What NOT to Do with RSS

Some thoughts on blogs, pinging, RSS feeds and site promotion and something you definitely don't want to do and how to avoid it with a minimum of pain.

Everybody is hot on using RSS to increase their traffic, promote their sites and do their marketing. Why?

Well, it's newish - at least within the internet marketing segment. Not as new as it was a year or so ago, of course. Getting significant results is a little harder as the competition increases.

With the profusion of blogs and spam blog-pinging to attract the search engine spiders to index static pages, the utility of this approach has been seriously impaired by unscrupulous overkill.

Pinging every 3 minutes is - even to an idiot - absurd - or at least it should be. Why not just scream, "I AM AN AUTOMATED SEARCH ENGINE SPAM PROGRAM." Lovely footprint, very hard for even a seriously brain-damaged bot to identify.

Still there are a lot of sites with RSS feeds that are real feeds being produced as pages change and new content is added. So, yes, RSS feeds still work. Maybe not as fast and maybe they are less powerful than they were, but RSS remains a valid and increasingly necessary part of site promotion.

Techniques do get abused and the early rapid response tends to decline as a result. If people were a little clearer about what they're doing and why and how it all works, the frenzied search for new approaches could, perhaps, be a little less daunting. And if the quick buck artists were less successful at misleading people into doing things that are bad for everybody in the long run, then . . . but that's how it is, was, and apparently will be forever more.

One thing about a real feed - it's for more than getting bots to index your pages. If that's all you want then you can stop reading here.

For the remaining readers (if any), consider the single most critical element of any marketing or website promotion effort. You can have the most magnificent site, the greatest ever-changing content, beautiful and valid feeds in all formats -- and very little in the way of traffic. Unlike the search engines who have all those lovely spiders we are so hot to gain the attention of - most blog/RSS search engines and directories do not send out bots in search of RSS feeds.

Nope. You have got to submit to them. I know. I've done the smart thing - submit to a bunch - and the incredibly unspeakably stupid thing - letting the submissions slide because, frankly, it's a horrible boring tedious and extremely boring (did, I mention how boring it is?) job. That's not a very pretty admission, but there you are. I have a limited ability to tolerate severe boredom - even when I know I'm hurting myself.

And if you don't do the submissions, you won't get the traffic you could have. And that means fewer conversions, sales, opt-ins or whatever it is your site is about.

Ah, but there are answers to this problem. RSS submission services exist and so do RSS submission tools. In fact here's a new (still in beta) service that allows you to submit to 17 blog/RSS search engines - with more promised - for free. It's called FeedShot and you can find it at http://www.feedshot.com/

Now with FeedShot you need to enter each feed individually. However, with a tool like RSS Submitter you can enter from 3 (in the free evaluation version) feeds to an unlimited number in the SEO version. RSS Submitter then submits automatically to over 70 blog and RSS search directories and can also be used to do additional manual submissions with auto-form filling.

This tool is the purest gold for the serious RSS feed marketer. It works, it's easy to use and it saves you incredible amounts of time - and eliminates that nasty boring tedious repetitive work. Check it out and download a free evaluation copy through http://www.MarketingWithRSS.com/rss-submitter/

Just to be clear here you should realize that you can create and use RSS feeds without ever using any of the ping sites. RSS feed updates are noted by RSS readers/aggregators which check feeds for new content either on demand or on a schedule. RSS/blog search directories also check on a regular basis. Users find your feed through these directories. Again, if you want visitors, then no matter how you do it, you've got to submit.

Obviously, if your feed is produced by a blog, you'll want to notify ping sites when your content is updated. But you still need to submit the feeds. And you can also submit your blog URL to a whole host of pure blog directories, but that's a different subject.

The people who use RSS readers/aggregators in addition to or in place of a browser are the real target group for RSS marketing. When you consider how and what you want to market with RSS, keep in mind that this group tends to still be made up of relatively affluent, early adopters with some technical sophistication, a taste for new technology, a low boredom threshold and a keen appreciation of the value of their time. And don't forget to submit.

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and professional presentations, eCommerce related matters, RSS and more. For more information on RSS Marketing - http://www.MarketingWithRSS.com/blog and on eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building - http://www.building-ecommerce-websites.com

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