Increase website traffic with Feed Burner

Acquisitions Galore from Google

What do you expect a cash rich and perhaps the most successful company of the century to do with rich coffers? Buy up other companies? Google has been doing precisely that and for a very good reason. There is synergy in numbers and the customer is always the winner. FeedBurner is a comprehensive set of highly potent web applications that manages feed distribution and targets specific audiences.

It was released in 2004 and subsequently purchased by Google in 2007. No doubt, Google understood its immense potential. Whether you are an ardent blogger, a dedicated podcaster, or even a regular web content publisher, FeedBurner can provide you with enhanced feeds, and tools to manage them.

Along the way, you can leverage FeedBurner and its various applications to increase website traffic exponentially. Here, we not only describe the amazing features that you can play with after opening a FeedBurner account, but also the benefits that you would gain using its wide range of features and attributes.

What Would FeedBurner Do for my feed?

AT Google Traffic Guru, we tell you how to maximize your website traffic using Google’s impressive arsenal of tools, services and web applications.FeedBurner is no exception. It will make sure that your subscribers have a richer feed reading experience, tell you what exactly your readers like, catch more subscribers, and also generate revenues for you in the process!

In short, you will be in the feed heaven.

We are assuming at the outset that you know what an RSS feed is. An RSS feed is a feature of the Internet which culls relevant content from the web that you specify and organizes it for you to read. There is an excellent report on RSS feeds on Wikipedia which you might want to read first just in case you are unsure of precisely what RSS feeds are and how they can enhance website traffic for you. Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

Bouquet of Services from FeedBurner

Optimize

• Posts links from major social bookmarking sites like Dig, del.icio.us, Magnolia, Stumble Upon and others into your RSS feeds

• Allows your subscribers to e-mail, share, and tag your RSS feed content

• Encloses images, podcasts, and video casts as standard media attachments

• Ensures that your feeds are technically compatible with the subscriber’s feed aggregator

Analyze

• Estimates the number of subscribers and viewers of your website according to various time intervals such as the number of days and months

• Provides an account of the feed readers, e-mail services, browsers and bots used by your subscribers

• Tracks the number of enclosure downloads that have occurred on your website

Monetize

• permits ads from the Google AdSense program to be displayed on your RSS feed

• Shares a portion of the revenue from the advertiser’s network based on CPM

Publicize

• Displays Feed Count for you and for your subscribers

• Lets you cross-post your feed in an html code on any affiliated site which boosts qualified traffic to your website

• sends out immediate e-mail notifications to update the feed as soon as you create new content on your website

• Enables your subscribers to receive feeds through the option of e-mail subscriptions which is especially relevant to those subscribers who do not use RSS feeds

Myriad Benefits

Brand Identity

The Feed Image Burn allows you to ad your logo at the top of your feeds. Now, you can successfully develop brand awareness of your brand among your subscribers by adding your logo and even your theme colors to the various distributed feeds.

A Robust Revenue Model

If you have a large subscriber base, your server is going to be overwhelmed by regular feed update requests. FeedBurner can re-host your feeds thus saving you from the nightmare of slow server performance and large bills. Moreover, you are free to display ads within your feeds, bringing you a nice piece of the revenue pie.

Targeting and Boosting Website Traffic

The “Analyze” tab of your FeedBurner account does for your feeds, what Google Analytics does for your website. You receive a substantial quantum of data to analyze and determine who and how many subscribers have read your feeds, what headlines do they click on, etc. You can then concentrate your efforts on optimizing your feeds which in turn will generate more traffic for your website. .

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Using Google Knol to Build Website Traffic

One of the youngest babies of Google’s family of products, Knol is a reference site that contains articles penned by the contributors on a plethora of subjects. Knol is a project of Google, released on July 23, 2008, and is currently in a beta stage. According to Google, Knol means a unit of knowledge.

The term “Knol” is used to refer to the project as well as any article published in it.This might be a bit confusing, but you’ll gain a better understanding of Knol once you visit the website. In order to learn how you can increase website traffic with Google Knol, you will first have to understand how Knol works which is precisely what we intend doing here.

A New Kid on the Encyclopedia Block

Is Google Knol any different from the usual knowledge hubs like Wikipedia, Squidoo Lens, Helium or Hub Pages? You bet it is! Google randomly authenticates the author’s identity and credentials through e-mail and phone calls. It is also different from the other knowledge repositories in that the levels of scholarship Knol strives to achieve are lofty. Many submissions are even five thousand words long. They are substantiated with tons of references pointing to a variety of online and offline sources.

Feature Rich and Highly Informative

Google Knol’s stated mission is to present to its readership accurate and relevant information that is of very high quality. Other features of Knol:

Places special importance on the author’s view and perspective in the article
Enables multiple articles to be written on the same topic
Hands over the editorial control and responsibility to the author
Allows for hosting AdSense banners based on a unique revenue sharing model
Invites feedback from readers through ratings, comments, suggested edits, and reviews
Over 100,000 submissions to date in Knol
We believe that in order to find multiple articles with identical titles on Knol, Google’s famous search function should be used rather than monotonously browsing through the titles.

Google has left all the editing options with the contributor. The author can close any editing, allow the co-authors to edit, or enable the public to edit.

Have something to say about the Knol that you just cannot keep to your self? You are free to provide feedback, even if the Knol is closed for editing. This is done through rating, comments, and reviews.

Content Submission Guidelines

Google has released specific guidelines that address what can and cannot be published as a Knol. It prohibits material that deals in pornography, violence, discrimination, intolerance and copyright violation. These are things you shouldn’t be doing any way if you wish to Increase website traffic with Google Knol.

Nofollow Policy

Google marks a number of pages with in the Knol project with the “nofollow” directive. This implies that the links with these web pages are not crawled by search engine spiders. This policy has changed into a “follow” directive for a number of trusted authors. More on this in a moment.

A Truckload of Benefits for the Knol User

Take a look, and you just might be surprised!
Pages and pages of rich content with no end in sight
Ability to earn quick cash with your Knol submission through Google AdSense
Better quality articles at your fingertips
Personalized pieces with the focus on authorship
Plenty of choices among different articles on a single topic
Freedom for you to rate, comment, or suggest an editorial intervention
The power of Google behind each Knol
Watch out Wikipedia and Others
Knol has been compared to About.com, Squidoo Lens, Associated Content and Hub Pages. It is also a possible rival to Wikipedia and Scholarpedia. Unlike sites such as Wikipedia, you can truly benefit from the personal insights of the author along with the Knol submission made by the author. Adding the author name to Knol content lends a unique personality to the article. This is in direct contrast to Wikipedia that carries a neutral point of view. The policy of uploading multiple articles on a single topic will encourage better quality standards, as different Knols will compete for higher ranking in Google results. Wikipedia, on the other hand stresses on one page per topic.

The option of maintaining closed Knol, or Knols editable only by co-authors eliminates the threat of defacement of content. Needless to say, this threat is always there in peer-driven reference sites. Now, you don’t need to worry about any one editing your Knol without your knowledge even if your primary objective of contributing to Knol is to increase website traffic with Google Knol.

Knol the Robust Traffic Builder

Google Knol carries the enormous potential of being a first rate traffic builder for your website. However, there are a number of caveats. First, Google has openly stated that the nofollows will be used abundantly on all submissions unless the author builds a large following and a positive reputation on Knol. Google Knol may not be able to generate valuable back links for you in the first round. However, building and boosting high quality targeted website traffic is a whole different story. The resource box at the end of each Knol has the potential of becoming a traffic block buster. Remember, most Google Knol pages carry a PR rating of five and if you make it to the front page of Google Knol, the PR is a mighty seven! Contract the services of a top notch content developer to write a Knol for you if you don’t believe you are qualified to do justice to your niche through thought provoking and insightful submissions. Therefore, do consider Knolling at least once to see how many new traffic numbers you can touch in one go!

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More Google Website Traffic with Google Writely

What on Earth is Writely?

Before we tell you how you can increase website traffic with Google Writely, let us understand what Writely is and the nature of its contribution to the online space. Writely is one of the more popular components of Google docs and has witnessed impressive growth during the past year. It is a totally free web-based online word processing program like Microsoft Word which is entirely offline.

Its #1 reason for popularity? It is 100% online and you can view your documents from anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the Internet. You no longer have to lug your laptop with you all the time in order to create your next Booker Prize nomination!

A Dose of Online History

Writely was developed by a US-based Silicon Valley developer named Upstartle. It was subsequently acquired by Google in 2006. It is now part of the Google Docs online application suite, which in addition, has a spreadsheet and presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel. Google has made several acquisitions since then in direct proportion to its increase in popularity and stupendous growth in website traffic on its many Internet properties.

A Feature Packed Online Google Application

The online application has many attractive features thus making it possible for many to use it with virtually no training:

  • Share documents and work with others in a real time environment

  • Documents are stored online so you can edit them from any computer

  • Free to use as are most Google products

  • Easy to use with a minimal learning curve

  • Clean and uncluttered user interface with a familiar desktop look and feel

  • No complicated downloads because your Internet browser is all you need to use Writely

  • Permit access only to those you wish by managing the document’s access settings

  • Secure online storage which may be even more secure than your own PC

  • Data saved every ten seconds thus protecting your document from a computer crash at all times

And there is more!

These documents are created within the application, imported through the web, or by email. They can also be saved to your hard disk drive in a variety of formats. Documents are automatically saved on Google servers in a secure environment.

Open documents are automatically saved to prevent data loss, and a revision history is generated. Your documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes. The application supports a number of document standards and conforms to the ISO standard Open Document format. It supports document formats such as .doc and .xls. Writely allows the uploading and sharing of PDF files as well.

Up and Running in Five Minutes

In the Writely menus, keyboard shortcuts and dialogue boxes appear in a manner similar to what users may expect in a GUI-driven word processor. So you won’t be spending time in learning a whole lot of new things. Writely is no longer an independent product. It is used in conjunction with a spreadsheet and presentation suite called
Google Docs.

Benefits Galore

  • Easy to learn as it uses existing features of word processing programs

  • Ability to save your document on your PC as well as in addition to Google’s servers

  • Allows restricted use of data by privacy definitions which you control

  • Multiple users can use documents from different locations in real-time to collaborate on writing projects

  • Fully integrates with spreadsheet and presentation applications within Google Docs

  • Allows you to use your existing .doc, .xls and .pdf files

Increasing Website Traffic with Google Writely

There are many creative ways in which you can use Google Docs to write, create and collaborate. In order to use Google Writely as a genuine web traffic booster, create a comprehensive, easy-to-read and informative article about your niche with specific reference to your website and set its privacy setting as a public document. Google just might index this document for you and bless you with a valuable back link. This will contribute to your ongoing link building exercise. You can also develop another version of this document and upload it to Google Pages which is patterned after Geo Cities and provides free web space to Internet users. The speed with which Google indexes content featured on Google Pages is impressive and links featured on Google Pages tend to appear as legitimate back links in a live link search.

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Google Scholar and Targeted Website Traffic

Google Scholar is perhaps the most distinguished contribution to the global academic community from Google. Before we tell you how you can use Google Scholar to generate targeted website traffic on your website and create a real buzz, let us take a moment to tell you what Google Scholar is and how it really works.

What is Google Scholar

In late 2004, Google launched a beta version of Google Scholar. It provides you with a single source for academic information and allows you to search for peer-reviewed papers, research reports, literature reviews and much more. Google Scholar has digitized a large number of academic and professional journals and arranges results by taking into account the number of times that the item has been cited in scholarly literature, and other criteria.

The service is equipped with a unique and proprietary ranking process and sophisticated crawling techniques. Access to published materials can help you to benefit from a colossal repository of knowledge and rich scholarship. Many of the journal articles which appear in the results link directly to online versions of these articles. You can access these scholarly publications immediately online in their entirety.

Vertical Search Engine of Sorts

An example of a vertical search engine is a chemical engineering search engine which searches for information on that domain, this would be quite different from a biology search engine that presents search results and reliable information in its specific domain. Vertical search engines have a clearly defined focus and are excellent at generating highly relevant results because only relevant sources are indexed through their search matrix. Google Scholar is one such example.

What Makes Google Scholar Unique

Some of the main features of Google Scholar include:

Ease of use and user-friendly interface design

Direct access on the internet from anywhere in the world

Coverage of a wide variety of information sources

Unrestricted query structure designed to generate results with a high relevance factor

Allows for searches of documents both online as well as in library collections

Clearly tags and marks journal contributions which have free access or need subscription

Use of metasearches in which your query is sent to every resource and the result returned

Benefits of using Google Scholar

An excellent and totally free starting point for high quality academic research

Access to academic scholarship from all over the world

Access to excellent materials through related searches

Advanced-level research from the comfort of your home or office on your finger tips

Targeted Website Traffic

If you do not happen to be an academic scholar confident of submitting an article in a peer reviewed journal, the next best thing to do is to write to experts in your niche who feature in Google Scholar search results and ask them to write about your company, your niche or your USP. A link from one of these articles is worth a thousand links from garden variety search engine directories. Write to these experts in the same way in which you write to trustworthy websites for link exchange. We recommend that you consider this as an ongoing process and integrate this strategy with your link building exercise. The results will simply amaze you.