RSS feeds and article marketing
RSS feeds are currently an underused way to market your articles. You can improve your visibility and readership through RSS feeds and get more web traffic.
In case you’re not familiar with RSS, it often stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows website owners to quickly and easily publish syndicated content in real time. Although it has been around for years, its popularity is still limited considering how practical and powerful it is. Subscribers can not only keep up with your content in real time, but other publishers can link to your feed and use it on their site for up-to-date content.
Due to its sophistication, RSS is a powerful tool, still overlooked by many marketers. Because subscribers don’t share their email, multiple messages can be sent in a day without being considered spam by an inbox monitor. The feeds are sent to a feed reader or aggregator and do not use email addresses at all.
It is not the purpose of this article to describe the complete operation of RSS. If you want to know, Wikipedia has a great technical explanation. However, in simple terms, a website author creates a feed on her website. They can use feed creation software, or they can use a web-based resource like Feedburner to do it for them. Interested readers click on the website link. It could say RSS, Feed or XML. They then take the URL of the feed and paste it into a feed reader or aggregator, such as those found on the web and found at My.Yahoo, My.MSN, and Google+. Summaries of each post or update are listed for the subscriber to read. If they are interested, they can click the link and read the full article on the publication’s website.
How do you achieve article marketing through RSS feeds?
As an author, create an individual feed for your site. If you’re posting to article directories, it’s probably already done for you. As a marketer, you should take advantage of that and post the feed link on popular RSS submission sites. Once this is done, whenever you post a new article it will be instantly added to the feed. Also, add your own site’s feed link to every article you submit, creating more quality links that search engines love, as well as encouraging readers to subscribe to your own site’s feed.
Using your RSS feeds through your article marketing efforts is an additional way to drive new potential customers to your site. Also, you can use Google advertising in your feeds for an additional revenue stream.
The biggest benefit of using RSS feeds is that people who subscribe are interested in your articles and updates and want to know when you’ve posted something new. It can also help you with your website’s ranking in search engine results, because search engines prefer sites with regular updates.
Now is the perfect time to start adding your RSS feeds to your article marketing efforts and start reaping the results.