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RSS Feeds and Blogging for fun and profit!
Make Money From Blogs Without Writing A Single Word...
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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.
Blogging - Whats It All About
A blog usually is a web page that contains brief, discrete hunks of information called posts. These posts are arranged in reverse-chronological order (the most recent come first) and each is uniquely identified by an anchor tag which is marked with a permanent link that can be referred to by others who wish to link to it.
7 Questions To Ask Yourself BEFORE Staring A Business Blog
Blogging is the latest buzzword in online marketing and PR.
RSS Latest News - Blogging or Blagging?
The RSS latest news suggests that RSS can stand for 'Really Simple Syndication', 'Rich Site Summary' or probably other interpretations of the acronym. An RSS tool is one that can deliver the technology where it is required.
A Blog Isnt Just For Christmas
I was watching the news on TV last night and there was a warning about buying puppies as Christmas presents. There's nothing worse than visiting the kennels in the new year and seeing all those unwanted dogs that were chosen as presents because they were so cute at the time. It reminded me of people who start a blog in the hope of making some money online only to give up after a few days or weeks when things don't work out.
Will RSS Replace Email?
RSS is a big buzz word right now, and this question has been popping up all over the place.
Podcasting vs. Blogging
The US Navy blogs. Larry Kudlow of CNBC blogs. I'd say "everybody and their brother" except (1) it's a cliche and (2) it may be grammatically inaccurate. Dan Rather is only too aware that everybody blogs.
Making Money with RSS Feeds
First it was banner ads, then Google AdSense and now, the latest way to make money on your web site could very well be RSS feeds. Say what? I said: RSS is hot and you should be using it to drive eyeballs to your site.
RSS & How to Use It -- Part 2
Welcome to part 2 of the article that aims to give you just enough information to help you understand RSS and start using it.
3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog
Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds? No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog. The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs. Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it. In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern. Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it's definitely a plus. What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you. Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method. (If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.) This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone. These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results. You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share. The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked. In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written. Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you. Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed. So why don't more people use Trackback? One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away. Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again. It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site. The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog. Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers. It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now. These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article. To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week. That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published. There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you'll soon find, that's part of the reason they are so effective.
5 Easy Ways To Use RSS On Your Site
You hear so much talk about RSS these days on the Internet and in the media. Everyone is acknowledging it's importance in boosting your site's presence on the web. Not to mention how it can increase your site's traffic and ranking. But what exactly is RSS and how can I actually use it on my site? Try these Five Easy Ways...
The Viability of Blogging to a Niche Market
Niche marketing is an old and very successful marketing strategy whereby a company focuses on marketing and selling to a clearly defined segment of potential consumers. The company earns by supplying a unique product or service to this narrowly defined market which other companies have not met or provided.
How to Use Blog Exchanges
Traffic exchanges and blog traffic exchanges are a way to expose your blog or site to traffic by visiting other blogs and sites. I have looked at many such exchanges and selected what I though to be the best of these to see what sort of traffic I could bring to my site.
Blogs: Why, Where and How
So you have heard about the blogs or you are sure you are now going through one of the blog. You might have seen blogs in the search results and would not have noticed it. Yes blogs are now making news but still a large number of people consider them as online diaries or a political mouthpiece. What about the business blogs that is lately surfacing on the web sphere? Top companies like GM's Fastlane blog is there to prove the point that blog works. The problem is that regular media is not accepting it as one of the most promising medium, which could be as powerful as the newspapers, or tv channels in the future. Thanks to RSS, blog contents could be read via email as and when it is published.
How Can You Use Blogs To Increase Traffic?
I am conducting my 1st customer appreciation webcast and asked my subscribers list what is their most pressing question they have about blogs and rss.
RSS Works: Hard Metrics to Prove It
Marketers are constantly asking if RSS marketing works and if this can be proved.
Blogging Policies, Does Your Business Need One?
Weblogs or Blogs as they are more commonly referred to, have become extremely popular in the last several years. So popular in fact that many large businesses are letting some employees post Blogs on their corporate websites. While many businesses are jumping on the Blog bandwagon for use as a creative marketing technique; a few businesses have fired employees for what they posted on a Blog. These businesses accuse the employees of allegedly disclosing trade secrets, proprietary information, and making statements that showed the employer in a bad light.
RSS - The Making of a Feed
Everyday more and more websites, news services and blogs are adding RSS content. RSS is a method of syndicating content.The concept of aggregating content in one central location or repository is very appealing. Consumers have become tired of push technology, RSS allows users the flexibility to regain control of their content. RSS feed creators provide content without forcing it on consumers. In fact with RSS consumers are able to choose the content they wish to view.
Using RSS Feeds to Set Off a Traffic Explosion
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the perfect answer to your needs for sharing and distributing content. The way this works is webmasters can share bits of code with one another that give them access to the others forums, newsletters, blogs, information, news, and the like. When this information is shared, it can create a massive increase in traffic. Read the following suggestions regarding RSS feeds and increasing traffic for your website to decide if this is the right marketing tool for you.
Top 10 Ways to Get People Online to Read Your Business Blog
There are many advantages of running a blog, on top of your business website. A blog is an online diary, whereby you can easily posts clips about yourself, your thoughts and your personal life. If you publish a business blog, you posts good content, articles, breaking news or just about anything to build awareness of what you are selling.
5 New Internet Marketing Opportunities Through RSS
When it comes to new internet marketing opportunities for your business, RSS just might be the answer you were looking for. Here are just some of the new opportunities it can provide you with ?