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Website Imperatives and Solutions

by: Richard Keir

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

When you take a look at the most visited sites on the internet, what hits you in the face? Change, growth, new content. In a sense, a search engine is the perfect web site. By it's very nature, it grows and changes continuously and moment by moment adds new content. But, most of us are never going to build a Yahoo or a Google. The competition at that level is horrific.

But the lesson is there to be read. You could build a great site with terrific content never seen before and do very well - for a while. But the imperatives that control our success or failure revolve around growth, change and new content. An obvious solution is to continually provide new content for your sites. Basically this means writing or constructing new pages, preferably with unique content.

There are, certainly, several easy ways to get content for your site. The first is to use other people's articles. Nearly all of us who do write and publish articles want people to pick them up and use them - with live links to our sites, naturally. Despite a lot of mindless babble about a duplicate content penalty, article syndication is alive and working as well as ever. Just don't scrape a site and replicate it.

Another source is RSS. Most feeds are meant to be syndicated (but not all so you do need to check Terms of Use) and they provide updated content. Other sources include content in the in the public domain.

Like all easy solutions, there are a couple of drawbacks. Other people's articles may not be focused as well as you'd like to your site content and goals. And they don't help your site's link popularity. Along with growth, change and content, incoming links are a critical success factor.

Using RSS feeds or other search-based content can raise copyright issues, irritate some feed or site owners, and may be even more poorly focused to your site's content than articles. If you use RSS feeds, almost inevitably you'll see content on your site that is absolutely irrelevant.

Public domain materials are extremely useful as content sources - if you can find matches to your site content. Assuming that you can, then you will need to convert the material into pages or into a form useable on your web pages. This can be time-consuming, but it may be easier than writing your own content.

Ghost writers are yet another alternative. Here you trade time for money. But this can be a tricky process. Some are not really fluent in English and you may need to do some rewriting. Also, you may need to double-check and make sure that the articles provided are actually original and not nearly identical to existing copyrighted material. Some ghost writers seem to work by finding a site with a related theme and then pretty much copy material from that site with minimal changes. Not a good idea for you to post that as your own.

Another source would be sites offering private label products. Many of those products can be mined for excellent targeted site content. Some products sold with Master resale rights also allow you to use the materials as site content. In this last case, you need to be certain exactly what you can and can't do under the specific rights package. Sometimes you can alter the materials, sometimes you can't.

Private label products with you having full rights, including the right to alter them and put your own name on them as author can be one of the easiest ways to meet all of the imperatives. With rights to an informative, new and interesting book on a niche topic, you can rework it a little, maybe add some nice graphics, generate a PDF and sell it.

Or you could generate that PDF and also generate pages for your site from the book. Give the PDF away in exchange for signing up to your list. Extract tips and ideas from the book and put together 2 or 5 or more articles based on the book. Publish and distribute the articles to generate links to your site and help brand yourself as an expert.

From one private label product you can generate a lot of new real estate for your site, add a viral product that you can use to build your lists, and through articles generate incoming links and do some useful branding.

It really doesn't get any easier than that. It takes some time and effort, but nothing like the effort of writing 5 or 10 articles from scratch, building 30 or 50 or 150 web pages, and writing your own viral book for list-building.

What about the other people who belong to the same private label site? Isn't everybody going to have duplicate content? In the real world, 90 percent of the people with access to a product will do nothing at all or the absolute minimum. Very few will mine the product, produce articles, produce web pages, or produce a nicely modified PDF. And of those that do, each will follow their own unique path. The chance of near identical content is pretty low. The PDFs produced may be more similar, but consider how many people make serious money with resale rights selling identical material.

There's a lot of room out there. Even within the most competitive niches, a thoughtful, patient marketer who pays attention to the imperatives and works smart, can make a living few would complain about. But there are also less competitive niches where the same marketer could become the dominant force. The materials are out there to get you going. Use them and work smart.

None of this is rocket science. The first, and ultimate, imperative is take action. Too many will fail, because they never even really began. Start today.

About the author:
Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and professional presentations and eCommerce related matters. For more information on eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building - - and for more eCommerce articles.

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Tracking and Measuring RSS Feeds
by: S. Housley

Measuring and tracking RSS while a fairly simple concept, is really anything but. Unlike websites, RSS have the added caveat of potential syndication, making accurate tracking a challenge to anyone but the extremely tech savvy.

It is not unrealistic for marketers to want to know how many subscribers they have, which items in their feeds attract the most interest, or how many click-throughs are generated as a result of an RSS feed.

There are a number of 3rd party providers who focus on tracking the consumption of RSS feeds. Some solutions are rudimentary but likely sufficient for a small business testing the waters with RSS. Other RSS tracking solutions are more complex and while they can come close to being accurate, with syndication there is no solution that tracks with 100% accuracy.

Techniques Used to track RSS Consumption

Small businesses can view web logs to provide information on how many times a specific file (RSS feed) is requested. The logs and information is rudimentary but will give a basic sense of a feeds success. Many 3rd party tracking options have additional tracking information available.

Hosting

The most common method to track the number of feed accesses or individuals accessing a feed is to use a 3rd party feed host. Companies like FeedBurner essentially track feeds based on accesses. The downside to using a 3rd party like Feedburner, is that the url is a FeedBurner url and any PageRank or popularity associated with the url will benefit the feed host rather than the feed creator. Additionally, no distinction is made between unique views or syndicate feeds.

FeedBurner provides a free no frills service to host RSS feeds and they have been proactive in circumventing user concerns. Recently implementing a service that eases users concerns about migrating from FeedBurner. There is a 3 step process for users interested in migrating from FeedBurner's free service, implementing a permanent redirect, and url forwarding.

Details can be found at: http://www.burningdoorc.om/feedburner/archives/001251.html

Some publishers, who were concerned about lock-in or wanted to retain control of the domain and feed urls often resist a hosting service. The new program FeedBurner Partner Pro is not free, but allows for users to point to their own domain, retaining complete control of their feeds without sacrificing statistical tracking.

The downside to using a service like FeedBurner is that some filtering applications used on corporate proxy servers block feeds residing on FeedBurner or other free hosts.

Redirects

Companies like SyndicateIQ have more complex tracking solutions that generate unique urls for each subscriber. The tracking benefits to such a customized solution is obvious. Individual user habits can be monitored and any users abusing their access and inappropriately syndicating a feeds content can have their feed turned off. The downside of course is that the success of RSS is in a large part due to the anonymity. Users don't want their personal habits tracked.

Considering the venture capital interest in these 3rd party hosting services. It is important to note that their value is in the data that they collect. As with any 3rd party service, it goes without saying that publishers should read the privacy policy carefully, be aware of who owns the rights to the collected information, and how that information might be used. It goes without saying that the value in many of the free services currently available lies in their aggregate data.

Uniquely Named Transparent Images

Uniquely named transparent 1x1 graphics can be added to the description field of an RSS feed. Users can use standard web logs to see the number of times the image is viewed and determine the number of times the feed was accessed.

Companies Specializing in Tracking and RSS Metrics

Pheedo - Pheedo creates tools that enable individuals, organizations and corporations to promote, analyze, and optimize their weblogs and content.

http://www.pheedo.com

SyndicateIQ - SyndicateIQ's position in the content distribution chain provides clients a set of analytics.

http://www.syndicateiq.com/

FeedBurner - FeedBurner offers a full range of services to help you build awareness, track circulation, and implement revenue-generating programs in your feed(s).

http://www.feedburner.com

Each individual using RSS needs to make a decision of the extent and importance of the analytics they require. Realizing that any system they employ is not going to be perfect.

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