If you’ve heard about this new blogging software called Firepow around the web, you’re not alone.

Firepow won’t be released until July 1st, but I thought I’d post about it here with all the information I can gather for now so that you can stay well informed up until it’s launch

Basically Firepow is a blogging software but with a whole lot of features stacked on top of it… features that seem to make it a pretty darn interesting little (or big) tool.

It’s based on wordpress, and begins by installing you a nice wp blog - in fact from what I can tell, REALLY nice - you can create your own blog theme from scratch if you want, with the advanced theme generator and then select from a list of all the plugins under the sun, to have installed and activated on your blog with no further action from you.

Then you can go about adding your content - you can set the content to appear on schedules, including into the future, plus you can take advantage of other people’s content via various means not disclosed yet…

It also seems to have a focus on video content but I’m not quite sure in what capacity yet - in any case, more relevant video on your site can only be a good thing - oh and as well - they just released that there will be an “add camtasia video plugin” so you can easily get camtasia vids on your blog without using youtube… which if you’re in internet/software niches is a BIG plus.

Anyway after your blog is looking good with all the cool content, Firepow helps you generate traffic and promote your site around the web. At the moment the only traffic tactic I’ve seen is the promotion of your site through an in house network of blogs owned by Andrew which you can use to obtain links and a few extra visitors.

I’ve also heard mention of social bookmarking and rss feed promotion but we can’t be sure about what capacity these tools take.

Finally Firepow apparently lets you manage your sites too. You can view and make changes to your multiple sites from the one control panel, as well as monitor certain aspects of them.

One plugin we saw released was one that allows a user to split test variations of posts you make to see what generates the most click throughs. That alone makes this product exciting for me.

Even though what we’ve seen so far seems only a fraction of what this software will be capable of.

If you want to check out more of Firepow for yourself, click here.

RSS is a huge part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon that is taking the web by storm. RSS provides an easy way for people who are interested in your content to subscribe to your site and have it delivered to them. Internet experts cannot even agree what the letters “RSS” even stand for. You get nearly equal votes for “Rich Site Summary” and “Really Simple Syndication”. Whatever the letters stand for, RSS is a tool that every blogger should be using to gain publicity for their site, and to keep interested surfers regularly reading your content.

The key to RSS feed internet marketing is to provide content which people will find interesting enough to come back and read regularly. This is the great problem bloggers all over the world face. Getting top quality content written at an economically viable price is by no means easy. There are many writers on freelance sites quoting very low fees, but often the quality of the work, and of the service, is not up to the standard needed by professional businesses. Some of the top businesses can take control of the situation by employing their own writers outright, but that is beyond the scope of most of us when we are starting out.

There are now even ways to incorporate RSS feeds into a type of email marketing replacement strategy. Marketers who have become ever more disillusioned by deliverability problems associated with email marketing can use an RSS feed to deliver their content with far greater reliability. The big problem with this is that a lot of computer users who are completely comfortable and familiar with using email struggle to understand RSS.

As Web 2.0 becomes ever more commonplace, these problems should recede, and RSS will have an ever more important role to play in content distribution. There even exists the possibility of using RSS feeds as part of paid content distribution, using RSS as a replacement for email due to its greater reliability. This is a serious possibility for the future of RSS feed internet marketing.

Using Digg for driving traffic to a website is controversial. Some people claim it is not even worth doing, yet others have had massive success with it. Digg seems to be like this, extremes with very little middle ground.

There is so much importance attached to getting on the front page. If you can manage to get a story on to the home page of Digg, then you can expect to receive thousands of extra visitors to your site. It really is worth shooting for if you have any chance of making it happen.

You will need to submit your story to Digg, and then rely on other people to vote for it. This is what is known as a “Digg”. You will need a good number of votes to have any chance of making it to the home page and picking up the thousands of extra visitors.

It has been estimated at over fifty, and it is unlikely to ever get any less, as ever greater numbers of people are using the site, yet the amount of space remains the same. If you can get someone else to submit the story, or if it happens naturally, that is so much better, and will give you a much higher chance of getting the votes you need.

If you want to give your story the best possible chance of being voted for, you need to attract the reader’s attention quickly. This means that having an interesting headline and description is of paramount importance. There are plenty of competing articles, and the reader can’t read them all.

Give them a compelling reason to read yours. It also makes a difference if your content is fresh and relevant. If you are writing on topics which are current and hot right now, your chances of getting votes increases enormously.

Don’t forget also that readers are more likely to vote for something which is of genuine use to them, so if you can produce an article with genuinely helpful information in it, you will certainly gain votes.