To get started, FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com) is an excellent tool that allows web marketers to easily track how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed(s) while offering a historical analysis of your feed’s popularity and a breakdown of your feed’s most popular content (such as the top 5 headlines your visitors clicked on, etc.) What you want to do is create a Feedburner account if you don’t already have one and burn feed links through their web site that link to your feed’s XML file stored on your server.

Your next step is to publicize the feeds (click on the “Publicize” tab in FeedBurner). The following are 2 excellent tools you can use to publicize your RSS feeds:

BuzzBoost – This is an excellent tool that allows web designers/developers of varying skill levels to easily display your feed’s content on their web site (i.e. top 10 headlines from your feed with a brief description). This works great with search engines and benefits those who syndicate your content on their web sites by populating their pages with relevant content that appeals to their audience.

PingShot – This will automatically list your feeds with services such as Technorati, Newsgator, Ping-o-matic, Feed Crier, Alexa and many others.

A word of caution: beware of ‘link bombs’ – such as when a blogger has an unusually high amount of friends link to his or her blog in a short period of time. Google and other search engines pick up on this and can quickly classify your site as spam. Best advice is to allow people to gradually introduce displaying your feeds on their site while participating in a link exchange program… generally a good idea – whereas you setup a formal link directory page or section on your web site and encourage those you link to to link back to your site as a favor. For more info on this, Google “reciprocal link exchange programs”.

To learn more about these options, you should visit the following 3 web sites and decide which one may be best suited for your needs. Adify and AdBrite are designed more for consumer oriented web sites while Adroll offers more specific targeting for B2B companies in addition to B2C.

• Adroll – www.adroll.com
• AdBrite – www.adbrite.com
• Adify – www.adify.com

You should ask yourself whether or not you require a site-wide CMS. Publishers for instance may only need a news/article publishing system vs. having the ability to maintain their entire web content collection via the web. Such systems mimic the capability of popular blog systems such as WordPress (www.wordpress.org) and Movable Type (www.movabletype.org) — both very powerful programs.

A big negative of CMS’s is the fact that (out of the box) they tend not to rank well within search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. However, there are ways around this using mod_rewrite on UNIX/Linux systems and if you research the web enough, you may find your CMS offers add-ons/enhancements known as modules or plug-ins which can utilize mod_rewrite’s ability to automatically parse your web site and create ‘search engine friendly’ links. This may require a significant amount of time, but depending on your situation practicality of a CMS to you/your organization it may be worth the research.

All of this aside, popular open source CMS systems on the UNIX/Linux end are Drupal (www.drupal.org), Joomla (www.joomla.org) and Mambo (www.mamboserver.com). Drupal is a very advanced system used by Linux Journal, MTV (I believe in England) and many others… the downside of this system is it has a fairly high learning curve. My understanding with Joomla is many of the original core developers from Mambo’s team moved on to create Joomla so it mimics many of the basic capabilities of Mambo and is now slightly more advanced. Mambo is not a bad CMS however, was developed before Joomla and has a large community base you can use for support and is still being improved upon to date by qualified software engineers.

On the Windows end, you may want to consider looking at either DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com) or one of Ektron’s CMS’s (www.ektron.com). DotNetNuke is open source software and has a very large support base although support is limited to a forum where inquiries and responses must first be approved by a moderator which can delay response time. Ektron offers their CMS’s at-cost but they offer solid CMS products used by companies such as Yahoo, BAE Systems, etc. and you can talk to a real person when you need to by picking up the phone. Ektron offers CMS400.Net (based on ASP.Net) and CMS300 (having slightly less features and based on classic ASP)… you can review the various features via http://www.ektron.com/cms400-web-cms.aspx?id=1757.

Taking into consideration everyone’s content management needs differ, you may want to take a look at even more options available for review at www.opensourcecms.com that may more specifically match the solution you are looking for. This site lists all the major CMS’s and allows you to test-drive the front-end and administrative back-end on-demand (through their web site) vs. needing to first install on your web server and then evaluate. Google, as you may know is a great search engine for finding even more CMS options if you want to consider a commercial product instead.

And if you decide a CMS is not right for you, search engine results suggest a static/semi-static web site ranks higher than CMS-driven web sites so you have a positive here. Your organization can also manage your web site using a product called Adobe Contribute CS3 (formerly Macromedia Contribute) which allows you to assign users a key allowing them to manage certain areas of your web site while limiting their administrative permissions in the process (i.e. whether or not they can delete files, etc.)

I personally have heard of one case where a publisher has made as much as $60,000+/year on AdSense revenue and one even shared at an industry conference his company pulls in $300,000/year on qualified AdSense click-throughs. Although these accounts are unverified, I do not see how this would not be possible per personal experience integrating AdSense on various web sites and watching this revenue grow over time. Bloggers for instance are notorious for using AdSense as their primary source of income, allowing many to function as independent, full time/professional bloggers. Google has published a few interesting case studies on this topic, which may be viewed at https://www.google.com/adsense/success. You may also be interested in reviewing Google’s official AdSense Blog. If your site (or sites) pull more than ~50,000 pageviews per month, you may be surprised to see how well this program can perform.

Some optimization may be required for optimum results, such as adjusting the size and placement of the AdSense ads, colors, etc. One negative about these ads is that they presently do not launch a new window when a visitor clicks on them, which pulls them away from your web site. This is not to say however that, with some clever programming (on your site) the links embedded within the AdSense ads can do this. As a result, you may want to consider placing the ads towards the bottom of your web pages or anywhere you feel comfortable allowing your visitor to exit the web site. As one person put it, they looked upon the ads as a way to collect a small tip upon the visitor leaving.

A common misconception with the AdSense for Content ads is that they do not allow the site owner/Webmaster to remove Google’s “Advertise on this site” option. This can in fact be removed through the AdSense control panel although it may take anywhere from a few hours to a day or so for this to disappear from current ad placements. You may actually want to consider doing this as Google does not currently pay commission from ads sold through this channel – they simply encourage the use of this as it can potentially display more relevant ads and thus drive click-through revenue higher.

Another misconception is AdSense only drives text ads. While this may be the most popular, Google also allows one to display traditional image ads and even flash video ads if they are relevant to the web page content and if an image ad/flash ad is available for a specific ad size (there are a number of ad sizes available, many corresponding to IAB Standards and Guidelines (universal web ad sizes per http://www.iab.net/standards/adunits.asp).

You will need to decide whether this program is practical for your site and your site’s audience but AdSense has proven to be effective for thousands of Webmasters/e-commerce marketing professionals. Whether you are displaying the ads exclusively or running the ads in the absence of traditional CPM or fixed-priced ads, you may find AdSense for Content a worthwhile pursuit for enhancing revenue from your web site.

For example, you may view an article and see a double-underlined phrase and when you point your mouse over the link, a ‘bubble’ appears (such as the conversational bubbles you see in newspaper comic strips) displaying an ad relevant to that specific phrase. These ads appear in a variety of different formats, embedding text and/or static graphic ads or even dynamic flash video ads. Interestingly enough, ContentLink ads bypass built-in pop-up blockers in at least Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox so implementing this could prove to be a valuable enhancement to your web site, if practical.

As a pay-per-click program, publishers earn extra income if a user clicks on the ads displayed in the ContentLink ads. Per Kontera’s guidelines for new accounts, the program is currently limited to web sites receiving at least 500,000 page impressions per month although they may be willing to waive this guideline on a case-by-case basis.

Once implemented on your web site, you may need to fine-tune the appearance of the ContentLink links appearing within your content. Publishers have the ability to customize the link’s color, whether the link is to be single or double underlined and can program filters using span tags associated with a class Kontera defined to prevent ads from appearing in certain areas of a specific web page. Publishers can also adjust the frequency of ContentLink ads, preventing certain keywords/phrases from being attached to ContentLink ads, etc. via an e-mail request to Kontera.

In summary, ContentLink offers yet another web advertising stream for you to use that cleverly embeds advertisements with hyperlinks associated with your web page content. For more information, visit http://kontera.com/default.aspx?id=20 for a full overview of Kontera’s contextual advertising solution for publishers.