feeds

Promote your site with a Squidoo lens

Have you heard of Squidoo? I’ve been a member of Squidoo since 2005, shortly after the site opened it’s doors to those who wanted to promote their websites in a very different way.

Squidoo allows members to make what they call a lens. A lens is a window to promote perhaps another sites or a number of similar sites on the internet. You can add as much information to your lens as you like in order to point others towards your website.

I made my first lens, as I said, back in 2005. It was for my reptile and amphibian care website
. I have information on that site about a lot of different reptiles but the majority is for one type of lizard – the water dragon. So what I did was to add snippets of care information to the lens that I created that lead to specific pages on my website where my lens visitors could learn even more in depth information about the care of the water dragon lizard. I did the same thing on another lens for iguana care.

I was also able to add modules to my lens that allowed me to select items from online stores like overstock.com, Amazon and many others for which, if I sold any items through my lens I’d get a percentage of the royalties that Squidoo made off the sale. Profits from a lens can also be donated to a number of charities as well.

I didn’t do much with my lens over the last year, but I’ve recently gone back and given them an overhaul adding new modules and updating the information.

As I said you can do as much or as little to your lens as you’d like. If you were to create one for your website you might add your RSS feed so that visitors could see your latest posts, as well as write a summary of what your site is about. You can also add link modules in order to link to similar types of sites.

I’ve now created lens for all of the blogs that my husband and I run. Each one has a summary of the blog, RSS feeds, links, shopping modules and I’ve added as many tags to the lenses as possible that describe the site accurately so that people will be able to find my lens easily on Squidoo or perhaps even via a search engine.

Visitors to your lens can rank your lens from one to five stars, so if you create a lens try to do a good job so that you’ll get a good rating. I believe the rating system helps with a lens popularity on the site as well.

The people as squidoo also send out newsletters telling members of popular lenses each day and you can apply to have your own lens promoted in order to get more visitors and ratings for your lens.

Check it out for yourself. At the very least it’s another way to promote your website and at the most it’s a way to make a little bit of extra money if your lens does well!

Visit Squidoo to make your own Lens.

FeedBlitz – RSS subscriptions by email

by Tricia

When I first signed up to Feedburner in order to provide another form of RSS feed to my readers FeedBlitz was strongly associated with Feedburner. I believe that while the two are still associated, FeedBlitz is more of a stand alone offering now.

So what is Feedblitz anyway? Well, to keep it simple, Feedblitz is just another way of providing your site visitors and hopefully subscribers with a way to be notified that you have written new posts on your site.

Anyone subscribing to your sites feed through Feedblitz can get a summary or the full text, depending upon how you set things up, of your most recent posts by email.

Think about it. RSS feeds have been around for quite a while now, but at first it wasn’t as easy to deliver RSS content to your site visitors as it is now. Also, even though RSS feeds have been around for years there are many people out there that still have no idea what they are, or how to use a feed reader. The whole concept can be confusing to a newbie. Luckily almost everyone understands what email is so it makes sense to provide your site content in email form to your site visitors who’d like to subscribe to your site and be notified when you’ve updated your site doesn’t it?

It’s easy to set up your site feeds on FeedBlitz. Once you add your site feed, FeedBlitz will provide you with a code that you can place on your site that will make it easy for your site visitors to subscribe to your feed. Once they subscribe you’ll be able to keep track of how many email subscribers your site has through the account interface on Feedblitz.

You can customize how your site content is delivered to your subscribers via email, and you can schedule delivery times as well.

Take a look at FeedBlitz if you are looking for yet another way to promote your sites content.

Feedburner

by Tricia

As you probably know by now, your blog has an RSS feed. Blogs are often set up by default to list your 10 most recent posts in your RSS feed. Feeds can be read in your browser, sent to site visitors by email via services like Feedburner, or read using a feed reader.

I’ll discuss a few on the most popular feed readers in a future post, but I’ll just tell you that if you have a number of sites that you enjoy reading it’s sometimes easier to keep track of them by listing their site feeds in your feed reader and quickly reading their posts or post summaries in the reader. You can visit the site to read the full post or to comment on their post – and you should do that every now and then anyway so that the blogger knows that you are a regular reader.

You’ll notice that I have my sites feeds listed in the top right sidebar. Those are the default feeds that my WordPress blogging software creates for this blog. However, I’ve also created Feedburner feeds for my site too. You’ll can subscribe to my Feedburner feeds by clicking on the second subscribe listing a little further down in my right sidebar.

I have created Feedburner feeds for my site because it allows me to optimize my feeds, and add a little flare or personal touch to the feeds. Feedburner feeds can easily be read by browsers or feed readers, but they can also be sent by email if a subscriber wishes to receive them that way.

Feedburner is actually the worlds largest feed management provider. Bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers use Feedburner to promote their sites and provide content to their subscribers.

One great thing about using Feedburner for your site feeds is that Feedburner keeps track of how many people subscribe to your site feed. It’s nice to know if you have one person subscribing to your feed or fifty.

There are far too many Feedburner features to discuss in just one post, but one recent change at Feedburner is well worth mentioning. When you create a feed for one of your sites at Feedburner you can add some extra code to your site that allows Feedburner to track your site traffic for you. In other words Feedburner not only helps you manage your site feeds but it also provides valid site statistics. I think this was a great addition to the many valuable features of Feedburner and I use it for all of my sites.

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