Internet Marketing the Simple Way

Posts Tagged ‘feedburner’

You may know that there are a lot of benefits of using RSS feed.   If you do not, please read the entire post and you may learn some tricks and gain some benefits from reading this post.  People are using it in different ways to serve their purpose such as boosting traffic to their sites.  Below, I am  going to describe what the real benefits of using RSS feed.

Link Juice: RSS feeds will give you some link juice. This can happen after you submit your RSS feeds to RSS feed directories.   People who subscribe to the directories would find your feed interesting and would come and check your site more often.  RSS feeds seems to be overlooked from many website owners as they are very beneficial for SEO (search engine optimization).

SEO: Search engine likes updated fresh content or new things. The RSS is the one which ping the update to search engine as well as it also helps user find the new updates on the web.

Reader convenience: it can expose your site more if you have a great  content that provides a lot of benefits to the public.  People would subscribe your RSS feed without going to your site.  They can read your content remotely.  So it is a must have a RSS feed subscription on your site so that people would be able to read your posts after they find your great content and want to learn more what you are going to write in the future.  I believe if they know your style of writing and the subject area that you have been writing.  RSS is a great way to keep your readers updated with all the latest happenings on your blog.  So have a RSS feed ready for them to subscribe is a way to expand your reader to another level.

Boost Traffic: It can boost traffic to your site  when one of your guests subscribes to your RSS feed.

I love to hear your comments and thoughts.  Please leave it below if you have any.

I hope you are familiar with the WordPress blog by now.  You can create either a page or a blog post.  Usually, you tend to use pages for things like an “About” page, a contact form, an advertising page etc where as blog posts are your bread & butter content. There is one very crucial difference between pages and posts – posts are published to your RSS feeds and pages are not. Your RSS feed is what makes your blog a blog, and not just a static website. Your RSS feed allows readers to view your content in RSS readers but another very cool usage of your RSS feed is to get backlinks.

Analyzing Your Blog Feed

If you are using WordPress, it automatically creates a feed for you at the following URL:<your blog url>/feed/
So for example, the WordPress-generated feed for my blog is found at: http://www.paulyunonline.com/feed/.
Take a look at that and you’ll see a page with excerpts of my latest posts. Each one of those headings is a backlink to the blog post in question.  There are now tons of sites called ‘RSS Directories’ or ‘Blog Directories’ which allow you to submit your feed to them. They pull your feed into their site so those backlinks get replicated at the directory site. This is a one-off job, you only need to submit your feed once to each of the directories and after that the backlinks are updated every time your feed is updated. In short, each RSS directory will create anywhere from 1 to as many backlinks as your feed holds depending on the structure of the directory. That can add up to quite a lot of backlinks!

Use Your WordPress Feed, Not Feedburner!

Note that this practice is a link building exercise; you are not trying to pick up new readers here. Whilst it is possible that you will get the odd reader, you will not get anywhere near as many as you will from people coming directly to your blog.

So, what you need to do here is submit your original WordPress feed, NOT the Feedburner feed. To understand why, have a look at my Feedburner feed and see how it compares to the WordPress one: http://feeds.feedburner.com/paulyunonline

Note: If you set your post without excerpt or summary and set the “Reading” to “Summary” , there would not be much difference between these two features.  However, if you set the “Reading to “Full Text”, the feedburner would show the entire blog post.  In this manner, you run the risk of content theft.  However, you have an option to prevent it by install a plugin called “RSS Footer”—allows you a phrase to your footer so that the copycat can not claim it as his own.

Each of the links is a dynamically created link to an internal Feedburner URL. Clicking on one will redirect to my blog post but because the link has been created dynamically by Feedburner, it is not a ‘real’ link. This is the same problem that we encounter with some of those social bookmarking sites. The only backlinks that count are real links – one that begin with your domain in the URL. Increase the Number of Items in Your Feed

Some RSS directories will store just a single link to your feed which is still a backlink as it is hosted on your domain), and others will store an arbitrary number of links of their choosing but some of them will show them all.

By default WordPress publishes the last 10 posts to your feed but you can increase this number to something of your choice.  Login to your WordPress dashboard, click on ‘Settings’ and then on ‘Reading’. You are looking for ‘Syndication feeds show the most recent’ and beside that is a box to enter the number. Older versions of WordPress allowed a maximum of 25 posts to be syndicated but this limit appears to have been removed. You can set it up to the number of posts you have.

For WordPress lovers, there is a plugin called “FD Feedburner Plugin” that you can redirect the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com if you like to use it.  It is your choice.  You must have WP version 2.0 or higher.

RSS & Blog Directories to Submit To

Here is a short list of just 7 directories that seem like they have been around for a long time and are hopefully they are still around! These are all free and do not require reciprocal links (like many directories do) for your submission. However you do need to register with most of them.

http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
http://www.blogged.com/submit_your_blog.php
http://feedfury.com/submit
http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web
http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx

Here is a site of RSS top 55 of best blog directories and RSS submission: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/. You have to sign up first before submitting your blog.

What do you think?

I am glad you dropped by my blog and I love to hear your thoughts.  So please leave your comment below!

If I have left anything out or you know of any other way to boost traffic quickly then please share with the audience/readers by leaving a comment below.

Let me review what I covered on part 1 series. I have talked about placing a comment on other blogs, subscribing to those blogs’ RSS feeds, and joining a couple of forums. In this series, I am going to talk about “pinging” a blog and using RSS feeds.

4- Ping a Blog to Let the World Know You Exit in Cyberspace

You need to ping places like Technorati and other update services to let them know your blog is up. WordPress will also automatically ping these sites whenever you put up a new post.

Go to Admin > “Settings tap” on your left hand side>Click “Writing” screen scroll down till you see “Update Services‟.   Once you have that screen add all these urls to the Update Services window:

http://flog.jkwiens.com/ping/41f7b71220d10fd8f8a148aea0179a32/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Be sure to ‘Save Changes’ when you’re done. All of those sites will now be pinged every time you publish a new post.

5- Optimize your RSS feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology that allows information to be syndicated – made available to news readers– blogs or anyone who wants to receive it.
All blogs have an RSS output as standard, but there are two main RSS technologies in use today and RSS readers are not always able to accommodate both types.

To get around  you have two options: setting up an account with Feedburner or generating your own feed.
Feedburner reads the RSS feed from your blog and converts it to a format that can be read by all readers. It also enables you to offer automatic updates by email, for those who prefer that, and gives you some great statistics on your blog readers.

Once you have ‘burned’ your blog feed, you will be given a Feedburner Feed URL and this is what you should use whenever you provide your RSS feed link to anyone.  The problem with it is when you submit your RSS feed, it is not going to give credit to you site, but it is going to intermediary site instead.

Click here to go to Feedburner, and open an account if you do not have one.  The RSS feed on your blog continually makes your articles and posts available to RSS readers – so this is another great way of ensuring that your new posts are made available as widely as possible as soon as they’re published.

Even if you’ve never used RSS, getting this set up is important because it’s another way of distributing your articles or your posts and attracting visitors.

The alternative option is you generate your own feed. In order to do that, if you are using WordPress, you can find this URL by adding the “feed” at the end of your domain.  For example, http://www.paulyunonline.com/feed. Then you feed your RSS feed to the sites under the feed directory directly.

Upcoming post–“8 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Blog”, part 3

You will learn about StumbleUpon and how to use it to boost your traffic  Subscribe to my RSS feed now to keep on learning about the other 3 ways to boost more traffic to your blog if you just got a blog and needed more traffic badly.

What do you think?

I would love to hear your thoughts so please leave a comment below before you click away.