Search engines and other forms of Internet marketing are effective at attracting new visitors to your website, but they can only carry you so far. If you desire a simple, affordable, and highly effective method of increasing your exposure and traffic, an RSS feed is exactly what you need. RSS feeds are a really simple way to expand your audience
In addition to increasing your online visibility, RSS will improve your search engine rankings, hasten the indexing of your new content by the major search engines, and drive traffic to your website from other, similar sites. Businesses will also see a significant increase in repeat customers, and will have the added benefit of being able to deliver advertising or product updates to customers as soon as they are published.
RSS, which stands for “really simple syndication,” allows you to automatically distribute your website content to infinite numbers of web users. As soon as your content is published, it is fed to special readers and distributed immediately to everyone subscribed to your feed. Your existing audience will be exposed to your new content as often as you are able to publish it. Moreover, because your feeds will be quickly indexed, your chances of being discovered through the major search engines will dramatically increase.
RSS feeds are free, and the only expense involved with this marketing strategy will be the costs associated with maintaining your website and creating your content. To be fully effective, your content will need to be updated frequently. If you do not have the time or ability to create fresh, unique content to add to your website or blog, you should considering hiring someone to write your content for you. Without fresh content, your audience will lose interest and your ranking will suffer in search engine results.
All major blogging software includes the tools needed to create and publish RSS feeds. When one of your visitors subscribes to your feed, they copy the URL into a feed reader. Your visitors will automatically receive excerpts of your content, or the full article, as soon as your content is published.
Website owners and bloggers have a number of different RSS feed formats to choose from, but not all feed readers are able to understand all feed formats. The use of a service like FeedBurner will ensure that your visitors are able to read your content. In addition to automatically converting your RSS feed into every available format, FeedBurner offers a range of traffic-tracking tools that allow you to monitor the number of visitors using your feed and the type of content that they are clicking on most often.
Contrary to what some believe, the use of RSS does not discourage visitors from returning to your site. Enabling RSS often results in a greater number of repeat visitors, and brings traffic to your site from RSS directories. Adding your feed to these directories boosts your visibility, increases links to your website, and enables you to connect with an audience that might have otherwise been out of reach.
Regardless of the type of business or website you own, RSS feeds should be an essential part of marketing your product or service. Although RSS is not typically used as a primary marketing tool, its ability to generate traffic and increase brand recognition should not be ignored.
Tags: content syndication, feed reader, feedburner, really simple syndication. rss, rss feed formats, rss feeds
Share With Others
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
June 13th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Thank you very much for the explanation. RSS simply means an effective way to bring the traffic to the site. But the problem lies in getting customers to sign up for our feed. So getting their interest is very important and this is where success lies. As has been said before, fresh and unique contents will always bring good traffic and that is what youneed to build first.
June 13th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Aye, if you have a popular blog, but it’s slow-moving, people might start losing interest and stop checking it after a few days of no activity.
At least when an RSS feed is active, they can see at a glance if you’ve updated your blog or not.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Huh, I never saw the point in RSS.. I figured it was just a way of getting updates, and I never found the need to use it myself on other sites, so I didn’t see it necessary to add it to mine. I didn’t realize that it had other benefits as well.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
RSS feeds have been around for a very long time whether or not people realize it. Back in the mid to late 90’s very few people used them although they were available. I think that it is interesting to see how much of a need they have become for some sites.
They are important as they help you to have more to offer people visiting the site. But a lot of people do not realize how valuable they can really be.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I have noticed that my blog gets indexed more frequently since I added RSS feed on my site. Even if my page rank is 0, I’m able to compete with those with high rankings on search engines with the use of an RSS feed. My problem right now is how to increase my feed subscriber. Can you write a topic about that too?
June 16th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I never really did understand the deal with RSS feeds til now. I just knew it was some kind of free subscription thing. I use Opera and it gives popup messages on the bottom right corner each time the site’s updated. Pretty neat. I’m going to use that RSS feed more often.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:55 am
I’ve always subscribed to Rss feeds for my sites but I have never thought about having a feed of my own. This would be a great way to reach out to a wider audience.
Thanks for the article. It is comprehensive and covers the basic details of creating RSS feeds for newbies like me.
June 19th, 2008 at 6:23 am
This is true because if someone subscribes to your feed, it’s because he likes your site and chances are he is going to come back to comment on most posts and share his thoughts about it. That is based on my experience
June 20th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Thanks you for your tips. I don’t know there are such thing like the burner. Its difficult sometimes to make sure that my visitor can read the rss. But an ordinary layout will make them boring. I never think to create my own rss, but you right anyway. It is a bigger chance to reach the audience. I ust have to figure out the best way to promote.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Rss feeds are great, they allow you to reach a broader audience then you usually would. I didn’t realize Rss feeds had been around for so long. All I know is that a few years ago it seemed like almost over night, everyone had an Rss feed set up.
Thanks for the great information.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Another great point about adding RSS feeds to the blog is that the content keeps refreshing and that helps to get the search engine spiders to crawl the site more often thus helping the blog to get more organic traffic from the search engines , but it’s better to carefully choose the site or blog one gets the rss feeds from because they might compete with other products on your blog if not chosen carefully.