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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.prof
itgazette.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.or
g/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.
About the author:
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.
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