Arggghhh!! Technical stuff! My brain just shut down completely. I'm still plodding through keywords and searching with the low-hanging fruit. This reminds me of 1983, when I first discovered Lotus Magazine. Remember Lotus? The DOS spreadsheet of choice--pre-Windows, pre-Excel. For the first time in my life I had less than 30% comprehension of what I was reading. It made me so mad! I did eventually learn the program, though. Linda, do I have to worry about either of these syndication things right now? If not, I'll put my fingers in my ears and go 'lalalalala' while you and Winston are talking about it, lol. I have discovered that no matter how much money Adsense would make for me, I don't want it. What it delivers on sites that I find with my keywords is exactly the type of thing my money management company is trying to warn people against. Darn it, I came back to re-read Linda's clarification, and here I am babbling. It must be midnight. Cheri

Hi: ========================================== Linda, do I have to worry about either of these syndication things right now? If not, I'll put my fingers in my ears and go 'lalalalala' while you and Winston are talking about it, lol. ========================================== You can put your fingers in your ears. lol Personally, I think RSS and syndication has potential - but will be more so when some of the garbage has died out. I compare it to the dot-bomb era compared to today. In the beginning, everyone thought they could slap anything online and make millions. Then companies started falling hard. For a while, companies didn't take the internet seriously. After all, look at all those big companies with deep pockets - if they didn't make it, no one can, right? (wrong) After a while, people began to realize that the Internet does offer us an unparalleled way to communicate with potential customers - but we still need sound business practices to make a go of it. Registering a dot-com and throwing money at it without a sound plan doesn't work. We discovered it's not about the money. It's about the know how. Surprise, surprise. Same thing with RSS. People think everything needs an RSS feed -- and as a result, there's a lot of garbage in the blogosphere right now. There's a lot of software that posts to blogs. There's a lot of blog spam. Every marketer out there thinks they "neeeeed" to get their sales pitches out by RSS. They fall all over CMS systems (content management) because -- drumroll -- they have RSS feeds build in. Heck, man, RSS is the way to bypass email filters, dontcha know? Of course, they don't realize that not all CMS systems are even search engine compatible - but they'll figure that out eventually, too. But, over time, RSS will evolve, get sane and get power... just like marketing online did. So - you can plug your ears for now. I'm still voting for good content that people actually want to come back for. At least for now. : ) Linda

Hi Linda, Good, so that's one less thing we really have to worry about for now at least. Though I can certainly see the potential once most of the garbage out there is gone and the next big thing catches on. ========================================= Of course, they don't realize that not all CMS systems are even search engine compatible - but they'll figure that out eventually, too. ========================================== I was curious about that. How can you tell when a CMS IS search engine compatible? Which brings me to my next question. If one was considering adding a forum to their site, what should they be looking for? :-)

Hi Winston, I hope you don't mind my input on this and I am sure Linda will add to it. If one was considering adding a forum to their site, what should they be looking for? This is something you need to really be careful about. First build a steady flow of clients before looking to add a forum. One way to kill a site is to have a forum that attracts no attention. When people come to the site and see no forum posts they make a subconscious parallel assumption (that was for Linda) that the site has no attractive qualities about it. Dead forum = Dead site. Once you have a mailing list of clients that follow your site, then you can get away with a forum, if it serves the purpose of informing your clients.

Hi Peter, subconscious parallel assumption (that was for Linda) Haha! Gotta love it! LOL Thanks. That is definitely something to keep in mind and something I never even really considered. But it leads to yet another but I suppose obvious question. How big of a mailing list would one need to have before considering a forum? Any thoughts? Also, if one has a very active forum what thoughts are out there on what effect it may have on sales? Will it detract from them with people spending more time in the forums than viewing your merchandise or will it add credence because it gives you a more direct interaction with your visitors/clients???