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

Adam Ostrow writes, in his article Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic:

From analyzing your RSS feed to counting page views to visual representations of where your visitors are clicking, there is no shortage of companies looking to help you better understand your web site’s traffic. In our latest “toolbox” installment, we analyze (pun intended) the wide variety of applications and tools available for keeping tabs on how your sites, feeds, blogs, emails, or even your intranet is performing.

Not only does he list a great variety of tools and techniques, his readers are leaving useful comments, too.

I thought I was well versed on this topic, but Adam lists companies and tools that have never crossed my traffic analysis radar.

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?

Over the last six months, I’ve been doing a lot of work to learn more about blogging and syndication, using a variety of tools.

One of the things I wanted to do was to create multiple blogs on specific topics. I’m interested in, and do, a lot of different things, and I didn’t want to confuse someone who was reading a story about marketing in one message and then one about nonprofits in another and making customized t-shirts in a third.

How can you build a readership when your blog has no focus?

So, I decided to use the easiest tool I could find: Blogger.

I built about two dozen blogs and learned how to syndicate them on multiple sites using javascript, iframes, and php. Things were going great, and I was getting ready to turn my attention away from building the infrastructure to writing more about the topics to which each blog was devoted.

However, about a month ago, Blogger installed new software, apparently, and I started going through a round of being blocked, then whitelisted, then blocked again, and so forth. Finally a couple of days ago, I had had enough of it and decided to move all my marketing, affiliate marketing, and network marketing blogs off Blogger. But, I didn’t want to lose what I’d written.

So, I registered Blog Feed Syndication and archived over 20 of those blogs there. Since they’ll no longer be powered by Blogger, they are suspended until I find a new way to do what I want without having to do a lot of extra work in the process.

I’m testing WordPress for this, but really don’t know enough about it to make a determination if that’s the way I want to go or not.

Ideally, I’ll find a way to blog in one place, choose separate categories for each posting — as I can do here with Radio Userland — and generate a separate RSS feed for each category that can be syndicated as I want. So, I have some learning to do over the next few days.

I did decide to leave my Cherokee County, NC Blog and Murphy, NC 28906 Blog on Blogger for now. Since they do not have the marketing characteristics of some of my other blogs, perhaps they won’t trip the new algorithms that have caused me so much trouble over the last few weeks.

(Update: September, 2006 - I’ve restarted both those blogs using WordPress and I’ll be reloading the old postings from the archives to the new blogs as I have time.)

In the meantime, I believe I have archived my test postings from my blogs so I can access that information and use it again, if I need to do so.

One lesson I’ve learned, again, is not to trust a free service enough to try to build a business around it, especially when their terms of service tell me my only recourse is to stop using the service if I don’t like what’s happening.

I’m old enough to have learned that lesson decades ago, but I keep making the mistake that I can trust people I don’t know, systems over which I have no control nor influence, and the inevitable gremlins that find new places to live.

Back to the drawing board, one more time.

A few months from now, I’ll probably laugh about this new opportunity to have a learning experience.

Ken Evoy’s free Internet search utility has just gotten better, if you have any interest in RSS, XML, and blogs or for specialty hubs and directories.

Search It!, which does NOT involve downloading anything to your computer, is a utility that makes it easier to find information relating to business and ecommerce on the Internet. By using a multi-step process (usually three steps, but sometimes four), it will build the searches for you and go to the appropriate search engine, directory, or content site to find the information in which you are interested.

One item you’ll see in the Step 1 dropdown box is “Reference Library for Content.” By selecting that, Search It! will automatically populate the Step 2 box with appropriate choices. There is a link to get help for using the tool once you have selected your choices for Step 1 and Step 2.

The new searches listed in the Reference Library for Content choice in Step 1 are:

Yahoo! RSS Domain Search
Feedster Blog/RSS Search
Syndic8.com RSS Search
Google RSS Content Search
Yahoo! RSS Content Search

It’s taken me years to learn how to search for some of these things and where to go to find them, and Ken has just given you that power for free.

Not only that, but he just added four more searches related to hubs and directories. Select “Specialty Hubs and Directories” in Step 1, and you’ll see the following new searches in Step 2:

Google Wide
Google Tight
Yahoo! Wide
Yahoo! Tight

The help link below Step 1 and Step 2 gives information on how to use these new searches.

I use Search It! just about every day. It’s easy to use. Leave the small window open in the top-left corner of your screen so it will be available when you want to find something of interest. The more I use it, the better I like it.

I was surprised to see that I have several sites listed in the top 10 for both the Yahoo! Wide and Tight searches for the following keywords: Step 3 = “Murphy NC” and Step 4 = “travel”. It looks like the work I’ve been doing for the last several months is starting to pay off.

About two weeks ago, while working on one of my websites hosted by Site Build It!, I wanted to create a weblog for maintaining current information about telecommunications. While it is possible to create a weblog, of sorts, using Site Build It, it wasn’t what I’d become accustomed to using Radio Userland or News Pro.

I decided it was time to investigate the state of the art concerning RSS and syndication, and that led me to the newest version of Radio Userland and the replacement for News Pro, Coranto. Both are heavily invested in RSS and XML and it was time to do some updating and building of new infrastructure before I could make progress on my original goal.

Now, I’ve installed Coranto on JohnDilbeck.com and DilbeckConsulting.com. I created a new weblog at blogger.com. I’ve updated some of the settings at johndilbeck.editthispage.com. I downloaded, installed, tested, and purchased a license for Radio Userland version 8. Now, I’m ready.

At this point, I create my weblogs (also called blogs) using Radio Userland, which automatically uploads to I Succeed By Helping You Succeed and to John Dilbeck And Friends. (Links updated in September, 2006, to point to current sites.)

Then, it’s a fairly quick procedure to copy the entries from my original Ramblings site to it’s new host at http://JohnDilbeck.com/news/ where it’s powered by Coranto, and to my blogger.com blog at (link deleted). I’m running most of the entries concurrently on all of the weblogs, and I don’t know if I’ll continue doing that or if each will take a direction of its own in the future.

Either way, the background work is completed. I have to add a few more pages to several sites where I’ll use syndication via javascript to show portions of the blogs on pages that will be automatically updated with no extra effort on my part once they’re in place.

In a couple of months, I’ll know how this is working and how well it suits my original desires.

Now, it’s time to turn my attention back to marketing and selling.