John Dilbeck Musings

There are several ways you can promote your business on Merchant Circle: the contents of your basic listing, any items you post to your blog, coupons you create, photos you upload, and the bulletins posted on your directory listing page.

I just learned about Merchant Circle a few days ago and I’ve jumped all over using their system. You can see the profile I’ve created for Dilbeck Marketing on Merchant Circle. I’ve taken the time to use most of the tools and love their system.

(Your business is listed at Merchant Circle, right? If not, you can create a professional looking online listing for your business with our easy to use tools. Free! - MerchantCircle.com.)

There are probably other things you can do at Merchant Circle that I haven’t discovered in the less-than-a-week that I’ve been a member of the site.

What you may, or may not, already know is that every time you blog, create a coupon, upload a photo, or post a newsletter, these things are added to a newsfeed for you, automatically.

At the top-right of your listing, you’ll see “Subscribe to blog and coupon feed” followed by an orange chicklet that says “RSS/XML.” This is a standard news feed that can be syndicated on many services and can be read by anyone using a news feed aggregator or a news reader. Even without sending emails you are broadcasting to the world - potentially.

I’ll write a post later to explain more about making use of this. For now, suffice it to say that you can blog in one place and have it automatically republished in multiple places. This makes it very powerful for getting your news out.

If you don’t know anything about RSS, let me suggest that you read What is RSS?.

One place you may want to syndicate your feed is at Squidoo.com.

To do this, you’ll need to be a member.

Are you an expert on something? Build your own Squidoo lens and tell the world. It’s free, and you may even earn some money from it.

Of course, you’re an expert on your business, so join Squidoo and create a lens about it. It’s worth the effort to learn how to build free lenses on Squidoo, and it’s a perfect place to syndicate your Merchant Circle news feed.

For example, I’ve created a Squidoo lens about Merchant Circle and I’ve syndicated (re-published) my news feed and Merchant Circle’s news feed on that lens.

Also, as part of that lens, I’ve created a list where you can add a link to the Merchant Center listing for your business. I will be syndicating that list on some of my other websites, so you’ll get free advertising just by adding your link to the list. If you don’t understand, just comment on this topic and I’ll see what I can do to help you.

Act on your dream!

JD

The more I participate at Squidoo.com by building lenses and adding those lenses to groups, the more I see pages on Squidoo referenced in my traffic stats on various sites I have.

What?

I mean that Squidoo is sending an ever-increasing stream of traffic to my sites, blogs, and forums.

Thinking about that, I took a little time this morning to create a new Get A Free Marketing Site lens on Squidoo.

Then, I found several related groups and submitted my new lens to them.

This morning, my lens is ranked at over 180,000. I’m guessing it will jump to about 30,000 or less in the next 24 hours. Then, who knows where it will end up.

To make it a bit more interesting, I added a Plexo module where you can vote for your favorite marketing book on the lens, and I added an RSS feed for marketing articles from 21st Century Articles, my article directory specializing in business, communications, technology, and self-improvement articles.

If you don’t see your favorite marketing book on the list, please feel free to add it.

I have been getting tens of thousands of page views to my Get A Free Marketing Site suite of marketing tools at LinkScout, and I know it has been worth the time and effort - and money - I’ve invested in it.

Therefore, I feel confident in recommending it to you, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. I also recommend that you start building as many Squidoo lenses as you need to promote your business, talk about your hobby, or write about anything in which you are interested. It’s free, and you may well get paid by Squidoo. I earn a small check from them every month, and that’s a lot better than buying advertising, in my opinion.

If you have a blog on just about any topic, you should create a related lens at Squidoo, and don’t forget to use the RSS module to syndicate your blog feed.

It brings me more visitors, and I’m sure it will work for you, too.

I am slowly making progress in converting all of my blogs over to WordPress (with the single exception of John Dilbeck And Friends which will continue to be powered by Manilla.)

The more I use WordPress, the better I like it.

One thing I’ve been doing is using categories rather extensively on several of my blogs.

On Syndicate Your Ad, I have a category for every state in the USA, all the provinces in Canada, and other countries as I need to create them. The reason for this is that each category has its own RSS feed and I syndicate those feeds on dozens of Squidoo lenses and other websites.

I’m way behind in blogging these offers, but I decided it was best to take the time I needed to create an infrastructure for promoting the offers. Now that I’ve almost completed that, I’ll get back to updating the blog this month or next. Then, it will be easy to update it every couple of days or so.

I’ve tested several other blogs to see how well they work when generating multiple RSS feeds based on category, and after several months of use, I’m going to convert all of them over to WordPress. As far as I’m concerned, it offers the best value in terms of power, flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use. So, the others will be ditched.

All of this takes time, but by the first of 2007, or so, I’ll have everything working as I want and can spend just a few hours a week keeping them updated.

So, now I have an easy way to generate information that flows from blog to lens, website, and other blog.

Now, I’m thinking about how I can complete the flow back to the originating blogs or if that is even something that needs doing.

I got the idea a few minutes ago when I was looking at my newest lens: Dolly Parton.

On the top right corner of the lens, there is the standard icon for RSS feeds. When I looked at it, the feed showed my description for the lens and it was repeated as a link item with the date of last updating.

As far as information is concerned, it doesn’t look too interesting to me, but it does look interesting in terms of the date of last update. I’m wondering if this is one of the mechanisms Squidoo uses to rank lenses in terms of “freshness” or recentness of update.

How can I use that for myself?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m going to be musing about it the next few days as I go about my marketing efforts.

Do you have any thoughts about it?