Rok: Do you have any more publishing advice, not related strictly to RSS publishing?

John: Whatever advice I have offered in this interview is not strictly related to RSS publishing. It is targeted to anyone publishing online who wants to make their readers, rather than themselves or their advertisers, the focus of their publishing efforts. It is for any publisher who wants to make content the heart of their newsletter. It is for any publisher who really wants to be a professional. It is for any publisher who truly wants to be recognized as an expert in their field.

The main advice I would give ANY publisher is focus on content. Make offering high quality articles the heart and soul of your newsletter. Remember people use the Internet not to find advertising, but to find information they can use in their everyday personal and business lives.

The second piece of advice, which is related to the first, is to write your own articles. Do the research to become an expert in your field. If the topic of your newsletter is holistic health care for cats, then learn all you can about that subject. Share what you learn with your readers by writing articles about what you have learned.

A publisher should, first and foremost, be a teacher and learner. You cannot teach what you do not know. Learn all you can about your topic and then teach what you learn to others. That is how you become recognized as an expert in your field. That is how you gain credibility and trust. You must be willing to share your knowledge and expertise with others. No secrets.

The best way to get yourself ranked on the search engines is to, first, put your articles online. Sending them out via email will do absolutely nothing for your rankings. The search engines do not spider email, they spider web pages. Get other people to use your articles. That will get you linking partners, another important step in gaining rankings. High search engine rankings will help the people you want as readers find you. Select a half-dozen or so key word phrases that are appropriate to your topic, words that are used to search for content in your topic, and use those in your articles. In other words, make your content key word rich - 4-7% is optimal.

In my considered opinion, based on my own experience as well as that of my fellow Quikonnex publishers, the most efficient and effective way to implement this advice is by becoming a Quikonnex publisher. I hope by now your readers and mine understand that email is no longer the best delivery system. I hope they also understand that Quikonnex is more than just RSS publishing. You, Rok, have ADDED RSS publishing as a delivery system along with email. But, I guarantee you are not getting the same benefits from your publishing efforts as we Q publishers are.

The main reason for that is you are out there doing your thing all by yourself. You do not have the community support that we get as members of the Q publishing community. That community support is built into the system, a system that is, yes, based in RSS publishing, but it is so much more than just RSS publishing. You keep shrugging off Quikonnex as "RSS publishing," as just another delivery system, when, in reality it is so much more.

That is why I am so very proud of being a Q publisher, why I am so evangelistic about Quikonnex. To equate Quikonnex with RSS publishing is the same as equating the space shuttle with Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. Yes, they both are flying machines, but the quality of the flights are very different. I don't know about you, but I'd feel safer in the shuttle than in the Spirit.

To say Quikonnex is just another delivery system is to say that the Hubble space telescope is no better than the telescope designed by Galileo. After all, they both use the same basic physics principles. However, you have to agree that we can do and see so much more with the Hubble than Galileo could with his telescope.

Or, to use one final analogy, the RSS publishing system you use is a Ford Model T. Quikonnex is a 2005 BMW 325i. But you really cannot appreciate the differences between the two until you have driven both. Nor can you really make a fair comparison between them until you have driven both. So, Rok, I hope that, if this interview accomplishes nothing else, it will get you to refrain from equating Quikonnex with the kind of RSS publishing you are doing. You, like so many other, really do not understand the differences, nor can you until you actually use the system. I, and all the others Q publishers, can try to explain the differences, but those are only words. Words cannot really do justice to Quikonnex because yo understand what Q can do, when used properly, requires a fundamental change in attitude. The best analogy I can think of is this: Do you really think that Neil Armstrong had the same attitude towards flying after being the first man to step on the moon? Don't you think that AFTER he came back from the moon, his whole attitude toward flying underwent a fundamental change?