Posts Tagged ‘RSS’

I was watching the film Labyrinth the other day (with David Bowie playing the baddie) and in it there was the famous door riddle….

There are two doors. You have to pick one door. One door leads to great happiness, the other leads to great suffering. But you don’t know which door is which.  However, there are two people in the room. One of them always tells the truth, but one of them always lies. But, you don’t know which is which.  You can only ask one question. What question should you ask in order to determine which door leads to great happiness?

Now I have never really understood the way that this riddle (and the answer of asking one of the guards the question, ‘who will lie?’) works, but its very good analogy of the way that web sites work.

We produce our pages advertising our products and services, and then people who hit it have two doors they can use.  Door one is any of the links, menus and subjects we put on our site to lead them through our details to eventually request more information.  The other is the dreaded ‘back’ button at the top of the browser which will return them back to the search results, and to another site.

Now I know nothing about web sites, SEO and what makes people stay on a web site.  Actually, that’s not true, I know a fair bit, but compared to those who work on site optimisation every day, I know next to nothing.   But, I have been instructed well in the art of testing different landing pages to see which people prefer (that’s the one to keep), testing different types of menus to see which have the most impact, and how to grab people’s attention.

If you want to get more from your web site, get more traffic, to sell more products or services, can I direct you to the Blog of GetElastic, (subscribe to the daily RSS feed) and prepare to take your web site into the fast lane.

Yesterday I shared some of my favourite small business general RSS feeds.  Today, I complete the list with RSS feeds from some great freelancing and contracting resource and blog sites.

Freelance Folder
The Freelance folder provides a news feed which will be useful for IT contractors and freelancers looking for tips on productivity, growing their customer base, working smarter and promoting their business services.

Guerrilla Freelancing
Guerrilla Freelancing is a website news feed dedicated to helping every freelancer still in the trenches, working as hard as they can to build up a solid freelance business. It’s main objective is to be a voice for those who have not “made it” and provide straight to the point advice and tips for the guerrilla freelancer.

FreeLanceSwitch
This is a community of freelance professionals from around the world, spanning all manner of fields.  As well as providing a very good podcast, this news and information feed covers a large range of useful freelancing and contracting tips, which will prove useful for any small business owners working in or around IT.

Contract Calculator
The calculator website is a great resource for working out tax rates, how much to charge customers, day rates, and a host of other contracting tools.  The RSS feed provides finance and tax tips for IT freelancers, contractors and other small business owners.

A week or so ago, I shared a really great way of reading business RSS feeds on the go by downloading the items to an eBook.  Today I share with you a list of some of the small business RSS feeds which I subscribe to.   I subscribe to many more than are listed here, but I wanted to provide a list of my favourites.  Today I bring you general business RSS feeds, tomorrow it will be more IT freelancer and contractor specific…

ClickNewz! Internet Marketing Blog
This news and advice feed is updated daily with internet marketing strategies, affiliate tips, search marketing tutorials, website traffic ideas and ways to build passive income. You’ll also find product, service and website reviews that relate to internet marketing and online business.

Sitepoint Business Feed
This advice and tips feed covers more topics than any of the other suggestions, and most of them are out of outside of the usual business areas, but very useful none the less.  Topics may cover how to build a virtual team, use of CSS to improve your web site, dealing with spam, web site branding.

Enterprise Nation
This resource is geared more towards people who run a business from their home, but even if you run a business from a business premises or visit customers, the information can be useful to help you start and grow your business.

Ian Brodie
A great blog which deals with small business processes for getting Clients, and in particular, how to Find, Win and Retain Clients

Get Elastic
The Get elastic web site and RSS feed deals with everything a small business needs to know about ecommerce – from promoting your services on the web, through to ecommerce and social networking for more business.

Dumb Little Men Tips
Whilst this suggestion is not technically a business tips feed, Dumb Little Man will provide you weekly tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane

Sales Motivation
The sales motivate blog, website and RSS feed provides some very useful sales techniques and ideas for marketing, useful regardless of whether you are an IT specialist looking to expand your sales pipeline, or a more established business looking at gaining more revenue.

Just a very quick note to say that the RSS feed for this blog has been updated.  The new RSS link (which can be accessed by the URL below, the RSS button at the top of the page, or the RSS button which should appear in your browsers address bar) is now:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ItFreelancersContractor-MakingItWork

This has been changed as feedburner provides a richer RSS experience for both you and me.  Using feedburner, I am able to track people reading my posts, and using Feedburner, you have more options on how you can subscribe to my items.

I want you to imagine if you will, the perfect business book.  A book with the best possible advice on how to run your SME/SMB, with all the topics you ever need covered – sales, technical details, ideas, productivity – everything you need.  Now, imagine this book never ends – as you read it, more ideas are added all the time, so it’s growing with more and more ideas and useful information.

Now, lets take this idea one step further- there are sections in this fantasy book for other areas of your life – for your hobbies and interests; music, movies, book reviews, your favourite sports team, food, whatever.

Let’s complete this fantasy idea by setting a price for this magical book.   How does free sound??

Well, last week I created such a book – and it’s so easy to do.

You see, all the information is there, on the web, in blogs, forums and web sites, all available in RSS feeds, such as the RSS feed for this item at the top of the page, providing streams of articles from web sites you like.  There is a vast array of RSS readers presenting the information in multiple formats.   The problem is, if you are anything like me, when do you find the time to read all this information?  If your computer is on, you may be more interested in working than reading blog posts.

The solution, is an e-book.  An electronic book such as the fabulous Sony-505, the Amazon Kindle or even the new Apple iPAD.   Download the RSS feeds to one of these devices, and you have all of the articles and information in a format that you can read anywhere; sitting in front of the fire, or a train, in the bath, in bed, over lunch, in the park, all without a PC in site.

For moving all of your various RSS feeds into a nicely formatted eBook, I would highly recommend a Free eBook tool called calibre.  In addition to the converting of eBooks (regular electronic books) from one format to another, the Newspaper function allows the specification of as many RSS feeds as you like, and will produce an eBook on a regular specified basis with the new items, with an index, all the graphics, and best of all, a way to read this useful information on the go.  Oh, and dont forget, because you would be using the eBook to read business news, your company can pay for it, and its tax deductible.

When you create your own never ending business book, don’t forget to add the feed for this blog.