Let me ask you three questions to get you thinking. Does your website offer an RSS feed? Are you promoting your feed effectively? Are you seeing an increase in profits as a result of offering a feed to your visitors?I'm going to outline several actionable steps you can take to promote your RSS feed both internally on your own website and externally on other websites. Then I'm going to show you a couple of effective programs to generate more profits using your RSS feed. Read what I have to say carefully, and then act on information. I guarantee you can take it to bank! I'm not just reiterating what others have said before. I actually acted and performed on my own websites everything I'm about to tell you and results are awesome.
Promoting your RSS feed effectively requires a two prong approach. Start with examining your own website. Educate your visitors about benefits of using your feed first. Then focus on external promotion second.
The average visitor won't understand what RSS is about, why it would benefit them to use it or how it even works. So there's no point in slapping up little RSS Syndication logo on your website, linking it to your feed file and hoping people will subscribe. The simple fact is that they won't. You need to spend some time building a page on your website that briefly explains to your visitors what RSS is about and then show them how to use your feed.
Let me show you a solid example. Point your browser to this URL: http://www.profitgazette.com/syndicate.php On this page of my website I tell my visitors various ways they can receive my content. Along with subscribing to newsletter, a visitor is also able to subscribe to RSS feed. I don't want to overwhelm them so I keep it brief and educate them with four points. "What is RSS? How can I use RSS? How do I get a News Reader? Can I use these feeds on my website?" See also in top of left column of that page (and every page on my website) how I give visitor a quick teaser, mention a benefit to them and give them a link to my "RSS education" page? That's how I get my visitors to discover what RSS is all about. Then if you look in center near top of page you'll see little orange RSS image which doesn't just link only to my RSS feed file, I actually use a small snippet of JavaScript to make it easy for my visitors to automatically subscribe themselves to my feed with whichever news aggregator they happen to be using. Just mouse over RSS button on that page to see what I'm talking about. You can download a copy of that JavaScript for free at http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/
What's next? External feed promotion. There are lots of websites that accept RSS feed submissions. I'm not going to drop a large list of sites into this article but I have put together a large list of them here: http://www.profitgazette.com/rss-submission-list.php Visit that page when you're ready to submit your RSS feed. I personally submitted my feed to each of those sites and took a brand new website which I own from zero traffic to consistently maintaining an average of 80 unique visitors per day in two weeks from date of submissions. So that really is a powerful submission list.