Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Raise Your Website Traffic with RSS - Blogs and YAHOO! - Part 2
By Kamau Austin (c) 2006

In our first part of this article, we raised the question of
whether blogging and its distribution tool, RSS feeds, are
really useful for Internet and Search Engine Promotion. Are RSS
feeds and blogs really the next big thing in web marketing,
distribution, and content creation — or are they just hype?

There is a lot of hype around RSS, blogs, and derivative
technologies like podcasting. But are they really useful to the
serious Internet marketer or are they just the subjects used by
marketers looking to create new products to grab our hard-earned
marketing dollars.

We also covered the objections and reservations from some
Internet marketers about the usefulness of RSS feeds and blogs
to the bottom-line of their ebusinesses. This can be contrasted
to our discovery of people like Willie Crawford and companies
like Weblogs, which generate 6- and 7-figure incomes from blogs,
RSS, and related technologies with Google Adsense.

To illustrate, if the typical Internet marketers — not just web
gurus — can benefit from blogs and RSS feeds, I promised to share
my experiences with my new sites not yet optimized for the search
engines.

With virgin websites, I could observe the traffic pulling power
of blogging, pinging, and RSS. If you would like to read or
familiarize yourself with Part 1 of this article, you can read
it at...
http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/feb06-rss-prt1.htm

To test the effectiveness of the ability of RSS feeds and blogs
to attract and drive traffic to my web properties, I did some
quick and insightful research on the topic. Brandon Hong's
Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS was the resource which best
enabled me to understand the techno-jargon associated with blogs
and RSS feeds. Believe me, I have a 10-year background in
information technology, and I can't make heads or tails out of
the alphabet soup served up by tech geeks on blog and RSS
media.

Plus, I run a very busy SEO consultancy and virtual real estate
(VRE Adsense™ and Affiliate Sites) side business, so I don't
have the time to muck around in nebulous articles on these
topics.

If you even remotely feel like me about the complexity of blogs
or RSS, do yourself a favor and obtain Brandon Hong's multimedia
ebook of screen-capture videos.

You can read a full review of the book at...
http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/hongrss.htm

I have been blogging for almost 3 years, but RSS feeds have been
harder to grasp in terms of development and marketing. The
easiest way to start blogging is to setup an account with
www.Blogger.com or www.Bloglines.com. Blogger will actually walk
you through the process.

Experienced web designers should not have a problem setting up a
www.Blogger.com account. Blogger.com is actually a good initial
choice because it provides an easy setup for RSS feeds. The
setup can be done by going to the Settings Tab in Blogger,
clicking the site feed link, and filling out the forms.

The next issue to consider is the complex RSS compatibility
issue. You can sidestep the decision about whether to go with
RSS version 2.0 or Google's Atom standard by "burning your RSS
feed" or making them more compatible with all popular RSS
formats with a third party service like Feedburner.com.

After creating your RSS feed in Blogger, you should have it
burned in the Feedburner.com service; it will guide you through
the process. The optimized Feedburner.com RSS feed is then ready
to be submitted to the major RSS directories.

I would suggest creating a few descriptions of your blog and
then submitting both your blog and RSS URLs to the appropriate
RSS and blog directories. My firm fast-tracks blog and RSS feed
promotion by submitting them to about 90 directories that
specialize in this type of media — including Yahoo! and MSN RSS
content services.

Both the Blogger.com service and, more extensively,
Feedburner.com can be configured to ping the major RSS and blog
directories. This means they signal or alert these directories
whenever you update posts on your blog in real time. Perhaps
most importantly, you get traffic statistics about your RSS
subscribers and readers.

The results of my RSS and blog traffic research over the last 3
months are amazing! I have been totally blown away by the
research. I am excited about RSS and blog usage, despite the
good and bad news:

The bad news: According to a White paper on blogging, sponsored
in part by Yahoo!, 88% of Internet users don't know what RSS
technology is and 96% of Internet users stated they do not use
it!

The good news: 27% of Internet users experience RSS feed content
on their My Yahoo and MSN web accounts, although they don't
realize it! Moreover, 4% of Internet users actively use RSS
feeds. This means 31%, or almost one-third (1/3), of Internet
users in the U.S. read RSS feeds.

With almost 150 million U.S. Internet users and 600 million net
users worldwide, you do the math on the large numbers of people
reading RSS feeds even if unwittingly).

More positive stats on RSS and blog usage, according to the Pew
Internet & American life project:

- (1) Fully 19% of online Americans ages 18-29 have created
      blogs
- (2) 11 million American adults say they have created blogs
- (3) 27% of Internet users reported in November that they read
      blogs

This translates into 32 million American adults who read blogs
This information shows that RSS and blogs are growing
technologies for serious Internet business people to adapt into
their marketing mix.

My personal research over three months showed that when I
regularly updated my blog sites, burned RSS feeds pinging the
major directories increased my traffic a whopping 25%!

Blogs, RSS feeds, and articles distributed regularly to major
host sites and distribution services actually rivaled the
traffic of my highly optimized top-ranking SEO and VRE sites.
More importantly, traffic from blog, RSS, and article-driven
traffic actually made twice as much income in sales and Adsense™
revenue than my traditional SEO sites.

Needless to say, once a skeptic, I am now a big believer in the
power of RSS feeds and blogs to boost my bottom-line. I will
leave you with a controversial statement from a SEO and
Searchpreneur©.

Dr. Jakob Nielsen recently referred to search engines as "the
leeches on the Internet." He feels "Search engines extract too
much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites
that actually create the content. Liberation from search
dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and
software vendors."

With Yahoo! and MSN soon to enforce email postage, according to
a recent article by the New York Times, RSS and blogging may
become the best and latest arsenal for small business to
continue to survive and thrive in the Internet economy.
================================================================
To stay informed on the latest blogging, RSS, and SEO
developments, visit www.searchengineplan.com/blogs/seoblog.htm.
Kamau Austin is publisher of www.eInfoNEWS.com and runs
www.SearchEnginePlan.com. He is author of Always On Top -- How
to Get the Highest Search Engine Ranking for your Website. See
more about his strategies at www.AlwaysOnToptheBook.com.
================================================================

Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.