Are you a busy business owner stretched for time, but yearning to come up with new profit producing innovations? A business blogger dealing with information overload? A sales professional or marketer looking to stay several steps ahead of the competition?

If you fall into any of these categories, you know how important it is to make every minute of your day as productive as possible. Yet at the same time — you also know that one of most important responsibilities you have is staying on top of your niche, industry, and competitors.

So there you are, left in a quandary. Two critical business needs that up till now have been diametrically opposed. But now with the power of RSS, you can quickly and painlessly put an end to that struggle. And that’s critical, because let’s face it … the overwhelm of information usually leads to procrastination or plain old neglect.

With a pair of easy to use tools, you can harness the power of RSS and put it to work for you and your business. You can do your research, create new online and off-line contacts, keep ahead of competitors, and spawn a host of innovative profit producing ideas in a fraction of the time it would have taken you just two years ago.

In fact, you can cover more material and come up with more profit producing ideas in 30-minutes using these two tools than you could with five hours of online and off-line work.

So what are these two tools that harness RSS to save you time and help make you more money?

Well the first is FeedDemon, the most efficient RSS aggregator on the market. The second is ThunderBird.

Rather than blather on in a few posts, we’re going to cover the benefits and applications of these tools in a short video series. So let’s get started today with a brief introduction to FeedDemon and the FeedDemon video specifically for business owners, sales professionals, and marketers.

FeedDemon - the busy business owner’s research and innovation mega-tool

There are plenty of free RSS readers and aggregator out there, but they are big time wasters compared with FeedDemon. Not to mention that (comparatively) they’re ugly as sin too.:)

As you’re about to see, FeedDemon 2.0 has a look and feel similar to Microsoft Outlook 2003. But it has a much prettier management area that’s user-centric and custom tailored to managing RSS feeds. None of the free RSS aggregator alternatives offer the same level of organization, customization, or filtering capabilities as FeedDemon. And that means more time, nore results, and more advantage in your corner.

Click the images below and the video will open in Windows Media Player (WMP)
If you do not have WMP installed, you can download it here for free

Part 1 (11.2mb / run time 9:44)

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If you’re a business owner looking to market with blogs, podcasts, and RSS — then here’s another cool tool to help your efforts to get more exposure. It’s called a Swicki! A Swicki is a new and very different kind of search engine created by Eurekster. It allows you to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about.

It’s a great tool for business bloggers because unlike other search engines, a Swicki puts you and your community in total control over the results.
It’s an ingenious social tool too that uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results.

In doing some last minute research for our presentation at the Publishing4Profits Seminar this weekend I came across a terrific book publishing blog by Joe Wikert. After giving Joe’s Swicki a spin, I liked what I saw and followed his lead quickly creating our business blogging Swicki.

Three simple customization steps and about five minutes of adding the simple code to your site and you’re up and running. You can check out the Advanced Business Blogging Swicki over to the left under the “Search Tools” header (about half way down the page.)

Testing the Swicki Search Engine

If you’re like me you probably find a lot of good relevant material buried way down deep in the results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN. The first thing I noticed when I tested about a dozen different Swickis is that you can really segment your results and get real results that have the most relevance for people who are passionate about a topic.

From what Eurekster states on their FAQ page:

“Every click refines the Swicki’s search strings, creating a responsive, dynamic result that’s both customized and highly relevant.”

They’re not kidding! And Eurekster is willing to put it on the line and prove it. They provide (more…)

One of the biggest reasons blogging attracts the attention of business owners is because of it’s ability to boost search engine rankings and direct streams of highly targeted traffic. But it takes more than just setting up a blog and starting to post regularly to get results.You need to have a solid Business Blogging Strategy written out. And you definitely MUST have done your keyword research, have your Killer Keyword list, and be ready with the right strategies and tactics to apply on your business blogs.

With all that setting the stage for great results — there are WordPress plugins that help to optimize every SEO action you take. In fact, no other blogging software that you can use for your business gives you as much flexibility, control, and optimization as WordPress does!

And keep in mind that organic search engine results are just the first step in building a massive list and making more sales. You need to quickly an ethically grab the attention of people coming to your site through organic search results.

So here are four of the best WordPress plugins to help in this area.

WORDPRESS PLUGINS FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and TRAFFIC CONVERSION

Search Hilite

Here’s a simple plugin for grabbing a searchers attention. But don’t let it’s simplicity fool you. It helps fulfill a critical attention grabbing step that many business owners ignore when blogging.

Study after study has shown that when a person is searching for a product, service, or solution (whether it’s through organic search results or pay-per-click ads) — the more related a site seems to be when they land there, the more likely it is they’ll take action.

When you’re marketing with business blogs, your target audience will usually find your blog through organic search engine results. The faster you can make your site/blog appear more related to the search term they entered, the more likely it is they’ll stop and spend more time. That time is critical for you to put high priority marketing techniques to work building your list (like name capture, report downloads, etc.) (more…)

Blogging for business is all about capturing the attention of your target audience and building relationships after adding them to your multi-channel (email, phone, an off-line) list. But you’ll never have a chance even get that far if your business blog is clunky, hard to navigate, or a pain to print content from.

There are hundreds of WordPress plugins available to help improve your marketing and list building, but all are not created equal. To help you filter those down to a reasonable list and get you started, here are the best ones to help you make your blog more user friendly and make viral word of mouth marketing easy.

IMPROVING WORD OF MOUTH and VIRAL MARKETING ON YOUR BUSINESS BLOG

E-mail to Friend

Let’s say a first-time visitor, regular subscriber, or client likes an article, podcast, or video you have on your business blog. And let’s also say that as they’re reading, watching, or listening; they think of at least one person they think would benefit from that post. If that visitor now has to find the permalink, copy it, open their email program to paste it, and then finally send it to their friend — forget it! That will rarely (if ever) happen!

Enter the ‘Email to a friend‘ plugin for WordPress. This plugin eliminates all those hastles and makes it easy for someone to impulsively share your content with others. This is just one simple step that stacks together with other strategies to boost your word of mouth marketing.

Since installing this plugin on several of our blogs we’ve had a noticable increase in subscribers (to our update lists and/or download pages) — and we’ve been able to directly link that back those new subscribers to the Email to a friend option.

To download this WordPress plugin, go to http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php and look for ‘WP-Email‘ in the list

Print This Page

This plugin makes it easy for visitors to print a clean version of articles/posts from your blog. This is particularly helpful if you will be using special series or reports with offline calls to action for clients or prospects.

If you’re producing great content, and it’s in the form of longer articles or transcripts for podcasts — this plugin is a must. You’re shortchanging yourself an your target audience if you (more…)

Effectively stopping comment spam is right up there behind admin efficiency when it comes to effectively blogging for business. As spammers improve their ability to spam through comments, trackbacks, and pings, they will definitely be sucking up more of your time trying to stop them unless you take some serious steps.There are quite a few spam filtering plugins available for WordPress, but here we’re going to share the ones that have been tested and proven themsleves the most reliable and effective.

Each of these plugins has be tested for extended periods on multiple blogs, and they’ve all performed wonderfully. After the plugin list below, you’ll find a business blog coaching tip that will share how you can maximize spam filtering on WordPress with a simple little trick.

So here we go! (more…)

When you’re blogging for business, you need to be as efficient as possible if you’re going to drop the maximum profits possible to your bottom line. And when it comes to moderate/heavy marketing with business blogs, efficiency starts with the administrative management of your blog. If you can minimize the amount of time you or one of your team needs to spend administering your blog — you can focus more time and effort on marketing actions that yield more traffic, more sales, and more profits.

Minimizing your research time and maximizing your results is why we put this series of Business Blogging Plugin articles together. Being busy business owners ourselves, we want to save you time by sharing what we know works best and help you filter through the hundreds of plugins available to help streamline your blog admin when using WordPress.

So without further delay — here’s the first installment covering general blog administration and content protection. These are the plugins we’ve found (through our testing and the testing of our blog coaching clients) to be the most valuable especially, for small business owners.

EASING THE ADMINISTRATION OF YOUR BUISINESS BLOG

Event Calendar

This plugin is particularly helpful if you run special events for promoting your business (online or offline.) It’s also great if you’re using WordPress for a membership-type setup (paid of free.) It makes posting a practical, interactive event calendar in the navigation column of your blog a snap.Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Event Calendar.

Category Organizer

WordPress has lots of advantages with it’s extensive category capabilities. Advantages for both practical organization and search engine optimization. But sometimes when you have a lot of categories on your business blog, or when you’re using WordPress for more a membership type site for subscribers — you want more direct control over the way your categories show up.

‘Category Order 1.9.2′ allows you to set the explicit ordering, spacing, and indentation of categories in the category list that appears in the sidebar. All you need to do is use the handy “Category Order” management page to customize your navigation area and make things look exactly like you want.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Category Organizer plugin (Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for ‘Category Order 1.9.2′)

PodPress ****

If you’re going to be using your business blog to it’s full potential, you’ll want to be using multimedia (audio, video, PDFs, and regular blog posts.) And there is hands down no better way to make that multimedia posting easy than this great 4-star plugin called PodPress.

Dan Kuykendall over at MightySeek.com has done an (more…)

If you’re business blogging and are dealing with a significant amount of comment spam, here’s some great info for you — especially if you’re business blogging with WordPress.

We’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks putting the finishing touches on the home study version of the Marketing With Business Blogs. And that project, along with questions coming in from students of the multimedia coaching course, has had me doing a lot of research. One of the things I’ve been doing is scouring the net for WordPress plugins that’ll help business bloggers with their marketing and administrative efficiency.

A little over a month ago I decided to start testing various solutions to stopping comment span. I was pretty frustrated with this problem myself (although my assistant was the one who was doing the actual ‘house cleaning.’ :)) But when students of the blogging course started to pepper us with questions on how to stop this problem I realized how this administrative problem could really get in a way of busy business owners who want to market efficiently with business blogs. (Remember that comment spam is not only ugly… it also saps away valuable points in your search engine rankings.)

Since we were dealing with a ton of comment span here at Advanced Business Blogging and on our other business blogs, I figured we could provide the Guinea pigs for testing. So over the last 40-days or so we’ve tried five different anti-comment spam solutions on five separate business blogs, and here are the results.

Five anti-comment spam solutions — with one BIG winner!

Unfortunately there are a lot of supposed “solutions” out there that spammers simply laugh at. To save you time and frustration I’m going to share with you what we found. Let’s take a quick look at the solutions we tested starting with the least efficient and working our way down to the hands-down winner. (more…)

A new Google Inc. blog specific search engine sifts through the Internet’s millions of frequently updated business blogs (personal blogs too :)) with astounding speed and accuracy. Google rolled out the beta version of its blog search engine on Wednesday 9/14/05 and it seems to be all you would expect from the world’s leading search engine.

A quick search using the term “marketing with business blogs” (what else would I try first?) at http://blogsearch.google.com turned up 4 entries — all blogs, and all directly related to the search term. Over at Google’s regular engine I got 155 entries, a mix of blogs and regular sites, many of which were directly related to our multi-media coaching course. And using http://technorati.com I got 59 results, again most of which directly related to the course or referring back to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com.

What happened when I went to an open search (without parenthesis) on a more general term was even more insightful. I used the semi-generic term business blogging was pleased to find that AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com appeared in Google’s new “Related Blogs” listing at the top of search engine results.

(For a full-size screen shot, left click on the image above and it’ll open in a new window.)

That’s like a top priced Pay Per Click listing using Google Ad-words in their regular search engine! Plus — as you can see, we even had a link through to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com AND MarketingWithBusinessBlogs.com at #8, thanks to a mention about us in the blog for the public relations firm Burson-Marstellar on their e-fluentials blog.

The same open search in Google’s main engine turned up a massive mish-mosh of 42,600,000 results. And in Technorati, the results were just as much a time-waster with 67,427 results only loosely related to the search term business blogging. And the results were provided in a non-user friendly chronological order starting with the most recent posts.

(Business coach’s note: I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking for info on the web — I’m most concerned with the relevance of the results — not the most recently published. This is the main reason I only use Technorati when searching for breaking news being published on blogs in situations such as with hurricane Katrina where the lack of balanced coverage by mainstream media is a concern. But enough on that for now, I won’t go on that rant… for now. :))

The bottom line:

1. Compared with Google’s main engine, blogsearch.google.com did a much better job of locating blog related mentions of the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media course.

2. Google’s main engine (the undisputed digger of hidden relevancy) added more relevant links for the more specific search phrase Marketing With Business Blogs. But with the more general term business blogging Google provided an overwhelming mass of non-related content that most searchers would feel was impossible to wade through.

3. Technorati did a good job of finding the specific term “Marketing With Business Blogs” within blogs. But on all other counts, Technorati failed to live up to the accuracy of the new Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media course, especially with more common (less specific) keyword searches.

Over the coming days and months I’m sure Technorati and the other search engines will vow to add more features to their search engines with Google in the game. But busy business owners (and overwhelmed consumers) will go with what they find the easiest to use and yields the most relevant results. The Google brand with trust, familiarity, and user experience definitely holds a decided advantage with the average consumer.

A final note on business blogging and Marketing With Business Blogs

We’ve been preaching the benefits of starting and maintaining a business blog with our business coaching clients in the Business Owner’s Coaching Club and business owners in general with the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media course. But now the benefits of taking action are becoming crystal clear for proactive business owners to see.

A new world of information is about to break wide open for mainstream society. http://blogsearch.google.com is going to launch blogging into mainstream society, that is undeniable. The only question that remains unanswered is — what are you doing to take maximum the marketing advantage this movement presents?

Early adopters of business blogging are already reaping rewards. Don’t miss this next wave of growth where the masses shift the whole market up the growth curve. If you decide to start on your own — there are plenty of tips, strategies, and free advice to get you started on this blog (including the FREE e book “21 Ways To Boost Your Business With Business Blogs” which you can download from the upper left column of this blog.)

And if you want to get a decided marketing advantage in the marketplace and beat your competitors to the top of your niche — then you should strongly consider the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media course. With a 100% success rate and rave reviews from happy business owners, you can’t go wrong!

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Yes, all you students of the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media coaching course — you know how we LOVE WordPress. With complete control over coding, customization (for both function and appearance,) along with the reliability and zero cost factors of open source software — WordPress is a winner.

Yet even with the step-by-step videos included in the level 202 materials of the course (including installation, management, and optimization of a self-hosted WordPress business blog,) some business owners have found it easier to turn to Blog Harbor or Square Space than to mess with a WordPress install.

Well now there’s a viable alternative. A solution that has all the convenience of a third-party hosted blog service, with a lot of the functionality and control of WordPress. It’s WordPress.com.

And yes — that’s WordPress.com, not WordPress.org (the completely open source software requiring self-hosting.)

You can check out a very detailed article written by Lorell VanFossen on the new service over at http://lorelle.wordpress.com. Lorell does a fantastic job of laying out a complete overview of the up-and-coming service.

It may be just the high-powered “middle of the road” software solution you’ve been looking for to reliably run your business blog.

Enjoy!

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I’m on the mainland visiting family and attending a few events over this week and next so it’s been tough (if not intentional) getting online. Just stopped in to check comments and stats while in NYC, so I figured I’d post a heads-up on a couple new cool research tools that I came across in development.

The first is Podscope.

If you’re quickly becoming a podcast junky like me (business or otherwise,) this new tool is going to get you excited. Podscope is a new web engine that allows you to keyword search each and every word spoken in a podcast is now live in beta mode. In about a dozen single-word searcgh tests I ran on the engine’s capabilites it was amazingly accurate. Complex searches are still quite a ways off it seems. But hey… even with single word searches — Podscope can prove to be a big timesaver in discovering new podcasts.

The second tool is FeedPlex

FeedPlex is a search engine exclusively for XML (RSS, RDF) content. It relaunched in beta a couple of months ago and seems to be getting more accurate with each passing week. The database is being revamped and expanded by Nathan Enns, the person who also runs FyberSearch. In our testing using proven keywords for our own blogs and a number of our strategic partners, the FeedPlex engine has also been steadily improving.

Well, that’s it for now. I’m off to breakfast with the fam now, and off to Detroit for our “Innovation Playshop” with Stephen Pierce.

Aloha from NYC!

JP