RSS - How to Promote and Profit From Your Feed

Let me ask you three questions to get you thinking. Does your website offer an RSS feed? Are you promoting your feed effectively? Are you seeing an increase in profits as a result of offering a feed to your visitors?

I'm going to outline several actionable steps you can take to promote your RSS feed both internally on your own website and externally on other websites. Then I'm going to show you a couple of effective programs to generate more profits using your RSS feed. Read what I have to say carefully, and then act on the information. I guarantee you can take it to the bank! I'm not just reiterating what others have said before. I actually acted and performed on my own websites everything I'm about to tell you and the results are awesome.

Promoting your RSS feed effectively requires a two prong approach. Start with examining your own website. Educate your visitors about the benefits of using your feed first. Then focus on external promotion second.

The average visitor won't understand what RSS is about, why it would benefit them to use it or how it even works. So there's no point in slapping up the little RSS Syndication logo on your website, linking it to your feed file and hoping people will subscribe. The simple fact is that they won't. You need to spend some time building a page on your website that briefly explains to your visitors what RSS is about and then show them how to use your feed.

Let me show you a solid example. Point your browser to this URL: http://www.profitgazette.com/syndicate.php On this page of my website I tell my visitors the various ways they can receive my content. Along with subscribing to the newsletter, a visitor is also able to subscribe to the RSS feed. I don't want to overwhelm them so I keep it brief and educate them with four points. "What is RSS? How can I use RSS? How do I get a News Reader? Can I use these feeds on my website?" See also in the top of the left column of that page (and every page on my website) how I give the visitor a quick teaser, mention a benefit to them and give them a link to my "RSS education" page? That's how I get my visitors to discover what RSS is all about. Then if you look in the center near the top of the page you'll see the little orange RSS image which doesn't just link only to my RSS feed file, I actually use a small snippet of JavaScript to make it easy for my visitors to automatically subscribe themselves to my feed with whichever news aggregator they happen to be using. Just mouse over the RSS button on that page to see what I'm talking about. You can download a copy of that JavaScript for free at http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

What's next? External feed promotion. There are lots of websites that accept RSS feed submissions. I'm not going to drop a large list of sites into this article but I have put together a large list of them here: http://www.profitgazette.com/rss-submission-list.php Visit that page when you're ready to submit your RSS feed. I personally submitted my feed to each of those sites and took a brand new website which I own from zero traffic to consistently maintaining an average of 80 unique visitors per day in two weeks from the date of submissions. So that really is a powerful submission list.

Now that you've educated your visitors on how to use your RSS feeds and are well into promoting your feed externally, what about optimizing your feed for the major search engines? Yes I said optimize. Did you know that you can optimize your feed to effectively garner traffic from MSN and Yahoo? Here's how. Do some proper keyword research using WordTracker just like you would when performing a regular SEO campaign. Identify your top 3 key phrases and use them when you write the title and description of your feed inside your RSS file. The search engines will pick up on this and in conjunction with the items inside your RSS file they will rank you accordingly, providing you with an additional stream of traffic you never had before. To alert MSN and Yahoo to the presence of your RSS feed just visit http://my.msn.com and http://my.yahoo.com and add your feed to each page. That's all there is too it.

By now you'll probably be asking yourself "How can I make some bucks with my RSS feed?" There are a number of things you can do and programs you can participate in to generate a constant stream of revenue from your feed. Obviously if your website is product/sales oriented you could drop in an advertisement about your products at the end of each item in your feed. You could also apply for the Beta RSS program which Google Adsense is offering to select partners but there is no guarantee of being accepted. Although I have noticed that Google recently updated their Adsense terms of service agreement to include RSS and feed terminology. Perhaps this may mean that the program will come out of Beta soon. See this URL for more information: https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=957 Another search engine which offers publishers the option to earn revenue on ads placed in their RSS feed is Kanoodle. More information about Kanoodle's venture into RSS is here: http://www.kanoodle.com/about/press_releases/02-28-05.cool

There is so much more to promoting your RSS feed and generating profit from it than what I could possibly hope to cover in an article and it really wouldn't be fair of me to reveal all of the secrets when somebody has already put a lot of hard work and research toward putting them into a paid publication. If you really want to learn all of the top internet marketing strategies for RSS you should purchase a copy of Rok Hrastnik's new eBook, "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS". I read Rok's book from cover to cover and implemented almost all of what I discovered through him into my websites. The difference is not just noticeable results but a completely amazing increase in exposure and profit margin.

Learn how to do your own online marketing and save money with this free, easy-to-understand web marketing newsletter. Don't waste hours searching for your next, great Internet marketing strategy. Subscribe to The Profit Gazette Weekly Newsletter today.

More Blogging RSS Articles

24 Tips and Strategies on How Everyone Can Blog Right and Get Everybody to Read
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. "Blog readership shoots up 58% in 2004 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators But 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is.

5 Secret Benefits That Bloggers Love And Enjoy
1: Building Trust RelationshipsBlogging allows bloggers to share their expertise and knowledge with a very large audience. Building a loyal audience is something that every small business owner would love to accomplish and bloggers are able to do this by simply sharing their thoughts using their business blogs.

RSS Feeds, What They Are and How to Use Them
What does RSS stand for?RSS ?Really Simple Syndication? was created in the 1999 to allow information to be published and subscribed to. RSS basically takes bits of up-to-date information from websites and provides it in concise simple text based format.

Small / Medium Business Blog Process Outsourcing as a Website Traffic Building Service
You are a small or a medium business owner. You have a well designed business website.

Blog Your Affiliate Links
Blogging is a relatively new form of communication, closely related to the newsletters of days long past. Your thoughts, ideas, and activities are posted for the world (or a chosen few) to view, and if you choose to include the option, leave a comment.

Blogs As A Marketing Tool
Blogs are the biggest things to happen to the Internet since personal home pages. Blogging software has made it easy for the average Joe to create his own blog,and the thriving community of bloggers have spurred designers to release completely free, and professionally looking templates.

How to Activate The Firefox Live Bookmark Feature on Your Site
Live Bookmark is Mozilla?s response to offering RSS feeds through their browsers and Firefox in particular. Using this technology, it?s possible for any visitor to your website to add your RSS feed in only two or three steps.

What is a Business Blog?
Although Blog was the most requested word of 2004 as per Merriam Webster Dictionary Online, there are quite a few people, for whom the word Blog is still unknown.Blog is an online journal of events, raves, rants of the people.

Advertising in RSS Feeds: Are we risking disaster?
Advertising in RSS feeds is something that Google is considering offering to its Adwords and Adsense customers. RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication and is a really easy way for a webmaster to share their news and information stories to the world wide web.

You Are Losing Money If Youre Not Using RSS Feeds On Your Website!
(An RSS primer can be found near the bottom of the article)A commercial website in 2005 is really costing itself money if it does not utilize the myriad advantages of implementing RSS feeds. RSS provides near real-time delivery of information your website visitors are interested in, it provides constantly updated content that search engines crave, and it is quite simple to implement.