WordPress, the famous and FREE blogging platform is poised to make a major jump with the release of its version 2.0. There are several new and ground-breaking features.

Download and test WordPress 2.0 here.

Site Build It guys understand the importance of RSS feeds as an inexpensive medium to promote one’s site as well as to disseminate the information through a barrier-proof medium (RSS is pull technology as compared to email which is push technology and prone to several levels of filtering).

They have been offering a comprehensive guide on using RSS to your advantage for quite some time. They have taken it one step further. Now every site built with Site Build It will have an RSS feed published automatically – no extra cost, no extra effort.

Dr. Ken Evoy mentioned – “I believe that business owners should be able to leverage the power of Internet to further their businesses without having to dabble with technology. Our auto RSS feed is another step with the same philosophy in mind”.

Sidenote: SBI started as a simple system which took care of domain names, web hosting and interactive web design through a simple interface. However it now offers extensive web promotion and web site maintenance facilities. Their brainstorming module has to be seen to be believed.

The funny part is that the cost has not increased at all while the facilities available have grown to more than 10 times the original offering. What a business model! Well, who am I to complain as long as my clients are getting the whole shebang for the cost of hosting alone!

Google has now introduced its own RSS Feeds reader. This web based reader follows all the things that Google stands for – elegant simplicity.

You can enter the desired feed URI directly or search for the feeds based on topics. Google Reader can accept RSS feed as well as Atom feed.

The entire process is very simple –
Search for the desired feed by typing in some keywords or enter the feed URI directly. You can even enter the URI of the HTML page that references the feed through a link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” meta-tag. Then choose Click to preview in Google Reader and then click on Subscribe.

You can maintain all your favorite feeds in a list and read them from a single place.

Start here – Google Feed Reader

We discussed Blog & Ping Technique to attract the search engine spiders to our site and get all the pages indexed quickly. Your site may get all the pages in the Yahoo, MSN & Google directory within a week, sometimes even earlier.

I had talked about the Blogging Equalizer software which retails for about $150. Today I discovered another blog and ping software that does virtually the same thing for under $50.

Go have a look and decide for yourself if your needs can be fulfilled by this one (and save you a cool $100 in the process).

Do you wait for ages before your new websites get picked up by the search engines? Do you spend hours submitting your websites by hand just to be entered in a queue of sites to be spidered and indexed sometime?

Stop. And listen.

There is a much faster and efficient method of announcing your new website to the search engines, called Blog & Ping Technique.

All you do is make a blog post about your website referring to all the new pages and then ping some sites thereby informing these about your new creation.

And now there is an even faster and more convenient way to exploit the blog and ping technique. The new Blogging Equalizer software claims to make this process easier and faster for you. Check out how “blog and ping” can get your website indexed much quicker and drive free search engine traffic your way.

Trust Allen Says to come up with a unique twist on a common idea. This will get him huge link popularity and make money for the linkers.

Here is what he did–

Allen Says of the Warrior Fame, created a blog at www.InstantGuruBlog.com. OK, what’s the big deal? Almost everyone and his mum are creating a blog nowadays.

Here’s the twist. When a prospect visits this blog through your link, almost all the links in the blog turn to your affiliate links. So if the prospect gets interested in a particular product that Allen has reviewed and buys that during the same visit or sometime later, you get an affiliate commission. Now that’s cool, no?

How can you get a piece of that action? It’s easy! You can visit Allen’s www.MyBlogNetwork.com and sign-up to get your own referral URL. Just link to this from your website or blog and you are done. Now sit back and watch your affiliate income grow from a trickle to a steady flow.

I also noticed that he is using the same blogging software, WordPress, that I use. Good decision. WordPress is highly customizable and you can really create cool blogs with this. If you do not want to spend much time setting up your blog and customizing it, but just want to start blogging, you can Rent A Blogger to setup your blog. Quick and cheap!

Go ahead! Signup before it’s too late!

Even before RSS feeds for text content has become common and a majority of web site owners have implemented it, a new wave is coming. Look for Podcasting – RSS feeds for audio and video content.

Podcasting is derived from iPod and webcasting. It essentially consists of an RSS feed (version 2) that lets you know when new audio/video content is available. It can be used for posting content related to Internet radio, interviews, training material and any similar stuff that is not standard text files like HTML, PDF etc. It makes use of the ‘enclosure’ tag in the items to indicate the URL, type (audio, video etc) and size of the content.

As you can possibly guess by looking at the term ‘iPod’, you can listen to the audio file even when you are offline (not connected to Internet), on an iPod or through the standard media player of your computer system.

There are several tools to access podcasts but the most popular combination is iPodder and iTunes.

I should be preparing a step-by-step guide to installing the feed reading setup and then I will cover how you can create your own podcasts. So stay tuned…

A reader of my RSS feed guide, Roseanne van Langenberg of www.marketingdefined.com/blog.html was wondering how to add her blog to her My Yahoo! account because Yahoo won’t accept a HTML page.

Here’s how –

Blogger blogs like this generate an Atom feed instead of an RSS feed. However Yahoo is smart enough to be able to interprete that this is an Atom feed and update its directory accordingly. The typical URL for the Atom feed will be www.domain.com/atom.xml .

You can find out the exact URL for your feed from the control panel of your blog. Click on the Settings tab and then Site Feed tab within the sub-menu. You can see the exact URL of your feed there. You selected ‘Yes’ in the “publish site feed’ option. No?

RSS feeds let you take a dynamic look at the web. You can learn about updates to web sites and information as they are take place. In almost real-time. I predict that RSS is going to be the most happening thing in 2005. Have you joined the revolution yet?

As you have already seen, I have prepared a FREE guide for those hesitating to take the plunge. My FREE guide to your own RSS Feeds takes an uninitiated webmaster or site owner by hand and helps him to publish his first RSS feed. If you don’t have an RSS feed yet, I strongly recommend you download this 16-page, quick-read guide and go, do it. It is easier than you expected!

Keep coming back. I will be reporting about the discoveries I make in my exploration of this vast RSS field. You can learn about creating better feeds and more importantly, about putting these feeds to use – in making your site popular and making money.

Best wishes for a great 2005!

By The Way, feel free to post your comment and talk back to me but keep your post on related topics of RSS and blogs. Remember that the comments are moderated, so don’t post again if you don’t see your comment appear immediately.