RSS Feeds – Let Us Learn the Facts

What is RSS? To begin with, it’s one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. However it is not so.

The easiest way to explain it is to make you understand a live example. We are not trying to explain everything on the subject, but this should help get you started.

Let’s sign you up for the Excess Voice RSS Feed

If you want to read the Excess Voice newsletter every two weeks you can either read it in your email inbox, or read it in your web browser.

You already know how it works when you subscribe to a newsletter via email. You sign up, hope the spam filters don’t block some or all issues, and then read the newsletter in your email program.

With RSS, instead of subscribing via email, you subscribe via a web page.

Let’s walk through the subscription process

If you have a Yahoo! account, or even if you don’t have one you can go to My Yahoo! and click the Add Content page. On the right side of the ‘Find Content’ area you will see a link, Add RSS by URL. Follow that link and, to add the Excess Voice RSS feed, simply paste this url in the field option, http://www.excessvoice.com/excessfeed.xml (Don’t click on this link. Cut and paste it.).

Now click the Add button and you’re done.

If you don’t use Yahoo!, register at Bloglines.com and follow the same process. Bloglines is a free service preferred by many users.

What happens now?

Now, whenever you go to My Yahoo! or Bloglines, you will see when the Excess Voice feed has been updated. In Yahoo it tells you how many hours or days ago the search rss feeds was updated. In Bloglines the feed name will appear in bold, and a number displayed after the name tells you how many items the feed has been updated since you last checked. (Bloglines is one such service.)

What you see…

When you check the Excess Voice feeds, you will see that with each feed, you don’t get the complete content…you don’t see the whole newsletter, the complete article or the whole review. You see the title and the first ten lines of the content. If you want to read the whole article, for example, click on the link and then it will navigate to the page on the Excess Voice site.

Online Paid Advertisements – Know the Facts before You Take the Leap

Online Paid Advertisements

Online paid advertisements are advertisements placed by online advertising networks on webmasters WebPages with permission of the webmasters, so that the viewers of the website may click on the adverts and the webmasters get paid for ads when any visitor clicks over the advertisement. This is fiscally highly profitable for the webmaster – who owns the website. There are many programs that offer this kind of novel income opportunity. The webmasters get paid for ads that have been clicked by visitors to his site.

Types of Online paid advertisements

Online paid advertisements come in different formats and shapes, starting from banner ads. Other formats include pop-up ads, pop-under ads, text ads, and news letter ads. Each online paid advertising format is unique by itself, i.e., every ad format has its special purpose. Looking to each format in detail will give a clearer picture.

Banner Ads

Banners ads, as the name implies is a banner that has ads within it. There are different types of paid banner advertising. Some of the standard formats are horizontal banner – leader board (480×60) and vertical banner – skyscraper (120×600). Other formats include half banner (234×60), button (125×125), wide skyscraper (160×600), square (250×250), large (336×280) and small rectangle (180×150). The webmaster can choose to display between image ads and text-only ads on his/her webpages. If he/she likes to display image ads, then it will cover the entire banner. But if one would like to display text-only ads, you may have from a minimum of one text ad to four or five text ads within the banner. Banner ads are also displayed in paid email advertising.

Pop-up Ads

Using Pop-up ads is a very conventional form of online paid advertising. Whenever a webpage loads, a pop-up also emerges. Before a visitor can see the webpage he has to view the pop-up -provided by the online advertising network. The online paid advertising networks such as Adsense, and Adbrite -, provide small HTML codes that can be into host webpages.

Pop-under Ads

Pop-under ads are ads that are displayed when an user visits a website, but unlike pop-ups these ads tend to stay minimized so that the visitor does not get annoyed. On closing the active window, then pop-under ads will be displayed. This type of advertising is gearing up pace in the online advertising market, as it is quite non-intrusive and doesn’t irritate the visitor or internet user. Many online advertising networks are currently offering pop-under ads and the webmasters are paid reasonably well when compared to pop-ups.

Competitor Analysis and Marketing – Where are Your Competitors?

Before the internet, there were a series of tools designed for comparing yourself to your competition. A competitive market analysis was a must for any company that wished to maintain themselves in the market.

As in the field of battle, if you don’t know what your enemy is doing, then you are lost. Information is the weapon of our modern era. And the only way to have it in the world of business is with a competitive business analysis.

What Is An Online Competitor Analysis?

A traditional competitor analysis is a tool where a series of factors are pre-established. That way, you only need to fill in the required data or information and you will obtain a result of the analysis.
In the case of an online competitor analysis, it’s almost the same thing, but adapted to the world of the internet. You will be able to measure the pros and cons of your competition. That way you can design and implement a strategy for attacking them and gaining their share of the market.

Purpose of an Online Competitor Analysis

The main importance of an online competitor analysis is that it is able to determine what are the strengths and weaknesses of your competition. That way you will be able to attack it in those points where it won’t be able to react quickly enough. And, knowing its strengths, you can benchmark (compare) them with yours.

Another factor to be taken in account is how effective is the website of your competitor. Designing an adequate webpage isn’t an easy task. It requires a good balance between content, images, colors, animation and sizes. Nobody wants a webpage full of text with no images. And no one wants a webpage where you can only see photos of the company but no information on their products.

Additionally, it’s good to know how often your competition updates its content. Why? Because it tells you how much they care. An updated site with detailed content means that your competition places great emphasis on and invests resources in maintaining an online presence. But, if the website is outdated, or if the content doesn’t have much to offer to the potential customers, then it means that they don’t have a real interest in the online market. Either that or they are incompetent. Either way, no serious business should be done outside the internet, not if they want to maintain their position.