Getting a web presence up and running is not a difficult task in today's digital age.
Another issue that requires a bit more thought, planning, time allocation and careful implementation is actually profiting off that presence. So many products and systems offer easy immediate results that promise to generate large profits with little or no work on your part. For those of us who have a bit of experience under our belt, we know that there is no magic formula. The truth is, one has to implement multiple strategies in starting, building and growing their online presence in order to reap actual benefits.
We started Rak-Wholesale.com in an attempt to aggregate the most up to date expert advice, resources and tools geared towards providing a useful information community for all those web entrepreneurs - new and old.
Our site (www.Rak-Wholesale.com) has launched in a minimal format and provides regularly updated articles and resources as well as video guides to rest tired eyes. In the future we will be adding user forums, networking platforms, chat, article and directory submissions and more.
This blog will outline the progress and status behind the scenes in our online community and hopefully will provide you all with useful insights from an actual start-up's point of view.
Of course, we are not that selfless - we would love to hear from you as well! If you have any comments about our blog, the site itself, any features you would like to see or any critiques, please e-mail our team at blog@rak-wholesale.com
So, we haven't posted for a couple of days. The main reason is we've been too busy kicking ourselves for succumbing to the temptation of easy syndication, easy stats and drag and drop bookmarking buttons we could add to our feed without overexerting ourselves. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, it's pretty simple - we let feedburner hijack our feed and are now backtracking to try and get it back.
The first few weeks of our love affair with feedburner was all champagne and roses.
Readership numbers rising, services being pinged automatically - how wonderful. But then the unimaginable happened... feedburner somehow managed to hijack our feed. If anyone clicked on the link back to the website from within their reader, feedburner somehow managed to redirect them to the wrong url - an article hosted on feeds.feedburner.com instead of Rak-Wholesale.com.
Not a complete disaster, only problem is - we have no way of fixing this, since we cannot edit the xml file, and we can't get our readers back since they are all owned by feedburner now - thanks to our laziness...
But this isn't the only problem we were experiencing with feedburner.
Since one of the main reasons we opted for this Google service to begin with was the fact that they promised to serve adsense ads within feeds, but as you all might have noticed possibly from your own experience - this does not happen. As a result, we researched into alternate ways to serve ads withing feed posts. Apparently this isn't an easy task either. If you try to implement the services mentioned in a previous post (monetize your feed) you will be faced with similar issues - feedflare all but crashing your reader and scripts you cannot implement because - again - you have limited control over the output unless you resort to hacking your core php files - something we just assume not attempt.
In any case, if you are thinking about using feedburner for your syndication, and the above reasons didn't make you rethink your decision, you might want to read a very important post which explains why you should keep control of your readers, and how you could still benefit from feedburner's statistics without relinquishing all control.
In the next couple of days we will be backtracking, hacking and reclaiming control of our hard earned feed and subscribers. We strongly suggest you rethink your syndication and subscription options and keep your valuable readers your own. You earned it - no reason to give them away.
And again - the url of our site is www.Rak-Wholesale.com - NOT feeds.feedburner.com.
We are currently experiencing technical issues with Feedburner parsing our feeds.
We have opted to republish our feeds with feedburner in order to take advantage of their multi platform/multi reader support and enhanced statistics. However, for some reason, the last couple of days, if you tried to click through to our articles from your rss reader, you were pointed to our article on feedburner.com instead of our domain: Rak-Wholesale.com.
We are trying to work out the kinks. (if you use feedburner to publish your feeds, you've probably also noticed that since Google has purchased Feedburner, there have been more and more problems popping up and less solutions)
In any case, if you would like to click through to the article on our site, then you will need to manually replace "feeds.feedburner.com" with "www.rak-wholesale.com"
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and are working at fixing the issue.
As a last resort, we might forego this service altogether, since the original feed works just fine - unfortunately, this would mean that all our subscribers would have to change the feed address and re-subscribe - and we would like to avoid that.
If you publish your feed through feedburner, you might want to validate your links and your feed's health. Note though, that when we use the feedmedic feature on feedburner, no issues are reported - so you might want to do this manually....
Likewise, if you know of a workaround or solution to this issue - we would be very happy to hear from you!
We're happy to announce that our 2 week old, little known site has been slowly but surely attracting new and repeat visitors. While a quick check on visitor statistics last week returned slow results, in the last week we have attracted an average of 50 new visitors per day!
This little rise in numbers can be attributed to two very important efforts:
Internet Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You might be asking the question: why are you so excited about 50 daily visitors... Well first off, we would like to stress that these are 50 unique new visitors, not visitors that have come back (since our content is so useful, wouldn't you agreet?) And secondly, you must remember that we only launched the site about two weeks ago. Most new sites don't even get indexed that fast!!
We are happy to announce that we are one step further to building an interactive, useful online networking community for all online entrepreneurs! After some testing and retesting, we have added some new features available exclusively to our members - free publicity!
If you have been following our blog, you know that we have been working hard at getting our fresh new site listed and indexed by the top search engines, Google and Yahoo. Although we are still not at the top of the list, we're happy to report that in just under a week, our site has been crawled by not only Google and Yahoo, but by numerous other search engine robots and at least 14 pages (as of March 16) are indexed by Google. Want to see which pages are indexed? Go to Google.com and type "site:Rak-Wholesale.com" in the search box.
Don't Miss a Story!
We are happy to announce that we are one step further to building an interactive, useful online networking community for all online entrepreneurs! After some testing and retesting, we have added some new features available exclusively to our members - free publicity!
Although we are still not at the top of the list, we're happy to report that in just under a week, our site has been crawled by not only Google and Yahoo, but by numerous other search engine robots and at least 14 pages (as of March 16) are indexed by Google. Want to see which pages are indexed? Go to Google.com and type "site:Rak-Wholesale.com" in the search box.