Schedule Feed

Schools, clubs and organizations will often use feeds to communicate meeting times, places and events that might be occurring. The RSS feeds are often used to publicize events, notify community of schedule changes or meeting agendas.

Discounts / Specials Feed

Retail and online stores have begun using RSS feeds to deliver their latest specials and discounted offers. Some online retailers have taken this a step further, allowing users to create their own feeds based on keywords or phrases.

News Monitoring

Companies or individuals interested in receiving headline news based on a specific brand or keyword can use RSS feeds to monitor news sources.

Now that you know what RSS is and how it can be useful, let's cut to chase and figure out how to cash in with RSS. By now you should be asking yourself this question: "Why should I implement RSS into my website and if I did, how would RSS increase my web traffic and profits?"

Here's a hint: Microsoft is integrating RSS support in next version of its Internet Explorer and is making RSS an integral part of its long-awaited Longhorn operating system.

This is a tremendous opportunity for website owners who position themselves early on in game (i.e. right now) by implementing RSS into their own websites. Once Windows Longhorn is released in late 2006 users will be able to find, subscribe to and read RSS feeds all while having very little knowledge of how RSS works. Microsoft is helping to make RSS very user friendly.

Even major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are already supporting, spidering and/or showing RSS feeds.

A very good resource which you should visit if you're at all interested in setting up a successful RSS feed would be MarketingStudies.net which is operated by Rok Hrastnik. Specifically if you want to learn how to setup a RSS feed visit this page.

Now that you've educated your visitors on how to use your RSS feeds and are well into promoting your feed externally, what about optimizing your feed for major search engines? Yes I said optimize. Did you know that you can optimize your feed to effectively garner traffic from MSN and Yahoo? Here's how. Do some proper keyword research using WordTracker just like you would when performing a regular SEO campaign. Identify your top 3 key phrases and use them when you write title and description of your feed inside your RSS file. The search engines will pick up on this and in conjunction with items inside your RSS file they will rank you accordingly, providing you with an additional stream of traffic you never had before. To alert MSN and Yahoo to presence of your RSS feed just visit http://my.msn.com and http://my.yahoo.com and add your feed to each page. That's all there is too it.

By now you'll probably be asking yourself "How can I make some bucks with my RSS feed?" There are a number of things you can do and programs you can participate in to generate a constant stream of revenue from your feed. Obviously if your website is product/sales oriented you could drop in an advertisement about your products at end of each item in your feed. You could also apply for Beta RSS program which Google Adsense is offering to select partners but there is no guarantee of being accepted. Although I have noticed that Google recently updated their Adsense terms of service agreement to include RSS and feed terminology. Perhaps this may mean that program will come out of Beta soon. See this URL for more information: https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/topic.py?topic=957 Another search engine which offers publishers option to earn revenue on ads placed in their RSS feed is Kanoodle. More information about Kanoodle's venture into RSS is here: http://www.kanoodle.com/about/press_releases/02-28-05.cool

There is so much more to promoting your RSS feed and generating profit from it than what I could possibly hope to cover in an article and it really wouldn't be fair of me to reveal all of secrets when somebody has already put a lot of hard work and research toward putting them into a paid publication. If you really want to learn all of top internet marketing strategies for RSS you should purchase a copy of Rok Hrastnik's new eBook, "Unleash Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS". I read Rok's book from cover to cover and implemented almost all of what I discovered through him into my websites. The difference is not just noticeable results but a completely amazing increase in exposure and profit margin.