Volume 1 Issue 16 7-28-06

For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I16_072806.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/.

Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it.

Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Author’s Comments
2. Inexpensive Website Hosts
3. Sam’s Club is in the Web Hosting Business
4. Google and Yahoo Site Maps

Author's Comments

One busy weekend after another! We had a great time with our English friends. Their seven years old twins reminded us of many years ago when our boys were that age. We were younger then and I guess the energy that our sons had then did not make as much of an impression then as the twins did now.

This weekend is a very special one as Linda and I celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. On July 30, 1966, I made the best move of my life when I married Linda Jeanette Anderson. I assume she feels the same way about me. Our three children, our grand daughter, and Linda’s mother are coming to celebrate with us. They say they have a surprise for us so we will see what it is. More on that next week.

Inexpensive Website Hosts

I used Google to randomly research five lists of the top inexpensive web hosting sites on the Net. I developed a table of the results showing the ranking position for each survey and then compiled the results. The results are shown as how many times the site appeared out of the five lists (Count), the highest rank in the five lists, lowest rank in the five lists, and monthly price.

Host Name - Count - High - Low - Monthly $
StartLogic - 5 - 1 - 6 - $4.95
LunarPages - 5 - 2 - 9 - 6.95
Dot 5 Hosting -3 - 3 - 4 - 3.95
BlueHost - 3 - 1 - 3 - 6.95

It appears that StartLogic is a favorite of the web hosting lists with LunarPages close behind. I had not heard of Dot 5 Hosting before, so that was a new one for me. BlueHost is a popular hosting site.

I do not profess to be really current on this subject since I have used two web hosts for a long time. Only HostExcellence.com which is one of my hosts appeared on one of the lists, but it did not make the top group in my summary.

I must caution you on using what is advertised as an “inexpensive web host”. These prices are driven by competition to get you hooked so you will buy more services from the site. These are the old “lost leaders” in the website business.

These sites are really VERY EXPENSIVE. You will spend time and money developing a great looking site on these hosts. You will work hard and after about a year, you will quit because you do not get the traffic you needed to be successful. The “build it and they will come” adage does not work on the Net.

I know that this sounds like a commercial, but Site Build It (SBI), while seeming very expensive is a good value for the money when you truly understand all of the benefits that you get for the annual fee. I hate to see people waste a year of their Net careers trying to “poor boy” their Internet businesses and fail.

I encourage you to follow this link to go Site Build It for a detailed comparison of SBI and the other leading web hosts. Click here now to compare. http://compare.sitesell.com/boomer.html

The reason that I can write with such conviction is that I wasted a lot of valuable time building websites and trying to use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to get traffic with very low success. I decided to experiment with Site Build It so I could report on it in this eZine, and I discovered how powerful it is. I am not yet finished building my http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/ (RJO) site and already my traffic has increased significantly. I started the site on May 30 and in May, I had 3 visits by 3 unique visitors who looked at 3 individual pages. During the month of July (as of July 28), I had 372 visits by 182 unique visitors who looked at 934 individual pages. I expect the traffic to continue to increase as I add more pages and learn how to better use SBI.

The RJO site already has four keywords in the top 10 ranking with MSN, three with Yahoo, and two with Google. I am starting to see traffic come to the site from the search engines. (Site Build It reports this for you). This is free traffic that is looking for a solution to a problem. It is open to what the site offers since the searcher found it himself/herself.

To really understand Site Build It, go to this link http://buildit.sitesell.com/boomer.html and spend the time reading all the details about SBI. Get ready to do a LOT of reading, but it will be the best time that you spend on the Net. At the end, you will be offered the opportunity to test drive Site Build It. SBI offers a free test drive and a money back guarantee if you find that it is really not what you expect.

If you have any questions about SBI, send me an email, and I will answer you. If I do not know the answer, I will get it for you.

I hope you can see that I am excited over what I know SBI will do for Linda and me in our retirement. I know it can help you too.

Sam’s Club is in the Web Hosting Business

I thought I had seen it all, but I was wrong. Sam’s Club is now in the web hosting business. If you are a business member of Sam’s Club, you can get a five page website for no charge. It is a template driven site since it says that you can bring it up and be live in less than five minutes.

There are two higher levels of service. One is for $10 per month or $5 per month if you are a Sam’s Club Plus member. The next level is $15 per month or $10 per month if you are a Sam’s Club Plus member.

For more information the link is http://samsbiz.com/pages/google.

Again, remember this is an “inexpensive web site host”!

Google and Yahoo Site Maps

Let’s discuss a site map (sometimes called a site index). To start, let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about it.

“A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors, and search engine bots, to find pages on the site.

Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.Site maps do have limitations. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, additional strategies besides the site map may be required that search engines, and visitors, can access all content on the site.

While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one in the same.”

The important topic that I want to address is the one about search enginge bots (robots or spiders) that crawl your website. It is very important to make it as easy as possible for the spider to search your site. The easier it is for the spider, the more likely you will improve your ranking with the search engine.

Both Google and Yahoo have sitemap features associated with them. The requirements of each are a little different so if you maintain your site maps yourself, you will need to know about the differences. When you add a page to your site, you will need to update your site map and notify Google and Yahoo of the change so it can schedule a spider to come check your site for the new information.

You can also go to Google and log on to add your site map to their database. Once it is added, you can log in and see when your site was last checked by the spider and if the spider encountered any problems in crawling your site. This is just another of the many functions that you need to perform in order to have a first class website.

Guess what! Site Build It does this automatically each time that you add a page or modify a page to your SBI website. To get the process started. you do have to manually add the site to both Google and Yahoo, but SBI leads you through the procedure. SBI will handle the following updates or addition of with Google and Yahoo.

To read the Google explanation about site maps follow this link. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html.

To log onto Yahoo and submit your site to the index, go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request.

There are some packages for developing and maintaining site maps. You can use Google or Yahoo to find some of these. I have not researched any of these so I will not make any recommendations.

Don’t forget to maintain your site map on your site and notify Google and Yahoo when you make changes or additions to your site.

That wraps up our issue for this week. We need to spend time visiting with our family and getting ready for the surprise that they have in store for us. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/
http://www.boomer-entrepreneur.com/
http://www.boomer-marketplace.com/
http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/
http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE

Administrative Details …………….
If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want to remain in contact with you!

It is OK to go ahead and join our subscriber list with more than one email address. You never know when an email will be blocked by those tough SPAM filters. They are getting tighter and tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails.

If a friend sent you this newsletter and you would like to receive your own issue next time, send a blank email to boomerezine001@aweber.com and we will send you your own copy on the next issue.

Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.

Volume 1, Issue 15 7-21-06

For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I15_072106.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/.

Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Author’s Comments
2. Tip – Finding a Competitor’s Keywords
3. Making money with your publications

Author's Comments

We are not publishing a long ezine this week since Linda and I are playing hosts to some friends from England. Robyn and Nigel Wright and their seven year old twins (Conner and Adam) are visiting us. Robyn was responsible for introducing us to her parents who have let us house sit their 400 year old mill house in England three different times. This is the greatest situation that we could ask for. The house is 45 minutes north of London by train and is about two miles from the M1 which is the main north/south road in the UK. An “M” road is the equivalent to interstate highways in the US. We have used this as home base for trips all over England, Scotland, and Wales.

This weekend, we are dedicating ourselves to being great hosts to our friends since we can never repay them for all their great English hospitality.

Tip - Finding a Competitor’s Keywords

Are you aware that from your browser, you can view the HTML code that is creating the page that you are viewing? If you use Internet Explorer, position your cursor on the page where it is not over a graphic or other object. Right click the mouse and select “View Source” on the drop down menu. Notepad will open a window showing the HTML code. To see the keywords for the page, look near the top for <meta name="keywords" content="key words go here”>. The key words will be where I have typed “key words go here”. This is a good way to see the keywords that your competition is using. You can also pick up some HTML education since you can compare the presented page with the underlying HTML code.

Making money with Your Publications

In Volume 1, Issue 12 of Boomer eZine (http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I12_063006.htm), we discussed publishing an ezine. Let’s now cover how to make money from the ezine.

Adsense Advertising

One of the easiest ways to make money is to place Google AdSense advertising on your publication. You cannot put Adsense ads in a text newsletter, but you can put them in the archived pages on your eZine website or blog. If you are blogging, you can place them in the blog pages.

Let’s discuss Adsense a little more. It is a program from Google and is a very important part of Internet advertising. I feel that it is important that you know some basic information about it.

I was looking for a good definition of Adsense and the best that I found is from Wikipedia.org.

AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on a per-click basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors.

The way AdSense works is you sign up as an affiliate of the Adsense program. Adsense provides you with a snippet of HTML code that you insert in your web page where you want the Adsense ads to appear. Google reads the content of the page where the code is placed and it automatically places ads on the page that match the page’s theme or content.

When a reader clicks on an AdSense ad on your page and makes a purchase, you receive a commission on the sale. All you have to do is allow the AdSense program on your pages and Google does the rest. It is an ingenious system and is one that has revolutionized advertising on the Internet.

If you are reading this on the Boomer eZine website, you will see Adsense ads at the bottom of the page. I know that you have seen them on many Web pages, but you may not have known what they were.

It is very easy to join Adsense. If you are interested in learning more or if you want to join, click the link below.

https://www.google.com/adsense

Make Recommendations

You can make recommendations to your readers to buy items from which you make a commission or referral fee. On the Internet, this is called an affiliate relationship.

We discussed affiliates in Boomer eZine V1 I11 so I am not going to plow that ground again here. Go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I11_062306.htm for that information.

Selling Advertising

It will probably not happen on your first issue, but as you build your circulation or the popularity of your website, people and businesses will pay you to place their ads in your publication.

Move Traffic to Your Other Web Sites

Some people use their publications to move traffic to other of their websites. You will notice on Boomer eZine our associated websites are links at the bottom of the page. This attracts people to click on them and check them out. We also make reference to the other sites occasionally when we have something of interest on them.

If you have items for sale on the other sites, this is indirect selling using your publication.

That wraps up our issue for this week. Thanks for being a subscriber to our newsletter. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/
http://www.boomer-entrepreneur.com/
http://www.boomer-marketplace.com/
http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/
http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE

Administrative Details …………….
If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want to remain in contact with you!

It is OK to go ahead and join our subscriber list with more than one email address. You never know when an email will be blocked by those tough SPAM filters. They are getting tighter and tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails.

If a friend sent you this newsletter and you would like to receive your own issue next time, send a blank email to boomerezine001@aweber.com and we will send you your own copy on the next issue.

Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.

Volume 1 Issue 14 7-14-06

For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I14_071406.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/.

Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Author’s Comments
2. Yahoo Widgets
3. Building a Website

Author's Comments

This week has been a tough one. On my day job, I am the chief operating officer of a technology company that makes a high tech shipping container for shipping temperature sensitive products. We manufactured and shipped the first five units of a new model container on Thursday, and it was an intense week getting all the bugs worked out of the manufacturing process. We have a great crew at our plant and it all worked out well. These units will be used to ship vaccine for children’s vaccination programs around the Pacific Rim.

Another highlight of the week was a shipment of two units of a larger model of our containers to NASA. These will be used in August to transport material from Huntsville, Alabama to the Cape. This material will be loaded on Shuttle Atlantis for repairing the minute cracks on the leading edges of the wings of the shuttle. As you can see, I have an interesting day job.

Yahoo Widgets

Last week when I was researching RSS for Boomer eZine V1 I13, I checked many RSS readers and finally settled on a very clean, simple one that I am now using. In the process, I learned about a really neat thing and that is Yahoo Widgets.

Let’s go the Wikipedia for a definition:

Yahoo! Widgets is a free JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, previously called Konfabulator, but subsequently bought by computer services company Yahoo!. The runtime engine runs small applications referred to as Widgets, and hence is part of a class of software applications called widget engines. It combines its JavaScript engine with an XML document structure that can be used to author custom Widgets.
Note the uppercase "W" in Widget; this is the proper use of capitalization when referring to the actual applets that Yahoo! Widget Engine runs. The aforementioned use of capitalization is unique to this particular widget engine.

To use Widgets, you go to http://widgets.yahoo.com/ and download the Widget engine. This gives you the platform on your PC to run any of the many Widgets that are available. Yahoo says that there are thousands of Widgets. I am using three now. One for local weather on my desktop, MultiNewsReader to read my RSS feeds, and an analog clock on my desktop.

Some of these are helpful and some are just fun. Check it out and see if there is a Widget for you.

Building a website

This is a tough subject to tackle since there are so many reasons for setting up a site and so many options for building one. I will not attempt to guess your reasons for wanting to build a website, but let’s explore the options for building one.

If you want to have presence on the Net and you want to build it quickly and cheaply, use http://www.blogger.com/ and set up a blog. This will give you a unique URL that is yours to use. It does not cost anything and you can set it up in just a few minutes. It does not have the status that a domain name with dot com after it, but you need to evaluate your needs. This might be a way to feel your way into business on the Net. As an example, we post the Boomer eZine in a blog on Blogger at our own URL http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/.

If you want your own website, you will need to get your domain name in the form of domain name.???. The last letters will be .com, .org, .net. .biz, etc. You can get a domain name from a multitude of registrars as cheaply as $1.95 per year, but there is usually a “hook” with that low a price. The norm is about $6.95 for a year. Go to Google and search for “domain name” and stand back for the flood of advertising that will overwhelm you.

You can find many website hosts on the Net that will host your website for next to nothing each month. As an example, we use one host that will host unlimited domains for $2.95 per month. We are really just “parking” the domain names there until we have time to build them out. Go to http://www.boomer-success.com/ and see the web page that lists them. As we decide to build them, we move the hosting to a larger, more capable web host.

If you just need a few pages on your site and you are not concerned about getting search engine traffic to your site, you can find numerous sites that will host your domain for a few dollars per month.

However, if you are building a site that you want to create income for you in the future, I recommend that you consider using Site Build It (SBI).

In Boomer eZine V1 I6 I wrote about starting our SBI site. That was June 6. I wrote follow up articles in several issues following that date. Here it is almost two months later and there are 18 pages built in http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/. We already have three number one positions for keywords on the MSN search engine. We are getting hits from Yahoo and Google, but our page ranking is not as high with them as the MSN engine yet. These will take more time. All the feedback on how our keywords are doing and our position with the various SE’s (I will abbreviate search engine as SE in the remainder of this article) is on reports that we get as a part of the SBI management tools.

My Personal Experiences with Web Sites

Let me give you a little of my own experience with building websites so you will better understand my appreciation of SBI.

I built my first website in 2000. I registered the domain http://www.jhowe.com/ and used Microsoft Front Page to build a very basic website to give me a presence on the Internet and to give me a dot com name to use for my personal email.

Since the, I have built several other websites using Front Page for the HTML editor. I will be the first to admit that I do not program in HTML, but use Front Page which is called a WYSIWYG editor. This stands for “what you see is what you get”. With this type of editor, you develop the page that you want to see and the editor converts it into the HTML to make it appear as you have created it

I built these sites and used the premise “build it and they will come” and guess what, they didn’t!

In a bricks and mortar business, the physical location of the business is the all important factor for success. On the Internet, location is also important, but the “location” is your page’s ranking with the SE’s such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Off line, you find a location where the customers go by your store and see it and stop in. On the Net, your customer finds you when he/she is searching for information. The SE’s are how the searching is done, and if you are in the top 10 sites presented by the SE, you may have the customer come to your site. If you are not on the first page of the search results, you are invisible.

Site Build It has so many services bundled with it, that it I cannot list them all for you in this issue, but the most important in my judgment is its handling of the SE’s for you.

It helps you build each page and analyzes it for content organization so that the page will be best presented to the SE spider (SE program that checks your page for content to rank it in the SE). SBI then handles the submission of the page to Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It keeps track of when the spider visited your page, what the ranking is, etc. It provides you with a traffic report that tells you the number of visitors you had and evaluates the traffic for each page. It tells you on which page a visitor entered your site and the exit page from which the visitor left. These are the statistics that you need to improve your site and make decisions about how to improve it.

Sir Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.” In the case of working on the Net, that is true. SBI give you the support and knowledge to evaluate your site and improve it based on the information that it provides.

I hope you can see from my excitement over the capability of SBI that I plan to build all of our future commercial sites using SBI. It automatically handles so many of the small details for me that I would otherwise have to remember to do for myself if I were building the site in the conventional manner.

On the surface, SBI appears to be relatively expensive, but do not let the initial impression fool you. You need to really study what you get with SBI that are extra costs or are not supplied by the “cheaper” web hosts. Linda and I are both of Scots heritage and that naturally makes us frugal. We would not be planning to use SBI for our future web sites if we did not think that we were getting full value for our money.

I strongly suggest that if you are planning to build a major commercial website for your business that you research SBI in depth. For more information about SBI, go to http://buildit.sitesell.com/boomer.html


That wraps up our issue for this week. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/
http://www.boomer-entrepreneur.com/
http://www.boomer-marketplace.com/
http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/
http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE

Administrative Details …………….

If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want to remain in contact with you!
It is OK to go ahead and join our subscriber list with more than one email address. You never know when an email will be blocked by those tough SPAM filters. They are getting tighter and tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails.

If a friend sent you this newsletter and you would like to receive your own issue next time, send a blank email to boomerezine001@aweber.com and we will send you your own copy on the next issue.

Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.

Volume 1 Issue 13 7-8-06

For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I13_070706.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com/.

Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Author’s Comments
2. eBay Store and About Me Page
3. Real Simple Syndication - RSS
4. Site Build It

Author's Comments

Wow! Where did the week go? The July 4th holiday scrambled my week. I hope that you had a great holiday. We have so much for which to be thankful in our great country and yet, so many people “bad mouth” it. Last Saturday, Linda and I were listening to “Prairie Home Companion” which is a radio show on PBS. (We are long time fans of Garrison Keillor and the PHC). Garrison talked about how great the USA was and how so many citizens do not appreciate how good we have it. His convincing statement on the subject was that if the USA is not a great place, why were so many illegal immigrants trying so desperately to get in? I could not think of a more convincing argument. God Bless the USA!

eBay Store and About Me Page

My friend and mentor, Jim Cockrum, developed the concept of using eBay for more than an auction site. He uses eBay to generate traffic to his auctions and then directs the traffic to his ‘About Me” page where he signs them up for his “Creative eBay Selling Newsletter”. His auction is really “bait” for his back end selling.

We all know that attracting traffic is the largest challenge of doing business on the Net. Very simple --- no traffic, no shoppers, no revenue, frustration and failure.

I have been working on setting up an eBay store and an “About Me” page. The store frame work is set up, but I have not posted any items for sale yet so the “shelves” are empty. Go take a look for yourself at http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE. The main focus of this store will be to attract shoppers to our “About Me” page. The initial items that will be on the shelves will be books that appeal to the Boomer Generation.

You can view our “About Me” page at http://members.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=e--boomer. It has audio so turn on your speakers (or turn them off as wish :-). Its main purpose is to entice the reader to subscribe to this newsletter.

As a quick FYI on eBay, when you are looking at an auction page or eBay store, look next to the seller’s name for a red and blue “ME”. Click it and you will see the seller’s “About Me” page. Also, look for an icon that looks like a doorway. That indicates that the seller maintains an eBay store. Click it and you will be taken to the store.

For more details on how to fully utilize eBay, I recommend that you go to Jim Cockrum’s site on ClickBank and sign up for his free “Creative eBay Selling Newsletter”. Follow this link to get there http://jvwh1.silentsale.hop.clickbank.net/. His weekly newsletter has a reader list over 100,000 and is considered among the most successful newsletters on the Net.

Really Simple Syndication - RSS

This is the newest, hottest technology on the Net. Whoa! Did I detect that you pulled back from just hearing the word technology? Don’t be concerned about the “how does it work”, but let’s concentrate on what it can do for you.

Let’s discuss Really Simple Syndication. What is syndication? In the off line world, I always thought of the comic strips or a particular feature writer in the newspaper such as Ann Landers. The comic or article was developed and for a fee was syndicated to any newspaper that wanted to carry it. It would appear simultaneously in many newspapers across the country.

On the Net, most of the syndication that I know of does not cost anything. Most sites or companies that supply “feed” for syndication do so for free because they are looking for the exposure from the information and advertising that is carried in the feed.

When you go to the home page on Yahoo, Google, or MSN, you will see news, weather, sports, etc. displayed on the page. This information is coming from a feed from another websites and will automatically update on the home page without the owner of that page having to do anything.

What do you need to read RSS? Simple answer …… You need an RSS reader. The easiest way to get one is to subscribe to “My Yahoo”. Sign in on your “My Yahoo” page and it contains an RSS reader for you to use. Go to http://www.yahoo.com/ and click on the “My Yahoo” box in the top left of the window to sign on or to register.

When get your “My Yahoo” account set up and log in under your user name, look in the top left of the window and click “Add Content”. You will be presented a form to fill in for feeds by subject. Don’t bother with this search box. To the right of the search box in small letters is “Add RSS by URL”. Click that link and you will be presented another search page where you can set up the feed from a particular website. I have set up an RSS feed from Retirement Jobs Online.com for you to use.

DO NOT CLICK THE FOLLOWING URL. Highlight it and right click on it. Select copy and then paste it into the search box on Yahoo. Then click the “Add” box to the right of the search box. You now have added an RSS feed to your “My Yahoo” page.

http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/retirement-jobs-online.xml

OK you say. What is all the big fuss about RSS? Just stop and think about what this can do for you as a surfer on the Net. If you have particular sites that you check regularly for information, you have to spend time looking through the sites to see if new info has been posted.

If you set up an RSS feed from that site to your “My Yahoo” or any other RSS reader that you choose (and there are hundreds of them) you do not waste time having to look for changes, you are notified when a change takes place by the RSS feed and you can click right to it. As we say in Texas, “That is slicker than cow slobber”. I challenge you to find anything that is slicker than the slobber of a cow.

RSS is used extensively by bloggers to monitor blogs for new posts.

Now, on the flip side, if you have a website or a blog and you publish information like Linda and I do in this newsletter, establishing a RSS feed will put your publication on the feeds on the Net so it can be picked up by additional people and these contacts will possibly become subscribers. This is a way to build additional traffic and it is free. Anyone who has a website or a blog or publishes a newsletter should establish an RSS feed.

I will talk about how to establish a feed using Site Build it in the next article. Building a feed outside of Site Build It will have to be for another issue.

Site Build It #6

I have stated several times in previous articles that I continued to be amazed with Site Build It (“SBI”). Well, this last week clinched it.

While I was researching the installation of an RSS feed on the Retirement Jobs Online.com website, I found that all I had to do was to click an option button and select a few options and SBI would take care of all of it for me. That is just too easy.

By setting up the RSS feed, SBI will automatically publish an item to the feed every time I add a new page to the site. Also, if I modify a page, there is a check box that I can check if I want the changed page put in the feed. If I am just correcting some spelling or making a minor change, I would not bother the RSS world with that change.

There are options in the set up page to specify if you want buttons on your site that your reader can click to set up your feed on their Yahoo, Google, or MSN home pages. I elected to put those on the Retirement Jobs Online pages. Also, there is an orange colored button that says XML RSS on it. This indicates that this site has an RSS feed that you can tap into. You do not left click this button, but if you right click it and select “Copy shortcut”, this will put the URL for the location of the feed on Retirement Jobs Online.com on your clipboard. You can then easily paste it into any reader to set up the link to the feed. This appears to be a common practice in many sites since I see that orange icon appearing all over the Net.

Another feature of this RSS option on SBI is that by one simple click, you can set up a site blog. I did this and lo and behold, an instant blog was created with items for the pages that were added or updated recently. I added an entry to this blog on July 7 when I launched it. Go to the home page of http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/ (RJO) and look on the left top of the window. You will see the buttons that I have described for Yahoo, Google, and MSN with the XML RSS button is at the top.

Click on the navigation bar entry “Site Blog – RJO.com” and go to the blog page. What you see on this page is what is shown to the RSS world. SBI automatically puts entries on this page for the activity that goes on in the RJO site. I can add a personal blog entry when I feel that it is warranted.

In fact, I am going to make an entry when I publish this issue of Boomer eZine (If I can ever get it finished. I have so much to say about SBI that I could go on much too long).

Let’s wrap this up. To fully utilize the RSS feeds to Yahoo, Google, and MSN (the major search engines) you set up accounts on all of them and then set up feeds from the site to your home pages on each site. This causes the search engines to index your feed and they will send a robot or spider to analyze your site. This will help raise your ranking with the search engines.

The more feeds to your site that are requested on Yahoo, Google, or MSN, the more interest the search engines pay to your site. I request that you, my readers, set up retirement-jobs-online.com on your RSS feeds in all of your home pages with the three majors. This will automatically notify you of changes to the site which helps you, and it will help promote the RJO site. Thanks in advance for your help.

Conclusion

I strongly recommend that you read about RSS and follow the instructions in this newsletter to set it up on your home pages with Yahoo, Google, and MSN. This is the direction in which the Internet is going and you can easily be an early adapter. It will make your life much easier in staying informed on what is new content on the Net.

That wraps it up. I could go on about the RSS business, but I need to leave some material for another issue.

Till next time, Stay tuned (to RSS that is).

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Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.