Crucial Differences between Blogs and Forums as Tools for Two-way Interactive Online Communications

I mentioned in my previous posts that RSS technology can be successfully used as an
improved substitute for emails.

People simply subscribe to RSS feeds and they can use multiple RSS Readers to read those feeds. All major search engines - Google, Yahoo! and MSN now offer personalized "home pages" for their readers and the ability to subscribe to numerous feeds from those pages, and to read them right there. So they all now have built-in RSS Readers, so to speak.

What I didn't quite realize before is that blogs can now also perform many functions of forums. In fact, forums in the future might give up most of their power of interactive two-way communications to blogs.

Why? Let's look at forums closely. What are the main purposes of forums? To provide the place for people with certain common interests to hang out and to interact with each other and to interactively communicate with the host of the forum.

When the publisher of the newsletter sends e-mails to the list of his subscribers, it's a one-way communication. If he really cares about his subscribers, he wants to provide them with the way to communicate back to him, to ask questions, to give their opinion, tell about likes and dislikes, request additional information on the particular subject, etc.

Emails are not really a choice anymore, many publishers receive so much spam that they simply delete e-mails from un-known sources.

So forum is a great way to create a community, to let people help each other and let them talk to other people and to the host of the forum.

Also, it's a great way to create new content on auto-pilot. Hopefully you will have a few knowledgeable members in your forum and they will post thoughtful answers to other people questions. And those answers will lead to new questions, and on, and on, and on.

You just got yourself a constantly growing source of useful unique content, and search engines love fresh unique content.

However there are a few noticeable drawbacks in the forum structure. First, when you let people to freely communicate with each other, they unfortunately have a tendency not only to help other people, but bash them as well. Some are helping, others are bashing.

You want your forum to stay a friendly place where people are willing to help each
other, so you need to take some administrative steps - hire moderators, ban "bad apples", etc.

Also, it's not so easy to give forum a life. You need to get at least a few hundred
people to subscribe to your forum in a short period of time, or it will slowly die. And you need to keep people active.

Even if your forum is thriving (which is of course a good thing), you have another
issue. it's hard to maintain control over the topics in the forum. You created it with a purpose of discussing certain topics, but in a while forum will start living the life of it's own and you never know what other topic will pop-up. It may be a good thing, it may be a bad thing. But it certainly doesn't help to keep this place in a line with your initial concept.

Ok, so let's summarize the drawbacks of the forums: possible bashing posts and
additional administration costs, forums are hard to launch, hard to keep the posts in a line with your initial concept.

Now let's look at blogs. They have a fantastic feature called "comments". That means any person who visited your site may leave a comment about your post (if you enabled comments in your blog settings, of course). They may tell you what they like, what they don't like, ask you questions, etc.

Those comments could be followed by the comments from other people about previous
comments, questions, answers, recommendations - and you get the ball rolling.

It's up to you to decide, however, whether to post any particular comment on your blog or not. If the comment bashes another visitor or doesn't add any value to your blog, why should you bother posting it? Simply delete it and the end of story.

And with blogs people tend to keep discussion close to the topic of the post, thus
allowing you to maintain the theme in line with your concept.

Which of forum's drawback haven't I covered yet? Launch? Well, with blog it's a breeze.

You're not launching the place for interactive communication per se, you already have a blog. So you simply email your list and let them know that you provided them with a place to ask you questions.

You don't have to bother whether you have a one question or dozen for this particular post. The blog won't die as long as you're posting new information on it. Some people will like one post, others will want to comment on another - and that's how you get your interactive community, with little effort and no
headaches!

Oleg Ilin - Web Tester from http://www.web-feed.com

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How to Effectively Rent your Virtual Real Estate

A few days ago I wrote an article about Virtual Real
Estate. I won't go into details here, if you want, you
can read it yourself in my previous post.

The point is that you should treat your website exactly as
you treat your real estate investment property. Suppose,
you have an extra apartment that is not rented. Would you
leave it like that or would you try to rent it? I really
hope that you would do everything possible to rent it.
It's your money. Pure cash. Why should you leave it on
the table, right?

Ok, so let me ask you this. Why the heck do you leave piles
of cash each and every month and don't do anything to
adjust this situation? Why do you leave dozens of your
apartments in un-rented condition or with some bad tenants?

What am I talking about? You don't have any FREE
apartments or bad tenants. In fact, you don't have
tenants at all...

Well, that's what you think. Let's look at your website.
Each web page could be considered as a different apartment
(or at least a room in the apartment). Do you have some sort
of monetization mechanism implemented on each and every
page? No? And why is that?

Don't tell me you're selling your product only from the
one page and all others are, well, sort of complimentary.

The only pages that you can't effectively monetize are
your TOS, Privacy Policy and Disclaimer pages. Their task
is to defend you from the legal obstructions, not to earn
you money. All others should add to your income little by
little.

You're selling your products from product pages, that's
fine. But what stopping you from adding AdSense or
another advertiser on all other pages?

Or, which is even better, to add subscription boxes on your
pages?

Start building your list, treat your subscribers like
royalties, give them really useful information (don't
try to push some crap product to make quick buck), give
them bonuses from time to time.

When you find really good product, tell them about it.
There is nothing wrong in making money as long as you
really help people to solve their problems.

In fact, you will have much bigger income from your list
than from any advertiser. Just groom your list, listen to
your subscribers and take a time to find the answers to
their questions.

And don't tell me that you're not an expert. Everybody on
this earth is an expert. You just need to find out your
area of expertise and start selling products/services
relevant to that area.

You still don't believe me you're an expert? OK, let me
give you one example of the super-expert: 2-3 year old
child.

Just watch him crawl, watch how he falls (always ahead,
always toward his goal) and you will agree that we all
can learn a lot from this expert in the arena of
self-motivation.

Just find your arena, it's out there.

I hope now you will:
1) find your area of expertise
2) use each and every page of your site for your financial
advantage.

Ok, so now we're hopefully done with un-rented apartments.
But what about bad tenants?
You don't know what I mean? Well, if you rented web space
on each page, that's great.
But where exactly did you put this advertisement?

If your advertiser pays you for clicks, then it's in your
best interest to get as much exposure for that
advertisement as possible.

So you want a "good tenant", so to speak. The best place
to put advertisement is at the top left and top center
parts of your web pages. Placement on the right part of the
site gives you less effective click-thru results. And if
you place the advertisement at the bottom, especially at
the bottom right part of your site, you almost won't get
any clicks at all.

Bottom line: rent your web space, and get the most out of
it!

Oleg Ilin - Web Tester from http://www.web-feed.com

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Websites: Virtual Real Estate Investment Business with Minimum Risk!

Web sites and real estate? I might be joking,
right?

What could be possibly similar between those two entities?

Actually they are so similar that I could call them twins.
2 sides of one coin. Let me explain my point.

(Please note that I'm talking here only about investment
properties, not about the house that you call your home.
Your home of course can't fit into this category - it
serves completely different purpose. Your home is about your
family and love and friends and memories and Christmas Eve
and about all your hopes and plans - so it's impossible to
place a price tag on this special piece of real estate.)

No, I'm not talking about home. I'm talking about real
estate property, either commercial or residential, that
you bought to create a positive cash flow and passive
income by renting or leasing the space in it.

You know the average market price. And you have pretty
good idea how much exactly you would get per month for renting
it.

What factors have determined this price?

- Location (prices in New York, NY differ from those
in, say, Lincoln, Nebraska);

- Neighborhood (whether there are good schools
there, malls, theaters, nice restaurants, low crime rate,
and so on);

- Condition and specific features of your property;

- Square footage;

- Number of bedrooms and bathrooms;

- etc.

Now, I'm not going to give you a crush course on real
estate investments, it's just it's important that you
see all those factors while I'll analyze another side
of the coin - a website.

When you create a web site, what do you do with it?
Provide some useful information for your visitors, and either
sell something on it or use another monetization mechanisms,
such as AdSense or you rent your web site's space to
other advertisers.

Or wait, did I just say "rent your space"? Yes, I did.
You rent a space on your website exactly the same way
as you do with your investment real estate property.

And you can get pretty good money by doing this. As a
matter of fact, there are many guys who're raking many
thousands of dollars each and every month placing
AdSense ads.

What factors do determine the price of your web rent?

- Location. Your web site's position in major
Search Engines. There are hundreds of different
search engines, but what really matters is
your site's position in Google,Yahoo and MSN.

Are you on a first/second/third position for many popular
keywords in your niche market?

(Popular in this case means that those search terms are
entered by actual live people thousands of times per
month).

Are you on a first or at least second page of the results
displayed for those keywords?

If you are on a good position then you get a lot of
traffic and, hence, many targeted visitors to
your web site.

- Neighborhood. Two most commonly used factors to
estimate the "prime neighborhood" in web site terms are
Google Page Rank (known as Google PR) and Alexa Rank.

Both those estimation parameters have their own flaws, but
nevertheless they are used by all webmasters and
internet marketers.

Basically, PR is estimated based on a quantity of incoming
links for your site (quality of links is also taken into
consideration, but not too much). The higher the PR the
better.

Alexa ranks the traffic flow to your site. The lower the
Alexa number the better.

So the good neighbors to do business with are the sites
with higher Google PR and lower Alexa rank.

There are also bad neighbors and the whole bad
neighborhoods. Those are websites and networks of websites
banned from search engines for the attempts to
trick search engines in order to receive higher position
on the search engine result pages.

Usually it happens when some sort of automatic site
building or cloaking or another way
of search engine spamming is involved.

Watch out for those sites. If you have an outcoming link
from your site going to one of those sites, as
part of link exchange, remov*e it immediately or
search engines might think that you're part of the gang
and will ban you too.

- Condition. Pretty much self-explanatory. What is
the quality of your website,

how valuable it is for the visitors, etc.

- "Square footage". In case of your web site it's
the size and the position of the a*d on the web page.

- "Number of bedrooms and bathrooms" - on how many
web pages are you willing to place the a*d from the
advertiser for the certain price.

As you can see there is much more common between website
and investment real estate than you could think.

That's a reason why websites are called Virtual Real
Estate.

So start building your Virtual Real Estate today and you
will have all the benefits of real estate investments
without the risks of that business.

After all, you're not paying taxes simply for keeping
your site, you don't have all the hassles with tenants.
If you don't like the advertiser - you simply don't rent
him your space anymore. No house or flood insurance
is required either (just make sure you regularly back up
your site).

There you have it. On a golden platter. The business with
minimum risk. Just start creating your web sites! Today!

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Copyright@ 2005 Oleg Ilin
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Oleg Ilin, the president of 1EzHost L.L.C.-
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done by professionals.
(here is example of the real estate investment site we've
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http://www.estate-invest.com

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