How To Use RSS Feed More Effectively To Increase Traffic

Getting more traffic and building a mailing list are two of the big keys to making money on the Internet. If you have a website or blog and are not using RSS feeds correctly then you are probably missing out on valuable opportunities to increase traffic.

RSS is the acronym for Really Simple Syndication and it is basically a format that is used all over the internet for syndication of news and other related sites, which can include all major news sites and personal web logs.

Many people will use RSS feed to help them increase their traffic for their home business.

There are five key ways to use RSS feed as a successful business tool for you.

One: You want to use RSS feed to get your domain blog-rolled but you first have to have the RSS in place. So if you don't know how to put it in place than you need to learn how.

You can do this by attaching links from other blogs and websites to your blog and website. This will help to increase your link popularity.

Two: Submit your RSS feed to the RSS directories. You will be able to drive a lot of traffic to your link this way and it will help to increase your link popularity with the search engines.

Three: Be sure and keep your RSS feeds up to date. You have to do this if you want to be indexed by search engines on a more frequent basis.

Four: Use RSS press release. This has many advantages and one of them being that you won't need to use email marketing as much because you will be able to spread the news to the important places as it comes in.

Five: Use RSS for real time advertising. For example, if your customer wants a product that is not currently available, when it becomes available you can use RSS to notify them.

This will help your customer service be better and will help increase customer loyalty also. Part of the success to making more money online is taking care of people when you get the chance.

Six: Many internet marketers still do not understand the importance of branding themselves. You do that several ways, but being able to establish your own credibility is a big key.

You can keep your name in front of your subscribers and build your credibility using RSS feeds. Over time you become a trusted source for quality information if you do it correctly.

A couple of websites I came across that offer good information on setting up a RSS feed are:

http://www.rssfeedgenerate.com/

http://www.whatisrss.com/

This should give you some ideas on how to use a RSS feed to increase traffic. Traffic is the name of the game and you need it coming from as many different sources as possible if you are trying to make more money online today!

3 Reasons Why You Need to Use RSS - Now!

Despite the popularity of RSS technology, only about 20% of internet users actually use it. In fact, many internet users don't even know what it is or how to use it. But there are three reasons why we should expect that to change very soon. Just as many devoted "snail mail" users eventually came around to the idea of using email, many email users will probably become avid RSS users.

Three Reasons Why RSS is The Way to Go!

1. RSS Allows the Use of Embedded Audio and Video:

Let's say that you're an internet marketer who wants to send an email to established clients. You envision this email containing a YouTube-like preview that the client can click on to see your expertly-crafted video. But guess what? You can't do that with email. The best you can hope for is to include a preview image that opens up a web browser to play the video when the client clicks on it.

You may wonder why that's so bad, but just think of how much easier it would be to view the video right there in the email without being bounced around. And then remember that RSS easily and conveniently allows for embedded video and audio.

2. RSS Guarantees 100% Deliverability

If you're an internet marketer, listen up. Even if you legitimately obtain the email address of a potential client or an established client, there is only a 60% chance that they will receive an email that you send to them. That means that if you have a list of 100 emails that you've worked hard to obtain, 40 of those customers won't ever get the email. What a waste!

But RSS is different. If someone has subscribed to your RSS feed, you are guaranteed that they will receive every single message.

And the advantages aren't limited to internet marketers! Customers also win with RSS. No more whitelisting senders, and no more signing up for email lists only to find a spam box filled with old email. Once users realize how convenient and efficient RSS really is, RSS will grow by leaps and bounds.

3. RSS Means NO SPAM!

Industry analysts and internet marketers are acutely aware of the possibility that email may not be free forever, particularly for large corporations that send out significant numbers of emails. Why? The answer is spam. It's time-consuming to delete, it often contains inappropriate messages, and large corporations are often burned by it. Before you dismiss the idea that email may no longer be free, know that some email providers are already researching ways to make email like cell phones that impose a sending quota.

And won't RSS be popular then for marketers and consumer alike!

If you are one of the 80% who uses RSS feed regularly, you may be stuck for awhile checking both email and your feed reader because a few key things need to happen before RSS completely eclipses email. First, users need to be able to send messages to select RSS subscribers instead of everyone who subscribes to the RSS feed. Second, users will need to have the ability to share some identifying information with the publisher so that the publisher can send content that matches the needs of the user and can utilize RSS similarly to email.

So What Will This Look Like?

Quite honestly, it will probably look a lot like email, except that instead of publishing your message to a blog, you'll actually publish it to a private spot on the internet and to your client's RSS reader. When your client checks his feed reader, he'll see that you've posted a message to him and reads the message online or in the private space where you've published the message.

Sounds easy, right? Although RSS technology has a way to go before this is a reality, it never hurts to prepare for the possibility. If it all sounds overwhelming, consider the possibility of consulting with an SEO expert to talk about how your company can prepare for the widespread use of RSS as an alternative to email.

How to Use an RSS Feed to Provide Content for Your Website

Search engines love websites that are continuously updated with fresh content. As a website owner, if you want to achieve or maintain a good search engine ranking, then your goal should be to continually provide updated keyword–based content on a regular basis to your website. Naturally, if you're providing the content yourself, this takes a lot of work. Let me show you how you can get fresh, keyword-based content updated on your site on a daily basis with no work on your part using RSS feeds and PHP, and most of all, the search engines will love it!

RSS is an acronym that is short for Really Simple Syndication. It's a type of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that is used for syndicating content. XML is used to describe data and is basically a markup language – like HTML.

Before I go into the list of items that are needed to make all of this work, I will mention that the details outlined in this article apply to websites that support PHP. PHP is a popular server-side scripting language that is used to create dynamic website content. If your website is running on a Unix-based operating system (like Linux), chances are your web server supports the PHP scripting language. Check with your web host to be sure.

Now, I can make this a long drawn out article on the technical details behind RSS, XML and PHP, but that would result in a boring article that hardly anyone would read! Instead, I'll just layout the necessary details for an entrepreneurial minded individual to setup a website using these technologies in a quick and least confusing fashion, I hope.

Task: Let's say we run a website on gardening and we want to use an RSS feed to add changing content to our site on a regular basis without us having to do any work.

Our goal is to make this new content readable by the search engine spiders. In order to do that, the content needs to be returned via server-side scripting – not client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript). This is a mistake that a lot of websites that use RSS make.

You see, JavaScript is executed by the client; PHP is executed on the web server. When a search engine spider comes across a JavaScript 'script' tag, it stops spidering until it moves beyond the closing 'script' tag. On the other hand, PHP converts the script to HTML on the web server and sends the results back to the client (browser). So when a search engine spider comes across a web page that uses RSS with PHP, the spider only 'sees' the returned HTML – as if the PHP script were never there. So, PHP with RSS is definitely the route to take for SEO conscious website owners.

Here's what we need to accomplish our task:

1) An RSS feed link

2) An RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS feed into HTML

3) An HTML output-template

Getting an RSS feed link...

A good place to start looking for an RSS feed is 2rrs.com, where you can execute an 'RSS Search' for the keyword 'gardening'. You'll likely see a bunch of results. Click on any of them. You'll now find an RSS2HTML link under the 'Details' section - which is your RSS feed link. Copy the full HTTP path to this link; we will need it for configuration in later steps.

Now we need to get an RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS feed into HTML, and we also need an HTML output-template…

So, we need a method to take our RSS feed and convert it into HTML so we can insert it into our web page. The best way to do this is to use an awesome little PHP script called rss2html.php.

You can download this script here: http://www.feedforall.com/more-php.htm
(Choose Option two -> Download)

Unzip the download file and you'll find a sample HTML output-template file called sample-template.html and an rss2html.php file. These files will eventually need to be moved to your web server, but before you do that, let's configure everything...

The PHP file is the work horse and does the RSS XML to HTML conversion, so there are some configuration settings within this file that need to be set. Open the file in a regular text editor (like Word Pad) and make the following 3 configuration changes:

Configuration change #1:

Find the following line of code: $XMLfilename = "sample.xml";
Change it to: $XMLfilename = "Your-RSS-Feed-Link";

The above line of code tells the PHP script where to get your RSS XML feed (file). Remember, the RSS XML feed contains the content which you are trying to add to your website. The website that you get your RSS feed from will update this feed as new content becomes available from the website. (Note: be sure not to download the XML file and specify a local path to it – this will result in your website always using the same XML file – which means your website will not be updated with new content from the RSS XML source.)

Configuration change #2:

Find the following line of code: $TEMPLATEfilename = "sample-template.html";
Insert your HTML output-template name in place of sample-template.html.

The rss2html.zip that you downloaded from the feedforall link above comes with a sample-template.html that you can use. However, the template from feedforall encompasses the entire HTML code for the entire webpage (from the opening 'html' tag to the closing 'html' tag). If you're inserting this content into your pre-existing webpage, then you'll likely only want to use the HTML code between the opening 'table' tag and the closing 'table' tag. This will allow you to insert a table into your webpage where each row represents an article from your RSS XML feed source.

Configuration change #3:

Find the following line of code: $FeedMaxItems = 10000;

The number '10000' above represents the number of items that you want to retrieve from the RSS feed – which works out to be the number of rows in your HTML table from the previous step. You can leave this setting as is, or you can change it to any positive number your like. For example, if you change it to 5, then the PHP script will display the top 5 RSS feed articles from your RSS feed source.

When you're done with these configuration settings you can upload these files to your scripts directory on your web server and add the following line of code to your website's HTML file where you would like the RSS feed content to appear:

include ('path_to_scripts_directory/rss2html.php');

Make sure to prefix the above line of code with a 'less-than' symbol followed by a question mark, as well as, postfix it with a question mark followed by a 'greater-than' symbol. Also, remember, if your webpage was initially an html file (i.e. filename.html) then you will want to change it to filename.php in order for the web server to know how to handle the above PHP script.

There you go... an easy way to add changing content to your website without any extra work on your part.