Blogging

Using RSS on your website is a good way to spread your company message and increase your search engine position. But if you don’t have subscribers to your newsfeed, the benefits of news syndication are lost.

This article will provide you with 4 proven ways to increase the subscribers to your newsfeed.

1. Use an RSS Auto-Discovery Tag

Embedding an RSS auto-discovery tag into your webpage can allow newsreaders to automatically detect you serve RSS newsfeeds. Web browsers such as Firefox and Safari now detect RSS automatically, and ask the visitor if he or she wants to subscribe to your feed. This way, you don’t have to push your RSS feed - the web browser does it for you. Also, Yahoo search results will include an “Add to My Yahoo” link if you use an auto-discovery tag.

Global Syndication offers a tool that makes creating RSS auto-discovery tags a snap: http://www.globalsyndication.com/rss-autodiscovery-tag.

2. Submit Your Feed to RSS Directories

When people look for information on websites, they use a search engine such as Google. When they are looking for RSS newsfeeds, they go to an RSS directory. That is why it is vitally important to submit your newsfeed to as many directories as you can. Robin Good has published a definitive list of directories that you can submit to: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/.

If you are looking to save time with the RSS directory submission process, Global Syndication can submit your feed to the top 45 directories for under $10:
http://www.globalsyndication.com/directory-submit.

3. Create An RSS Landing Page

To many people, RSS is a completely new concept they know nothing about. When those people click your RSS link, what do they see? A bunch of meaningless XML code. Needless to say, this does not give a good first impression of RSS. You need to make it easy for your site visitor to start using your newsfeed - now.

The best way to do this is to create a separate page on your site describing the newsfeeds you offer and information about RSS in general.

Some things you should cover on this page include:

* A quick overview of how RSS works
* Why subscribing to your feed will help them
* Where to obtain a feed reader
* How to subscribe to your feed using a feed reader
* How to display your feed on their site

CNet and the New York Times provide good examples of RSS landing pages:
http://www.cnet.com/4520-6022_1-5115040-1.html?tag=cnetfd.ft
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/

4. Create a Branded RSS News Reader

If your website offers many diverse newsfeeds, consider creating a custom news reader that is branded with your company logo and preloaded with your newsfeeds. This saves the beginning user the time and hassle of figuring out how to get a feed reader and subscribe to your feeds.

Some companies that offer RSS newsreader branding include NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com/custom.aspx), Deskshare (http://www.deskshare.com/ awrc.aspx), and CustomReader (http://www.customreader.com).

By following the tips mentioned in this article, you will receive an immediate boost in your RSS subscribers, and in turn, drive more traffic to your website.

Josiah Mackenzie is an RSS syndication consultant and founder of Global Syndication, a company providing a wide array of practical RSS solutions: http://www.globalsyndication.com

Traffic exchanges and blog traffic exchanges are a way to expose your blog or site to traffic by visiting other blogs and sites. I have looked at many such exchanges and selected what I though to be the best of these to see what sort of traffic I could bring to my site.

I signed up with four blog exchanges and one traffic exchange. There are quite a few traffic exchanges out there but I found many of them to be, well to put it mildly a waste of time. These exchanges were mostly auto surf exchanges where amusingly enough the visitors were not encouraged to actually look at the sites they visited.

The idea behind the exchanges I chose to test where that you visited other sites and blogs in the network and in exchange the webmasters of other sites visited you. The idea is simple and should be an easy way to bring traffic in. The list of these sites can be found at http://www.blogtonomy.com/blog-and-traffic-exchanges.php

I have been using these sites for several weeks and I think I now have enough data to come to some reasonable conclusions about using exchanges in order to generate traffic to your site.

Does it generate traffic?

You can get traffic pretty much straight away as some of the sites give you some credits for joining, but most of the traffic needs to be generated by you visiting other sites in the network. How much traffic you get will depend on how long you spend visiting other sites, on average I found that you could get about 40 visits in return for about an hours surfing.

The catch

This is probably the easiest and quickest way to get traffic to your site or blog. After looking at the traffic being sent from these sites I noticed that not many of the visitors went beyond the first page. This is not really surprising as, like you, most of the visitors are webmasters trying to generate traffic to there own sites.

I would conclude that as a starting point for getting traffic and for testing new pages on your site then this can be a useful tool. The audience will be mostly untargeted and so probably not interested in what you have to offer and therefore probably the hardest type of visitor entice into making a longer visit or returning for a later visit.

If your site or blog is more targeted towards traffic generation and promotion then you may get a better response from the visitors. I would recommend setting up a landing page especially for the visitors from these sites so you can offer them something they are likely to be interested in. It would be worth investing some of your time in experimenting with this sort of traffic to see if it works for you. You can always dismiss it later if you find it is not working for you.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.blogtonomy.com/ where I will show you how I am promoting my site.

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