Something I have learned over the last couple of weeks, and especially with the release of Afrigator and Amatomu is syndication. RSS feeds are an essential attribute to a website, and should always be available to readers. I am not going to explain what RSS is at this point, as I feel that most people will already know what it is, but more to the point, I have a little plugin and information about using RSS in an interesting and useful way to increase our traffic and reader experience.

If you look towards the top of my sidebar on the right, you will see.. “RECENT PIXEL GRABS ON BLOGVERTISE”. Now, basically what is happening here is syndication. Over at Blogvertise, there is an RSS feed, which sends out a message each time pixels are taken by bloggers. Each time one of these feeds is sent out, the plugin I use captures the feed, and displays the title of it. Nifty? I think so!

If you scroll down the page a little bit, you will notice two things.. “Latest from iMod” and “Latest from IT Carreer”, these are, again, two live feeds from other websites. One being a feed from my personal website, and one being a feed from a good friends blog.

How will this increase your traffic? Well, firstly, if you have more than website, you can display the topics from site B on site A, and display the topics from site A on site B. Basically bouncing readers between the two websites, thus merging your websites and handling a larger reader base, as you have now spread your two sites over one! I hope you are thinking to yourself, “Wow, that’s a good point”.

Secondly, and perhaps not as effective as my former point: you can display live feeds from other websites, which cover similar topics to your site. Now, of course this might mean a reader clicking to a similar site, and enjoying the other site more than yours, this is a risk you will need to take. Chances are, the reader will enjoy the fact that you shared useful knowledge and thus return to your website again. If the reader has taken the time to look through all the links on your sidebar/navigation area, chances are he/she enjoyed the content on your website, and therefore is taking the time to completely look around your site. Personally, I think they would come back. What you could do, is make friends with someone who authors a site similar to yours, and both put up live feeds to eachothers website, kind of like a backlink, but with a bit more too it?!

Right, how do you do this? Well, it’s actually extremely easy, all you need is one file, and a statement of code. I have uploaded the files onto my iMod server, simply click here, to download.

You will find two files in the zip file. One which has a .php extension and a readme file. Upload the .php file to your plugins directory on your wordpress install. Once you have done this, login to wp-admin, move your navigation to plugins, and activate the plugin. Now, the readme file is really easy to follow, but to make it even easier to you, here is the code to display the live feeds on your blog..

<?php RSSImport(1,”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webtrepreneurcoza“,false,true); ?>

That’s it! Simply include that code whereever you would like the feed to be displayed, and it will be displayed. Looking at the code above, there are 4 properties to this method. The first property (here a ‘1′), is the number of recent topics to display. The second property is the link to the RSS feed from the website you would like to display feeds from. The first third property, a boolean property (true or false) is for whether you would like only headlines to be displayed, and finally, the forth property, another boolean property is for whether you would like to truncate the headline - meaning that if you set the property to true, it will only show the first 30 characters of the headline, which is very useful if your design has a certain width.

What happens if 30 isn’t going to work for you? Perhaps your design is very narrow, and you want to only display 20 characters? Well, here is a solution for you:

53  if(strlen($item[’title’])>30)
54  {
55  $item[’title’]=substr($item[’title’],0,30).” … “;

These are lines copied out of the .php file. The 53, 54 and 55 represent the line numbers in the file. If you would like to only display 20 characters, yes you guessed it, replace the 30’s with 30’s in the file. Save the file, and upload it as you did before.

That’s it for today, a nice long post, I hope you make use of these useful syndication techniques! Let me know if you come up with other unique ideas based on these concepts.

The Webtrepreneur

I have talked about reader interaction before on many occasions, and the importance of it. One of the features I mentioned was a Votting Poll. Voting polls can be used in many different ways, ranging from just random feedback to usable feedback.

I run a poll, located on the right of the website. This Poll is great, there are no popup windows, and it’s Ajax powered, which means that once you click to vote, the screen doesn’t refresh or anything. This feature is very important if you decide to choose to use a Poll on your website - there is nothing worse than clicking vote, and having things popup or having the whole website reload, it kills the user experience!

Anyway, the reason for my post it to ask that you use my poll please, I would like too see what articles everyone is enjoying, so I can concentrate on them. It’s really simple, choose your choice, click submit, the process takes 2seconds!

I hope to see many results

Thanks
The Webtrepreneur

The other day I was surfing around the Internet looking at peoples blogs, just doing my daily 30mins of blog spotting, when I came across an interesting blog. This blog, which I can’t for the love of me remember the URL, spoke quickly on a very interesting topic, which I will talk about below. If the author comes across this, please drop me a line and I will add the link.

People who author blogs which fall under the categories of Internet, making money online, advertising online, and the likes are supported by Internet friendly users, by the I mean - people who have a fairly good understanding of the Internet. This said, you will usually find that this market of people do not click adverts, as they know how to easily spot adverts and stay away from them, to avoid the steriotypical popups, etc.

Creating a blog with a topic which is very much an offline hobby/topic and deals with non Internet savvy people often leads to a greater click through. Let me give you an example: I have seen many websites, which have navigational menus down the left have side of the website. The link would be in red, and the brief explanation under the link would be in black, let’s say the background of the website is white. Now, inbetween or at the botton of these adverts, you could use Google Adsense for Content, Type: Link Unit. Again, you would format these adverts with red links, black content and white background, basically formatting them so they look like an extension of the navigational bar. Back to the topic at hand, I’m sure you can see now how this would benefit an author who writes about a more offline topic. There would be more change of his readers clicking those adverts, than someone who is Internet Savvy.

A great example of this, was a dog breeding website I saw many moons ago. There website was all about dogs, and different dog breeds. Now, there are plenty of Internet savvy people who know a lot about dogs, but there are tons of non-savvy people who know a lot about dogs, more so than a website about search engine optimization, and their readers knowledge, in contrast. This dog breeding website placed its adverts very carefully on the website, and after emailing them, and being absolutely amazing at their click through ratios, it made lots of sense to me with regards to blogging to offline readers. (offline readers I mean people who aren’t always online).

It’s an interesting concept, and one which I would love to explore. I, personally have always wanted to create a website about tropical fish, having sections with information on installing tanks, sections on fish breeds, sections on breeding fish, and so on. I have not looked into the market at all, I wonder whether Google Adsense have many adverts in that category?

Well, there’s something to think about - does your more offline idea have adverts which are targeted to it?

I came across these two great programs while actually trying to code my own little C# application to make postings easier than having to use wordpress wp-admin area posting system.

Windows Live Writer

This program is wonderful. Download it here, and once you have downloaded it, install it and get started, honestly, it’s that simple. What it does is, when you install it, it will ask you whether you use myspace or another webblog, in my case, I chose other because Webtrepreneur is powered by Wordpres. The following screen asked for my address, so I punched in ‘http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za’, and then the program asked for my login details (This is the username and password you use when you access wp-admin). It then makes a connection to your webblog. Once that is done, blogging couldn’t be easier! The program comes with a quick view mode changer, which allows you to move from standard view to html view to web preview view with the click of a button. There are quicky links to add images, tags and web links. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors make things so easy. Take a peak at the image below:

Windows Live Writer Firefox Plugin

Another great piece of software. This is a Firefox Plugin, which means you downlod the file, install it, and it appears in your Firefox Browser. You get a couple of options with the plugin, the first one being: add a new blog entry.. this will basically load up Windows Live Writer. You simply type in the title for the post, and type your post out and click submit! The second feature is pretty handy - Let’s say you are currently reading a blog entry on someone elses website and it catches your eye and you want to write about the same topic, you simply choose the “Blog This” option, and Windows Live Writer will load with the a premade link to the article you were reading - damn handy!

Here are the links: Information | Download Windows Live Writer | Download the Firefox Plugin

Blogging couldn’t be easier! This post is posted using Windows Live Writer.