Steve Mills – Online Marketing

A lot of people are unaware that you can actively market not just your blog or website, but also your the RSS feed of your website. Your RSS feed a way for your content to leave the confines of your own domains, and spread throughout the web, pointing backlinks to your domains and spreading affiliate links.

Although you have no control over where this content will be shown across the internet, there are good SEO benefits to be had for allowing your content to be syndicated. Back links from a wide variety of sites, who have content that is in the same subject area as yours are worth pursuing. Even if the page rank of the linking sites is lower than yours, as long as the links are one way then they will not harm your organic SEO.

If you embed your content with affiliate links, or sales material for your products that you could end up with these being syndicated across a number of related sites.

By using online feed aggregation services, other switched on users of these same services will see your feeds, and mix them in with their own aggregated content.

Its all about thinking of your online marketing activities as a publishing network, a hub in which your blog and a few choice social media profiles are at the centre. Those that have the furthest reach have the highest chance of getting their message heard above the noise, and actually getting to prospects before the competition does. Any way that you can write once, and have your content appear in multiple areas (at least a snippet of it) is an advantage.

I will write more about these services as I utilise them on this site, but here are some of the best.

Icerocket

FeedRaider

Technorati

Rss2

I have been working on a customisation for the WordPress Thesis theme by DiyThemes for a client of mine over the last few weeks.

Although Thesis offers a great deal of power in its backend, and is very well setup for SEO, it does behave very differently from your standard wordpress blog template. It uses hooks, which are chunks of code that with a single command you can insert before or after another element of code.  Once you understand the power of hooks and what they can do, it makes performing drastic alteration to the look and feel of the site easy to do on a large scale level. That is, it’s easy to move sidebars, change fonts for headers and text etc,

This reliance on hooks however makes some of the simpler customisations, like changing the look of the menu, or making custom page templates a little bit harder. To do this, you need to edit the file called custom_functions.php, and add a function that is called by a hook at a certain time when the page loads.

For instance, the script below

function custom_archives_template() {
?>
<?php query_posts(‘showposts=10′); // exclude the third category ?>
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?><?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php
} ?>
<?php

remove_action(‘thesis_hook_archives_template’, ‘thesis_archives_template’);
add_action(‘thesis_hook_archives_template’, ‘custom_archives_template’); ?>

The function contains all of the PHP, and it is then called by the hooks functions remove_action
(which gets rid of the old page elements) and add_action (which calls your new piece of code)

The problem that I was facing today is that I was leaving whitespace at the end of the custom_functions.php and getting a “Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/web49060/public_html/wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/custom_functions.php:87) in /home/web49060/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 850″  error message.

A hard one to problem solve if you haven’t encountered it before.

The Thesis theme can be found at http://diythemes.com/thesis/

Just a quick post today to make sure that everyone knows that I am still around and kicking. I have had a busy last month, consolidating a couple of exciting new opportunities that have presented themselves, and getting my teeth into some challenging new internet marketing campaigns.

I just wanted to put the idea out there today to all of the bloggers out there that are wondering how to make money online with their blogs. The short answer is that you have a very small chance of making a decent income with just your blog alone. A blog that just has posts, a few adsense ads and some affiliate programs (like this one is at the moment) may turn some dollars, but not enough to get the bank manager excited every time you walk in.

You should not be considering yourself just a blogger, but taking the next step, treating this area seriously and start thinking about starting an online BUSINESS. Sure, a blog may be an integral part to it, but at the end of the day you need to know how to attract peoples attention and move some kind of product. The internet is full of bad information about “How To Make Money Online”, in fact there seems to be more of this around today then ever before. But in-between all of this there are some sound strategies of people that have gone before and made Sustainable Online Enterprises.

Like the byline of this site says, I am all about helping people become Sustainable Personal (as in personally branded) Online Connected Entrepreneurs. Its a simple phrase, a small acronym that can be easily remembered and applied to everything you do online. It is a system that outlines how to gain traffic, and then monetize that traffic so that your audience becomes your customers, and yes, even your fans in the year to come.

By utilizing the wide variety of ways to promote your business, develop content and target customers the SPOKE system deals with social media, google adwords, SEO strategy, blog optimization, marketing and advertising theory, personal branding and sound business knowledge to provide a comprehensive system to at the very least give a good online business idea a head start.