It took me a while to figure out what  RSS was and why it is such a great advertising tool.  I had my blog going for 6 months before I even logged in to my feed and realized I could customize it – add adsense and images to it.  When was the last time you logged into your feed and actually saw what other people see when they subscribe to your site?  Do you know how many people have subscribed and how to get more to sign up?  You can advertise your RSS feed just like you can advertise anything else on the internet.  Check out this info on RSS Publishing -

So you’ve created an RSS feed and it contains current cutting edge information in your field of interest. Now how do you get the word out to other  webmasters who might be interested in putting the content from your RSS feed on their site?

Just how easy, or hard, is it to publish your feed and have other webmasters pick it up and publish it on their site?

If you’ve created your feed and validated it then most of the hard work is complete. Now you’re going to get the word out about it being available.

So what should be your first step?

I think I would first give the search engines the easiest path to find your feed and index it. To get the search engines to do this you should add this short piece of html code to between the tags on the webpage that has a link for your feed.

Be sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml with the URL to the RSS feed.

Next, I would be sure to display the Feed on your website using a graphic. The basic RSS or XML graphic in bright orange rectangles, will lead people visually to the feed.

Here’s an RSS graphics tool that will allow you to customize a graphic for your site:
http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm

Now that you have it on your site I would begin submitting your feed to all of the RSS directories and search engines you can find. The last time I reviewed them there was well over a hundred (that I could find).

Here is a link to a great list of RSS directories:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

By submitting to directories and search engines you will be helping to increase the link popularity of your feed and your site.

You can also use email to promote your RSS Feed. Simply include the feed url in your sig file on all outgoing mail. If you have an ezine be sure to include it in each issue. I would also go so far as to provide a link to a either or both a desktop RSS reader and a website reader for those webmaster who may want to use your content on their site.

Another way to promote your feed is to include the feed on a personal my.yahoo or my.msn home page. This is probably the fastest way to have your feed spidered by Yahoo and MSN. If you don’t already have an account and a personal webpage go to each site and create one. After you have created your account add your RSS Feed. In Yahoo, go to your personal page click on Add Content, then add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box.

A good point to keep in mind is to have content available in your feed before you add it to either of your personal webpages on the SE’s above.

To keep the search engine spiders coing back you can implement a simple strategy to let them know you have posted new material and it’s time to come back. This strategy is simply called ‘pinging’.

You can let the main RSS/blog directories know you have placed new material by “pinging” them. Now you could go to each of the directories individually or you could automatically ‘ping’ all of them at once by going to this site:

http://www.pingomatic.com

You type in your rss/blog URL, Click Submit and Pingomatic will send your ping to all of the large directories available on its page. Doing this will bring the spiders back to your site almost immediately!

Be sure to add relevant content to your RsSS feed as often as you can as the more often you add new content the more likely you will be to develop more traffic.

Once you’ve started implementing these ideas and strategies you should be well on your way to getting more recognition for your RSS Feed.

Author Ed Duvall is a webmaster for http://www.cashway.com and http://www.instantnettraffic.com providing internet marketing tools and resourcesto help you with your online business.

Related posts:

1. Publishing Your RSS Feed Internet Wide