If you tweet and don’t have the Twitter Hanbook, you are missing out!  Here’s the latest update about Twitter Lists: Twitter Handbook.

Owning, running and maintaining an Internet based business or a site needs articles. Plain and simple, every one who has a site knows this. Even those who don’t have sites but are frequent Internet users knows this as well. 

Articles quench the thirst for information and knowledge of the people. Plus, the articles provide many other benefits for the site. The benefits that articles provide are putting a site high in the ranking in search results of keywords and keyword phrases that pertains or are relevant to his or her site. 

They also provide attraction to website visitors when they are appreciated and is linked to your site from another site or newsletter. Articles provide for the increase of the confidence and trust levels of customers to your site and company. 

Many articles are also beneficial to both company and its traffic. When the readers like the articles, they would tell more of their friends, family and peers and recommend your site to them, providing for a larger volume of traffic. You get bigger sales if your traffic trusts and believes in you. Your product or services would be much easier to sell when they know you know what you are doing and talking about. 

So ok, we have established that articles are very important to a site and to business. Articles are crucial and to keep ahead in the game, a site must have an article, it is imperative. There is one dilemma though, not many people like writing articles. 

Many website owners would rather spend their time on something else, and unless you’re a big time company, you don’t have the necessary resources to use on a pool of article writers. Plagiarism or copying of other articles is frowned upon and could easily get you into trouble, worst case scenario; a hefty fine and jail time. 

So what are the other options? 

Well, for starters if you hate writing articles and you can’t afford to hire people to write for you then don’t. Get free articles. The first place to look at for free articles is the public domain.  Here you won’t have problems with copyright infringement and the following penalties and fines if you get caught for plagiarism. 

Public domain articles are articles freely given to the public for public use. You can do whatever you want with it. You can place it on your site, name it as yours, put it in a newsletter its you decision. Always remember though that you will have to choose articles that is very relevant to your site. 

The downside to public domain articles is that since it is free for everybody, many of your competitors may have access to them as well. Since every site needs to be original and unique even though you have the same niche, this could be a predicament. You may also have to edit them a bit to place more keywords and keyword phrases to make them better. 

Another way to get free articles is to allow other sites which has the same subject or topic as yours to submit articles to your site. 

This would be only to augment your existing content or else all your articles would be leading to other sites since these articles would have resource boxes with them that could link or direct the readers to their site. That’s why it is important to have your own articles; you cold use them to link your site to other sites as well. 

Tip: to truly feel the impact of what a good article to you, go for original ones. There are many article writers who do part time and freelance article writing jobs that charges only minimal fees. You can get good articles that have all the keywords and keyword phrases you need and people are looking for. 

The investment you made for these articles would be worthwhile because you could use them for all the benefits you could offer. You hold copyrights to them and you will be able to use them anyway you want. 

As your articles help you in building your business and your site, you will have more articles to write and maybe then you wont be having second thoughts about articles.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, or RDF Site Summary – whichever you choose. As you can see, experts can’t even agree on that! Regardless of what you want to call it, all three of those phrases mean the same thing. It means that your site, blog, or podcast is available via RSS. RSS has a very technical explanation that goes along with it, but it is too complicated for anyone that does not have an IT degree to understand – which is why many people run away from it when they look for ways to promote.  But it is really very simple, and can be put into laymen’s terms. RSS enables you to syndicate your data on the World Wide Web. When you view the word ‘syndication’ think about newspapers and how they syndicate columns or comic strips. The column or comic strip is available in multiple newspapers around the world. The same is true when RSS is used, basically. When RSS is put into play it takes information and creates an excerpt of it. An example would be the first paragraph, or even the first fifty words of a blog post. The title of the post would also be used in the RSS. This information is used in the RSS feed. 

Now, users are able to download one or several of numerous aggregators or feed readers and subscribe to sites, blogs, or even podcasts that are RSS enabled. When they open their aggregator or feed reader, they will see the headlines, and possibly the excerpts of the latest blog posts, site content, or podcasts.  They can also view these things inside of the aggregator, but may click on the link (usually the title is linked), and actually visit the site, with the aggregator or feed reader acting as a browser.  There are also services that don’t require an aggregator or feed reader to subscribe to RSS. Examples are major sites that allow users to customize the page, such as Google’s Personalized Homepage, Yahoo, and MSN. People can subscribe to your RSS and add the feed to these personalized homepages. 

An RSS enabled site usually has an emblem that looks like this: 

This emblem is the internationally recognized RSS feed indicator, and it is usually clicked on to add the feed to an aggregator or feed reader. This means that when you use this emblem on your blog or podcast download page, it must be set up.  Most blog platforms are already RSS enabled, and it is just a question of going into the options and selecting it. Otherwise, you can use a feed maker to create RSS feeds and make them available. Some feed makers are free, but not very easy to use, and others are easy to use, but not free.

Aggregators are end user tools. This means that in order to subscribe to your blog or podcast, so that they can see the posts or podcasts that are new, the user must either download and set up an aggregator or use a service that will allow them to add a feed to a customized page, without the use of a standalone aggregator. Aggregators are free, and the ability to set up a customized homepage is typically also free. 

That’s really all that the laymen needs to know about RSS – how to add RSS capabilities to their site. Again, there is a great deal of technical information that goes along with RSS, but knowing it isn’t at all necessary. As long as you can create a feed, upload it, use the orange button and link to the feed with that orange button, you are good to go.