The Archives

WTF Is RSS, Social Bookmarking And Social Networking?

Posted in: Social Media by Kuzzuk on April 24, 2009

What On Earth Is RSS?

Wikipedia says:

RSS (an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,[3] or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s URI, often referred to informally as a “URL” (uniform resource locator), although technically the two terms are not exactly synonymous, into the reader, or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

Did you really understand that? Here is what RSS is in plain English courtesy of the folks at Common Craft.

Now What’s Social Bookmarking?

Turning to the definition at Wikipedia

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.

Here’s the plain English definition of Social Bookmarking.

What On Earth Is Social Networking?

Just being a little dramatic as most people are familiar with the concept of Social Networking. If you are really dying to read the Wikipedia definition then head here or you could just watch the video for a plain English definition of Social Networking.

Questions/comments? Use the form below!

Can You Build A Great Blog In 31 Days?

Posted in: Social Media by Kuzzuk on April 17, 2009

Darren Rowse aka ProBlogger certainly thinks that a great blog can be built in 31 days and as I’m following along, I’m increasingly becoming a convert. Here’s how it works. Everyday, there’s a short post with some teaching on a topic that’s supposed to make your blog better followed by action items. I like the action items because that’s where the rubber meets the road.

As we speak, the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog or 31DBBB is in its 11^th 13 ^thday (will be updated periodically) and topics covered have been:

1. Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog: In this post Darren explains what an elevator pitch is and why is it important for bloggers followed by the task of writing an elevator pitch for your blog. He makes it easier by even showing you how to write an elevator pitch.
   Note to self: Hmmm, what’s my excuse of not having an elevator pitch for my blog?
2. Write a List Post: Here Darren gives 8 reasons why lists are very popular and lists out the task for the day which as you may have guessed is writing a post list. He gives examples of types of list posts and recommends sharing the list via comments on his post (smart move).
   Note to self: I need to write a list post but what shall I write about?
3. Promote a Blog Post: In this day’s post, I think Darren makes a good point about promoting individual blog posts instead of the blog itself. He lists out 11 ways to promote your blog posts including internal linking, article marketing and social media.
   Note to self: Apart from social media and internal linking, explore whether the other options are viable every time I write a post. A checklist of sorts?
4. Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche: Success leaves clues and Darren recommends identifying and doing an in-depth analysis of a successful blog in your niche in terms of content, reader engagement, design, monetization, traffic and SEO with two important caveats a) do not become obsessed and b) do not copy.
   Note to self: Whom do I admire in my niche? Identify and then analyze their blogs?
5. Email a Blog Reader: Here Darren shares his strategy of paying personal attention to readers who leave comments on your blog. Three ways of doing this – a) email the reader, 2) leave a comment on their blog (provided they have left their blog address on the comments) and 3) comment on your own blog which shows that you engage the readers.
   Note to self: Thankfully, I’m doing what Darren recommends and I’ll continue to do so as this blog grows bigger and bigger
6. 27 Must Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers: Nice list of 27 tips and tutorials as Darren spreads the link love to other notable bloggers like Seth Godin, SEOmoz, Skellie, Chris Garrett, Yaro Starak, Shoemoney, Maki, Liz Strauss, Daniel Scocco and Chris Brogan.
   Note to self: Read the articles and make my own action items. Plus have a goal to get link love from Darren.
7. Write a Link Post: The objective of this day is to write a link post (see Day 6 on how Darren wrote a great link post) and he explains why it is important to link out before wrapping up 6 types of link posts to consider.
   Note to self: Is this post considered a link post?
8. Interlink Your Old Blog Posts: Internal linking is very powerful for SEO purposes but Darren goes a step further
   by giving other reasons to interlink to your older blog posts with practical examples of how to interlink.
   Note to self: Set aside time periodically to interlink especially when the blog grows in size and stature.
9. Join a Forum and Start Participating: Forums are places where your potential readers gather so harnessing the power of forums makes sense. Darren gives three good reasons to join forums with links to two great posts on the power of forums.
   Note to self: Start harnessing the power of forums that I have identified.
10. Set Up ‘Alerts’ to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche: Darren gives 5 concrete reasons to monitor your niche and shows how to create a Google Alert before ending with a word of caution on ‘over monitoring’. I have found that monitoring Technorati as well as Twitter to be useful in addition to Google Alerts.
    Note to self: Write a post teaching how to create a unified alert combining Google, Technorati and Twitter using Yahoo Pipes.
11. Come up with 10 Post Ideas: Coming up with blog ideas daily can be a major pain and to counter that Darren recommends using older posts as a base and extending it further using tools like mindmapping.
    Note to self: Use FreeMind for generating ideas.
12. Develop an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog: The idea here is to build from the previous day’s task and come up with a weekly schedule. Darren talks about two methods to come up with a weekly schedule based on frequency and theme.
    Note to self: Weekly theme is something I should consider because it’ll give the blog some coherency.
13. Take a Trip to the ‘Mall’ and Improve Your Blog: The idea is to disconnected for sometime and then find inspiration for blog ideas offline. I know a lot of bloggers shudder at the thought of being offline
    Note to self: I’m going to the mall on Monday.

Bypassing ClickBank Merchant’s Butt Ugly Sales Page

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on April 16, 2009

As an affiliate marketer, I am sure you have had the experience of wanting to promote a really good product from ClickBank but the merchant’s butt ugly sales page makes you cringe and think twice. Here’s a set of step-by-step instructions on how to bypass the ugly sales page and directly link it to the shopping cart without losing any commissions.

1. Go to ClickBank Marketplace and find the product you want to promote. In this example, I’m choosing “Ewen Chia – AutopilotProfits.com!” (not implying his sales page is butt ugly). Click on the “create hoplink” link (highlighted in red) and it opens up a new window.
   
   
   

   Create hoplink in ClickBank

2. In the new window, I enter my ClickBank username “kuzzuk” followed by an optional tracker “kuzzukblog” so I’ll know the origin of the sales and press the “Create” button.
   
   
   

   Create ClickBank Hop Window

3. This creates my ClickBank hoplink (highlighted in red). Essentially, hoplink in ClickBank language just means an affiliate link.
   
   
   

   ClickBank Hop Links

4. The hoplink created http://kuzzuk.autopilotp.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=KUZZUKBLOG will lead to the merchant’s sales page but this is what we want to avoid. In order to bypass the merchant’s sale page, change http://kuzzuk.autopilotp.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=KUZZUKBLOG to http://1.kuzzuk_autopilotp.pay.clickbank.net/
5. Breaking it down:
   • Add “1.” before your affiliate username.
   • Change the “.” to a “_” between the affiliate username and ClickBank product name.
   • Replace “hop” with “pay” and get rid of the tracking ID.
6. Test the difference, the link http://kuzzuk.autopilotp.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=KUZZUKBLOG will lead to the merchant’s sales page (usually butt ugly) but http://1.kuzzuk_autopilotp.pay.clickbank.net/ will directly lead to the payment page so you can write your own sales copy or review of the product and then directly send your reader to the payment page.

Tip: Create a simple A/B testing and see whether your copy or the merchant’s sale page converts better. You may be surprised as there are many people out there who clearly favor butt ugly sales letters.

Is Your Username Available At These 72 Social Networks?

Posted in: Social Media by Kuzzuk on April 15, 2009

NameChk is a great service that allows you to check whether your username is available at various social networks that it covers.

Just type in your username and click the “chk” button and viola, it shows whether the username is taken or not for the 72 social networks the service currently covers (see screenshot below as well as the tags). I wish it would go one step further and allow me to register for these social networks should my username be available. However, I know that would be quite difficult but I like asking for the pie in the sky.

Before I forget, here’s a blank copy of the spreadsheet I use to track my usernames on social networks.

Dumb MySpace Doesn’t Seem To Know That Singapore Is Not In China

Posted in: Social Media by Kuzzuk on April 13, 2009

Not that I think of MySpace highly nowadays especially as a medium to market and make money but I visited the site today after a long time. I was stumped that it was mostly in Chinese and I just couldn’t find an easy way to change the language preference back to English (see screenshot below – click to enlarge). Since, I live in Singapore MySpace was probably trying to personalize my experience but instead ended up frustrating me.

Repeat After Me “Singapore Is Not In China”

If the knuckleheads at MySpace had done a little bit of research (like reading the Wikipedia entry), they would have known that English is the main language used in Singapore.

English is the main language of Singapore and has been heavily promoted as such since the country’s independence. The English used is primarily based on British English, with some American English influences. The use of English became widespread in Singapore after it was implemented as a first language medium in the education system, and English is the most common language in Singaporean literature. In school, children are required to learn English and one of the three other official languages. By law, all signs and official publications are required to be primarily in English, although they are occasionally translated versions into the other official languages.

Three Extremely Stupid Ways To Change The Language Back To English

In the screenshot above, did you see an easy way to change the language option to English? Neither did I. It turns out that there are three possible ways of changing MySpace back to English.

1. I must be able to read Chinese. Duh!
2. I need to have oodles of patience and mouse over links to potentially find one that leads me to MySpace in English
3. I randomly click the Chinese links and hope to find MySpace in English

I went for the second option and moused over links to finally find the link to MySpace UK. So much pain just to change the language! Why can’t they have a big button that says “English” (in English)?

Finding Hidden Money With Kontera

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on April 12, 2009

I tried out Kontera about a year ago on one of my sites and totally forgot about it. Kontera is an in-text pay-per-click network which means you do not have to embed separate ad units like Google AdSense. Recently, I was organizing all my affiliate and advertising programs and checked my Kontera stats. To my surprise, I was making a dollar or so every few days and a nice chunk of change had accrued but they were not releasing it to me as my tax information was incomplete. I felt like a kid who had found some change he had stashed and forgotten.

I quickly filled in the tax information as a publisher based outside of the US and it was breeze unlike some other networks which require you to fill up a PDF form and fax it to them. Don’t get me started on them. I just wanted to share that I’m happy to have found hidden money with Kontera. Yipee!

Hide Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on April 9, 2009

As affiliate marketers, we may need to hide and redirect our affiliate URLs. This post discusses various ways to hide affiliate links and then zooms in on how to use the WordPress Redirection plugin to hide and redirect affiliate links.

As for terminology, people call it link cloaking, link masking or link redirection (see Shoemoney’s post for semantics) but to make it simple, I’ll refer to it as hiding affiliate links.

Many Ways To Skin A Cat Or Hide Affiliate Links

1. Link Shortening Services: Create a short URL with a click of a button using services like TinyURL or abbrr. Most of these services do not provide a way to save the list of URLs you have shortened so my recommendation is to create a simple spreadsheet to track all shortened affiliate links.
2. Professional Scripts: Buy paid scripts like Affiliate Redirector or Samurai Stealth Cloaker to hide affiliate links. By the way, I have hidden these affiliate links with the WordPress Redirection plugin.
3. Write Your Own Scripts: This is a little too technical for the layperson and I guess you wouldn’t be reading this post if you could write your own script. But if you really want to write your own script then Shoemoney’s post provides a good primer.

Cloaking Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

Obviously, there are many ways to hide affiliate links but I like using the WordPress Redirection Plugin because of its simplicity and basic tracking features.

1. Download, install and activate the WordPress Redirection Plugin
2. From your WordPress administrator dashboard, click “Tools” followed by the “Redirection” option on the left panel.
3. In the “Source URL” textbox add your masked URL. This page doesn’t have to be a valid page, for example, I added http://www.kuzzuk.net/go/AffiliateRedirector which does not exist in reality. In the “Target URL”, add your affiliate link and leave the other options as default. Click the “Add Redirection” button to save the changes.
   
4. Now place this masked URL in any of your blog posts and the reader will be directed accordingly. I normally do one more step when I’m linking using masked URLs, I add the rel=”nofollow” tag which means that search engines do not follow this link while indexing my site. This is an often ignored but important step.

Questions or comments. Please feel free to ask!

Security Loophole In Ning Social Networking App?

Posted in: Social Media by Kuzzuk on April 8, 2009

I’m not a security expert but there have been a number of cases within the social network for Darjeeling that I run (with over 1,000 members) using Ning where someone logs in as another person and wreaks havoc giving the administrators a hard time.

One of our members dropped me a Facebook message informing me of the security loophole telling me that Ning transmits email address and password in cleartext.

the site is transmitting userid and password in clear text. i know the login form with ning id is secure but there there a field named xg_token as “xg_token=&emailAddress=me@gmail.com&password=password” somewhere in the code that is doing this.

Like I said before, I’m not an online security expert but I downloaded a sniffer from Effetech to test the claim using my own email address and password in Ning. I could see my password in cleartext (masked in the screenshot below). Additionally, as a logical test I tried sniffing my own Gmail username and password which was unsuccessful. In my own layman way, this probably means that the Ning password is being sent in cleartext while Gmail sends it securely.

I have informed Ning and let’s see what they have to say about it. Meanwhile, has anyone had this issue with Ning before?