Archive for October, 2008

Looking For Physical Products To Promote?

Christmas is coming, and many marketers are gearing up campaigns and niche websites catering towards eager shoppers. While online information products have their place, this is a critical time of year NOT to forget about physical products. Here are some great niche hunting sites for physical product ideas – feel free to share suggestions!

ProductWiki ProductWiki: They claim to be the resource for free and unbiased product reviews. Information is written and maintained by the user community. Plenty of product ideas here.

3LUXE 3LUXE: Several categories of products reviewed. 3LUXE performs research on the cream of the crop of physical products. If you’re looking to target an expensive niche, this might just be the place to gleam some ideas.

iliketotallyloveit.com ILikeTotallyLoveIt: An interesting social community featuring sometimes bizarre products. If you’re looking for strange and uncommon ideas, it’s worth a review.

Twine Is Live, Where’s Yours?

Twine is now public!If you haven’t heard of Twine yet, it’s never too late to get started. Nowadays there are many sites that let you keep track of your interests, favorite items, blog posts, etc etc. And that’s exactly what Twine is all about too. So what makes it any different, or any better? Well first of all, you can collect just about anything – not just stuff online but also upload photos, videos etc. But the big reason I think Twine will become a huge player in the search industry is because it’s heavily based on semantic understanding.

The semantic web is coming, and is happening right beneath your eyes. It’s a new way of understanding data and how pieces of data relate to each other. I’m considering putting together a mini overview of semantic search, so keep an eye out if you’re interested in learning more.

What Twine is good at is learning how information is related to each other, and learning information about you. With that said – let’s chat about how Twine can help with our marketing efforts.

I’ve been a beta member for a few months, but just today Twine has officially gone public. In my account at Twine, I can create groups or join other people’s groups. In these groups, I can collect information from throughout the web or from my computer. Okay I know what you’re saying, “Big deal”… But here’s the good news.

Each group has an RSS feed.

If you’ve read any of my other posts related to RSS, you’ll know how powerful RSS marketing can be. Since Twine is likely to become a strong player in the search engines, it’s a smart move to get yourself involved now and create some groups. I know I’ll be using Twine as part of my social bookmarking and RSS marketing strategies from now on.

Jump on Twine and take a look, let me know what you think. Here’s my Twine: http://www.twine.com/user/mystfire

Kaz

RSS Explained: What Exactly Is RSS And How Can It Benefit You?

So what exactly is RSS? You’ve probably heard about it, but might not fully understand what it means. RSS is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication”, although it’s sometimes referred to as “Rich Site Summary” as well. The word “syndicate” means to publish simultaneously. For example, an author who writes a column might get their column syndicated across several newspapers.

The term you typically come across is “RSS feed”. It’s called a feed because it feeds your content into feed readers, similar to syndicating your content across several readers or visitors. But an RSS feed is really a document. It’s a document created in a language called XML – short for Extensible Markup Language. It might sound confusing, but so does the meaning of HTML – Hypertext Markup Language. That doesn’t stop you from creating websites, does it?
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Are You Pinging?

Why should you be pinging your blogs and websites? To let others know that you’ve updated your content of course! Pinging isn’t talked about much these days, because most blogs automatically handle pinging.

So who are we pinging anyways?

Well there are sites that offer pinging services through technology known as “XML-RPC”. When you ping one of these sites, you are sending a signal to their server, notifying them that your site content has updated. Now these sites offering pinging services often allow other sites to “poll” their results, so one can easily identify blogs that are updated through the server.

Pinging is simply another method to get your site indexed quickly and generate more traffic. It’s fast and simple as well. There are hundreds of ping services you could hunt down and send pings to, but that’s not fun nor simple. Which is why I really love this site: Pingler.com

Takes about 30 seconds to fill out the form. Just used it earlier today on a new Blogger blog, which previously had zero promoting done and is not yet indexed in Google. Will update accordingly when it gets updated by Google – from using pinging alone.