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

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.