RSS Marketing

Discover How to Market Your RSS feed Online

As every internet marketer, you’re looking for additional ways to increase traffic to your website. Besides PPC, SEO or email marketing, there’s another great solution – RSS technology. By having an RSS feed on your site, you can boost the traffic and increase the number of sales.

So if you take action now and devote some time to learn how to market RSS feeds for your web site, you can easily gain advantage over your competitors and get additional traffic.

Why You Should Consider RSS Marketing?

RSS marketing is important not only for gaining higher number of targeted traffic to your site and building your subscribers list. It’s also important to realize that RSS is becoming more and more popular.

All major search engines already offer news via RSS for their visitors. This way they constantly increase the popularity of RSS on the internet. Not only that. Soon we’ll see major search giants offering RSS marketing options to its customers. As a matter of fact, Yahoo Publisher Network ads have already appeared on RSS feeds. Google has also adopted Adsense ads on Blogger website for people who have blogs.

Another great reason why you should market an RSS feed is - Podcast. Podcasting means syndicating audio via RSS into the iPod or similar devices. Just like people can subscribe to your feed and read the contents, podcasts allow people to download your MP3 file (for example) and listen to it on their devices. RSS version 2.0 already allows you to include audio files in your RSS feed.

As you can see, there are a couple of strong reasons to adopt RSS marketing into your web promotion campaigns. With the ever growing number of RSS users, it is about time to start marketing your RSS feed online.

Frequency of Your Content

Another thing to pay attention to is the frequency of your news. It means how often you are planning to update your news. As many say, RSS feeds should be updated regularly and quite often. Every day or every week. Your RSS feed should be updated often, otherwise some RSS directories won’t accept your feed. However, you can set your own time of delivery.

You shouldn’t be bound to the exact frequency. It’s your feed and you can set your own times of delivering content. Simply write, when you have something to write about and submit whenever you want to. No one will accuse you of that.

What Should You Provide in Your Feed?

Before marketing your RSS feed, you must also decide what kind of content you will provide to your readers. You might consider a few examples below:

News About Your Site – Whenever there’s some kind of update on your website you can inform your visitors about that. Whenever you write an article, receive an interesting post on your forum, you can announce it to your readers.
News About Your Industry – If you actively participate in discussions on other forums or seek any news that happen in your particular industry, you can inform your visitors (readers) about that event.
Audio Messages – Audios are great. Not only your online readers might be interested more in listening to some kind of news or excerpt from a seminar via MP3 file, but iPod users also. As we have mentioned above, more and more people are introduced to the audio in RSS options. So having an audio can be a great way of gaining more loyal readers.
Video Messages – Video has recently boomed the web. Even Google has dedicated a directory so anyone could submit their video online at http://video.google.com. Many marketers are using video on their sites to increase conversions. So having a video file included in your feed can be a great way of connecting with your readers. People can see and hear you. This makes much bigger impact than just reading a text.

Marketing Your RSS Feed

Finally, after you’ve learned the importance of RSS marketing and decided what you will actually going to offer to your visitors, it’s time to find out how can you market your feed on the internet.

First, there two ways to market your RSS feed – using internal and external marketing resources.

Internal Marketing Resources

Offer the link to your RSS feed on your home page and on every possible page of your site. Just like with emails, you can offer visitors a free ebook for subscription or a report. After they subscribe, they should get one message that includes a link where they can download the bonus.
If you already have an email list, you can advertise your RSS feed on your mailing list. Simply explain how your readers will benefit by having an RSS reader. Show them how to install one themselves and subscribe to your feed.

These are basic marketing methods. Now, there are also external marketing resources that you can use to market your feed online.

External Marketing Resources

Just like you promote your feed on your own list, you can contact other mailing list owners or ezine owners and ask them to recommend your feed to their readers for a price. You could also agree to advertise each others lists. You endorse the ezine to our own RSS feed readers (if you already have any) and ezine owner promotes your feed to their list for free.
Exchange links, ads, banners or anything you can think of with other RSS feed owners. You could find RSS feed that is related in content with yours, contact the owner (manager) and agree to exchange advertising space.
Finally, you can submit your RSS feed to various RSS directories. It’s one of the most powerful ways to market your RSS feed and it’s free. All it takes is your time. As long as there are lots of such search engines and directories it can take a while. However, you can see the increase in traffic very quickly.

Making Money With RSS Feeds

After you promote your RSS feed on the internet and gain some traffic, it’s time to monetize on your feed. There are a few ways of making money with your website RSS feed. Here are few that might be useful:

Offer contextual advertising ads on your feed. Just like you offer Google Adsense ads on your website, you could offer such ads in your RSS feed. This way you could gain additional revenue of income. As mentioned above, major search engines can soon offer similar ads for webmasters to use on their feeds.
Promote affiliate programs on your feed. You could also try to offer some kind of affiliate products on your RSS feed. You could include affiliate product advertisement in your feed’s description, next to the actual message. Or you could simply provide a stand-alone affiliate advertisement in your feed.
Sell advertising space on your RSS feed. Just like newsletter owners or webmasters sell ad space on their sites or ezines, you could start selling some advertising space on your feed. Of course, you should have a decent amount of subscribers to do that.

In Conclusion

As you can see, marketing your RSS feed online can give a great exposure. Including the fact that RSS is now available to iPod users, you now have even broader audience to market your news or provide readers with updated content.

If you have a list of email subscribers, it could be a great time to start educating those readers about RSS advantages. If majority of subscribers would subscribe to your feed via RSS, you wouldn’t have to worry about undelivered email messages, because of anti-spam filters. You could forget about being accused of unsolicited advertising, because RSS is 100% opt-in.

So if you want to market your feed, adopt internal and external RSS marketing strategies to your website and you’ll start enjoying a new stream of free traffic to your website.