First it was banner ads, then Google AdSense and now, latest way to make money on your web site could very well be RSS feeds. Say what? I said: RSS is hot and you should be using it to drive eyeballs to your site. Here's how it works:

Depending upon who you ask, RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary". Regardless of what you call it, RSS is a way to automatically publish (syndicate) someone else's content on your web site. Now don't worry, that's not same as stealing someone else's content. There is nothing illegal about using RSS feeds. In fact, publisher of content wants you to have it show up on your site and that's why he or she makes it available as an RSS feed to begin with.

So what's in it for all parties concerned?

Using RSS is a win-win for both publisher of content, who gets their name out to potentially millions of sites and you, web site owner who is pulling content onto your site.

Content, by way, means anything that a publisher decides it means. Typical content includes news headlines, new product update notices, blog summaries and lots of other stuff. It's "content" portion of equation that's good news for you.

Show me money

Working in research and development for a large infomercial company, I had many opportunities to do large advertising campaigns with lots of different online advertising agencies and Internet marketing companies. I would literally go online for days researching companies and types of advertising they offered to find just right ones to meet needs of our company.

We spent thousands of dollars before we were able to come up with accurate measures of which campaigns were actually converting prospects into customers. But after much testing, I came to an interesting conclusion about online advertising.

Many advertisers have a large emphasis on amount of exposure you get to your web site, but after running many expensive campaigns, I have learned that this is not what matters at all. The things that matters most in web marketing usually boil down to how many qualified, targeted click thrus you can generate to your site.

Click thrus are main thing you need to focus on when creating an advertising campaign. For our company, it has been most accurate measure of quality of any type of advertising we bought, whether it was banner ads, email campaigns, popunders, search engine, pay per click or any other type of advertising you do on web.

Click thrus represent an Internet user who has been motivated to visit your site by clicking on an email or online advertisement of any type. It is highest quality traffic you can have coming to your site.

Once you get this type of high quality traffic to your site, you can then focus on trying to convert your visitors to customers and sales. If you have a tracking method or software, you can then determine your conversion ratio. The conversion ration will tell you how many visitors you will need to get to your site to convert a sale.

If you can figure out how many click thrus it takes to make a sale and you know now much it cost to get clicks to your web site, you can then use that information to predict results of some of your advertising campaigns. Armed with this information, you will then have a lot more confidence when spending money or time on any type of online advertising.

If you are looking to generate high quality click thru's to your web site, you will find that this is not easiest thing to do. You will find many types of online advertising and lots of companies making outrageous claims on how much exposure you get. But when it comes down to it, exposure means nothing if you don’t generate click thrus to your web site. If you want to generate true targeted traffic to your web site, you should definitely take a good look at these types of advertising.

Email Marketing - Email marketing is probably most direct way to generate click thrus to your web site. You can either hire a third party company to mail to their lists or you can build a list of your own.

Email is great because you can instantly reach large numbers of interested prospect and start to generate click thru's within hours of sending your message out.

This method of marketing does have its drawbacks. It is getting more and more difficult to send email, because of SPAM regulations and extensive filtering by ISP's. Fortunately, many marketing tools are coming out to help average person start and maintain a list without knowing a lot of technical knowledge.

The best way to use email marketing is to build an opt-in list of prospects that you can mail to over and over again. Using a third party list or company to email will cost you a fortune if you do it over and over without building a list of your own. This is why it is important to concentrate on building your opt in list. Many of people who opt in to your list will eventually become your customers if you have a solution to their problem.

Coregistration - This is powerful list building method many Internet marketers have been using for about 3 years now. Coregistration advertising is process of generating opt-in email leads to add to your mailing list or autoresponder for marketing purposes. Using this form of advertising, you can build a large list of qualified prospects in little time.

The quality of coregistration leads can vary from company to company so it really pays to understand how they are generated and how old leads are. The best types of leads to buy are called Opt-In coregistrations where individuals have specifically responded to your ad for more information.

You can also get other type of leads that are cheaper, but they are not as high quality as leads generated specifically for your business. In addition, these cheaper leads are harder to deal with when mailing your messages.

Once you have these leads in your email system, they become a source of targeted click thrus every time you mail out to your lists. In addition, you are basically getting free advertising once you have your own list. Coregistration helps you get to that point quickly if you use it correctly and if you find some solid lead sources.

Search Engines - Search engines have long been a source of rich, targeted traffic, but competition and strict search engine rules make it difficult to simply put up a web site and take advantage of this type of traffic.