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5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs to Publish a News Feed
By Tinu AbayomiPaul (c) 2004

It seems like everyone is talking about RSS Feeds. They've been 
around for years but the buzz is up about them as the technology 
continues to go mainstream. Some people are reportedly abandoning 
their browsers and viewing the web through their readers - but 
they hardly represent the general public yet. 

So does your site need one?

This question is somewhat like asking if your site needs a
newsletter. Sure, the sky won't fall tomorrow if you don't get 
one today, but once you realize the benefits of having a news 
feed for your site, and try it for yourself, you may become an 
addict like the rest of us.

Reason #1: More free traffic to your site

I'm not exaggerating when I say that a frequently updated feed 
can bring you massive amounts of traffic in a short time period. 
This won't be true forever. 

Here's a snapshot in PDF format, of just the feed-originating 
traffic to a new page of my site for the first 24 hours it 
opened. 

http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/2-rss-marketing/screenshot.pdf 

Not exactly a stampede, but here's the good part. 

On the fourth day, the feed traffic doubled, and all other 
traffic continued to rise at the same rate. 

That's my fifth active feed of the twenty I have spread out over 
four sites, and I get similar results each time. In thirty days, 
that would be at least 5,000 new targeted visitors - again, this 
is not counting my present traffic, or those who try my feed and 
stay subscribed, nor does it factor in what happens when the 
traffic doubles again..

I can't promise you the exact same results, no one can. But you 
should know that my feed is targeted towards a crowded market - 
if you know how to set up your feed properly and correctly apply 
your keyword research, you could have better results.

Those visitors, from the first hour of traffic to today, 
resulted just from submitting my feed to the list of directories 
I compiled from many sources and studied. Some bring great free 
traffic to new feeds, some are better once your feed has matured.

You can often get better placement in feed directories and in 
Yahoo's RSS Directory than you could from your results in a 
regular search engine, and often, inclusion is instant.

Reason #2: It's a hands-off way to update your audience

What if you could run your newsletter without the hassles of 
maintaining your list, removing bounced addresses, finding new 
subscribers, formatting the content you find, altering your 
content to keep from being blacklisted, and after all that, 
wondering if all the various blockers mistakenly kept your 
message from getting through?

If that sounds like heaven, you can be one of the angels as soon 
as an hour from now. 

When you supplement your current newsletter with more frequent 
updates via feed, you will be able to push out updates to 
subscribers to your news channel or feed more frequently and 
more efficiently. 

With all the new free tools available, even if you're all thumbs 
when it comes to making a web page, if you can fill out a form, 
you can create a feed. 

Reason #3: Get visitors to click through to your site whenever 
you update

If you haven't used a feed reader before, you might be confused 
about the connection between the feed and your site and why it 
can result in an increase in traffic. I'll attempt to explain 
this to you in words, but I suggest downloading a news aggregator 
(also known as a feed reader), and looking at the results of 
your favorite site's feed through a reader after you read this 
for the full effect. 

You can use my main feed here if you don't have one to view: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreeTrafficTips 

If you don't want to have another application up while you're 
surfing, you can try Pluck , a free application you can use for 
more than just feeds that integrates with Internet Explorer - 
get it at http://freetrafficdirectory.com/pluck - it will take 
you right to the downloads page. 

You can also do this from My Yahoo!, by changing your page to 
include their RSS Headlines console, still in Beta testing at 
http://my.yahoo.com .

To summarize, visitors see the headlines they want to read, view 
the summary, and click-through to your site to read the rest of 
the news, either in a new window, or without having to leave the 
application they are in. 

And when you update again, the reader will notify them that you 
have new headlines, and/or populate the list of items you have 
available. This can keep your audience coming back.

If you had trouble following that, come to this page for a one 
minute tutorial:

http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/members/postt95.html 

Reason #4: Recycle old content.

If you have a list of your older articles, some older product 
reviews, site suggestions, or archived newsletters, you can use 
those to build content to populate your feed with information. 
As long as this news is still relevant, you can recycle this 
content to attract new visitors.

Reason #5: Its so easy it's crazy not to do it. 

Before the last few months, there weren't as many free tools 
online that made the process of starting and publicizing a feed 
so effective and user-friendly.

The bottom line is, now that you can get all those benefits from 
filling out a form, saving the file, uploading to your server, 
promoting it once, and updating it from time to time, it's 
insane not to do so. 

You already have to update your site from time to time. You might 
as well get all the benefits of having a news feed too.

================================================================
Tinu? Currently wanted by Secret Hoarders of America for 
spilling free traffic tips: http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/blog
================================================================

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