad co-ops that require the advertiser to subscribe to every newsletter carrying their ad.

How to use RSS I

Dear Friends and YORGOO Subscribers,

as last night's Session "Introduction to RSS" was somewhat technical, I have loaded the script for those who would like to review the content: Click HERE (new window).

1. February Contest: Congratulations
2. Tonight's Call: Hands-on RSS: Start using RSS
3. Today's Tasks

1. Congretulations to all winners of the February contest! The most amazing result comes from Toni Leuenberger from Switzerland with ID 60821 with 123 new downlines! And the best is his testimonial:

"…strictly YORGOO Daily Tasks Surfing and Safelists."

Toni got $100!

Special Clap-clap also to Alan Johnson and Borouch Rappaport with over 30 new team members.

Go now for the March Contest…it's worth while!

2. Join Tonight's call:

Hands-on RSS at 9 pm GMT (London) at http://yorgotalk.com

You are in for a big surprise and some gret revelations. Join and be amongst the first to profit from YORGOO's brand new RSS Traffic Tool.

3. Today's Tasks to get Free Traffic and Free Leads:

• Mail to all Safelists supported by YORGOO and promote your YORGOO.
• Surf 100 Pages on HitSafari
• Surf 50 Pages on Webbizinsider
• Surf 50 PAges on TrafficBunnies  (all to be found under Traffic 1 in your back-office)

Make it a great day!

Yorgo

RSS for Beginners: Back-ground and History

Back in the good old days before it was bought out by AOL, there was a company called Netscape who was investigating a new market: portal sites and content syndication. The idea was simple: a variety of web sites produce relevant content in a (nearly) continuous flow. Portals would be designed to aggregate news and content from those sites and present it to the user all in one page…

*****

       Yorgo: Author of numerous Publications pertaining to online Marketing and Business Development since 2001. Subscribe to the Feed at YORGOOpublishing for the latest articles, news and publications. All content may be quoted leaving the Author Label unchanged.

*****

Thus, Netscape invented a format called RSS, which stood for "Remote Site Syndication". This spec allows content producers to publish their news/content in an "RSS feed" (an XML based document) and content consumers to periodically check those feeds for updates.

XML is a special mark up language, just as is HTML. Mark up languages are mechanisms to identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and the role that content plays in the document: is it a heading? is it a footnote?. HTML uses a set of predefined tags to create the structure, much as we use letters to create words and then words to create documents. XML does not use predefined tags in the same sense that HTML does. In XML the programmer creates the tags.

In HTML, both the tag semantics and the tag set are fixed. An <h1> is always a first level heading and the tag <ati.product.code> is meaningless. The W3C, in conjunction with browser vendors and the WWW community, is constantly working to extend the definition of HTML to allow new tags to keep pace with changing technology and to bring variations in presentation (style sheets) to the Web. However, these changes are always rigidly confined by what the browser vendors have implemented and by the fact that backward compatibility is paramount. And for people who want to disseminate information widely, features supported by only the latest releases of Netscape and Internet Explorer are not useful.

"XML specifies neither semantics nor a tag set. In fact XML is really a meta-language for describing markup languages. In other words, XML provides a facility to define tags and the structural relationships between them. Since there's no predefined tag set, there can't be any preconceived semantics. All of the semantics of an XML document will either be defined by the applications that process them or by style sheets (emphasis mine)." — Norman Walsh October 1998

Please note: The last sentence in the quote above is one to keep in mind, We will discuss some of the ramifications of this statement when we discuss RSS readers.

The name "RSS" is an umbrella term for a format that spans several different versions of at least two different (but parallel) formats. The original RSS was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. It was deemed overly complex for its goals and replaced by a simpler version that was dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business. UserLand Software picked it up as the basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.

In the meantime, a new format was introduced, based on what the programmers perceived as the original guiding principles of the original RSS format. This format, which is based on RDF, is called RSS 1.0. But UserLand was not involved in designing this new format. UserLand continued to evolve the 0.9x branch, through versions 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, and finally 2.0.

RDF is "a model for metadata, and a syntax so that independent parties can exchange it and use it. What it doesn't provide though is any Properties of its own. RDF doesn't define Author or Title or Director or Business-Category. …It seems unlikely that one Property standing by itself is apt to be very useful. It is expected that these will come in packages…These packages are called Vocabularies; it's easy to imagine Property vocabularies describing books, videos, pizza joints, fine wines, mutual funds, and many other species of Web wildlife." Bray 2001

In other words, RDF is an attempt to add some structure to the data in an XML document. But, the idea of using what would be an enormously high number of Vocabularies seems to take the Simple out of RSS, as well as the creative potential of what applications can be signed for RSS.

RSS is what makes the big news sites (including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more) possible. That is how most people view RSS's usefulness. but there have been some very interesting developments in the uses of RSS in the past few years.

There are multiple versions of RSS currently in use, with different numbered versions. The higher number does NOT indicate a more advanced or powerful version of the protocol, as the development of RSS forked some years ago, and there are now two distinct and separate formats.

To summarize, RSS is an application of XML, which makes it possible to syndicate and aggregate online content. RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or, in fact, just about anything, to a channel viewer application.These applications are sometimes also called news readers or aggregators. These programs will constantly monitor the RSS feeds to which they are subscribed, and alert the user when new information has been added to a feed.

To effectively use RSS, that is all the technical information about RSS you need to know. There is no need for you to learn how to write XML code or to select which version of RSS you want to use. All that technical knowledge is not relevant to effective RSS marketing or publishing, no matter what anyone else tells you. There are many programs or services available that will handle all that for you, leaving you free to focus on what's really important.

A term you will see a lot in this ebook and any other discussion of RSS publishing is blog. That's short for weblog, which is your server's web log, its record of daily activity on your web server. The reason this term was applied to blog publishing is that, like a web log, the posts are in chronological order, with the oldest at the bottom and the most recent at the top.

For our purposes, a blog, in its purest form is a "frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links." A blog now is a mixture of what is happening in a person's life or their business, articles, and commentary. A blog is a wonderful format for an RSS newsletter and that is what we will discuss later in this book.

I want to talk a little bit about marketing and publishing here as well as their relationship to each other. Marketing is more than advertising. Marketing is any and all communications you have with prospect, clients, customers, subscribers or whatever else you want to call them. Your publishing efforts are a subset of your marketing efforts. When you publish, you are marketing and therefore you need to understand some basic marketing principles if you are already a publisher or intend to become one. We will present those basic marketing concepts throughout this series of articles as appropriate

RSS - Feeds and Communication

Dear Friends and YORGOO Subscribers,

I hope you spent a great week-end; let's start this week with a new topic: RSS.

What is RSS and what is it good for? Why do you find in your browser tool bar an RSS Button and why is there so much excitement out there about RSS, feeds and … traffic generation via RSS?

First of all, let me tell you that RSS is not a secret resource for insiders. RSS is for everybody and I would guess that within the next 2 years RSS will replace a big deal of mass mailing and communication. Today already RSS is the most important way for most professionals to gather permanently news about topics of interest.

We have been working with RSS since 2004 and in 2005 already we have integrated RSS into YORGOO with a simple tool at http://yorgoo.com/rss which we have never really promoted since at that time the use of RSS was much more complicated than today.

There are two ways we will look at RSS: first how to use RSS from your desktop and second, how to use RSS on your website.

Last year, when we created the best ever and most efficient script to storm the Google Top 10 in any niche, The Magic Search Traffic Formula (TMSTF), we have built in the most powerful RSS features allowing TMSTF to get high Google ranks even….without having ever written an article…:-) the secret is kept secret but the use of it is accessible to all TMSTF users.

Tonight we will start with a series of calls about RSS and its purpose and use and namely:

How can RSS help you to generate unlimited traffic at no cost!

Join tonight's call at 9 pm GMT (London) at http://yorgotalk.com

Today's Tasks:

Surf 100 pages at Hit2Hit (Sign up from the link under Traffic 2 in your YORGOO back-office) There is a 6 second timer there now and quite some activity these days…:-).

Surf 50 Pages on TrafficBunnies (you find the link under traffic1 in your back-office)

Surf 100 Pages at WebbizInsider

Make it a great day!

Yorgo

Yael Naim: New Soul

Dear Friends and YORGOO Subscribers,

today let's enjoy one of the greatest songs of the last 12 months: Yael Naim's New Soul: a real Newbie Song in many respect…just listen to the lyrics :-)! Yeal Naim was born in 1978 in France and raised in Israel. She is probably the best Israeli composer and singer since long. ENJOY!

By the way: Apple is using this song to promote it's new ultra-thin Notebook!

Last Night Yael Naim won the French Music Award and is featured here with a young French Singer in a Talent Show, Start Academy.

Today's Tasks:

while you are listening to Yael, surf:

TS25 for all the letters SURFER … and
50 pages on Forevertraffic.com

Make it a great Sunday!

Yorgo