RSS MARKETING OVERVIEW

RSS Marketing shouldn’t be a mystery.  In fact it’s pretty easy.  To help you get the most out of your RSS marketing efforts I’ve made my RSS REBOUND tool totally free.  It will help go do the four steps you need to do to make your RSS marketing stand out – and more importantly do more for you.

Now I was going to break this post up into several different posts, but I found that I just kept going and going and going.  So get a cup of coffee and come sit back down

The Basics:

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It’s been around for a long long time.  There are a couple different formats and versions.  Many scripts and CMS based sites spit them out automatically.  For example all wordpress blogs kick out a rss feed.

Some other scripts can detect rss feeds on these sites (technorati for example) and gather the content….and do various things with it.  Many other webmasters scrape rss feeds and display that content on their site.

Each rss feed has a number of ‘items’ in it.  Each item usually consists of a date, title, description (a snippet of content) and a source url.

That’s enough for the point of this tutorial.  If you want to learn more about the structure of a rss feed go read up.  A quick google search will explain things deeper.

RSS MARKETING

Rss Marketing is using rss feeds to get your sites indexed, build links, and if you are smart making money.  I mentioned above that you had to follow four steps to market with rss.

Those steps are: Aggregate, Make Unique (and mix up), Monetize, Promote.

Now for most people they don’t do all these steps.  They take whatever feed their site kicks out and plop it in a few rss feed directories (maybe) and hope for the best.

Silly……. they are only promoting one site, haven’t done anything to stand out, and aren’t monetizing in any way.

Those first two steps sort of require that you have a tool or script to  help you.  Hand coding rss feeds sucks and I wouldn’t do it if you paid me

Plus all that extra work would probably mean that you aren’t doing all the steps.  Lucky for you there is help out there.

It’s called RSS REBOUND

Let’s start off with what RSS REBOUND can do to help you.  First off it’s a place to store all your (and others) RSS Feeds by category.  It will pull in the content, store it, allow you to monetize, make unique, and then spit out feeds for you to promote.  It basically helps you do the first 3 steps (aggregate rss, mix it up, and monetize). The third step (promotion) we will cover below.

The Four Steps and RSS REBOUND

Aggregation

So aggregation is really just the collecting of rss feed items.  With RSS REBOUND you are going to use categories to store all your feed items (and others).  Gather, Gather, Gather.  All of those items are going to let you make unique feeds that aren’t just like everyone else’s.

There are so many places where you can grab rss feeds (some of them with your affiliate links).

Amazom, Ebay, some affiliate networks like pepperjam.

Places just for content:  Craigslist, yellow page sites, every blog on the planet.

Here is a simple little way to get more out of all those articles you might have been posting.  Most article directories give each author their own rss feed.  The problem is you don’t have any links going back to your sites in them.  A quick run through rss rebound and bammo – all your keywords that are in those rss items link where you want them.  YOU benefit from the feed instead of the article directory.

Mix it up

Depending on how dark you want to go you can actually change other peoples feed items, and even the source url (so anyone who clicks on it goes to your sites instead).  That’s one of the ways you can abuse rss rebound and it’s totally a conscience thing since it’s really not very nice.    Mixxing it up for most users will involve mixing your feed items with others so your feeds are bigger, unique, interesting, etc…

Monetize

Rss Rebound let’s you add in keywords and wherever they are found in the rss feeds it will replace that keyword with a hyperlink to the website you define.

It also let’s you add in items (ads).

It also let’s you edit others items (ads in t heir content).

It’s important to have links in your rss items.  In the cases of your own sites you usually don’t put a link

Promotion

This is the important part of things and will finish out this tutorial.  You need to promote your feeds for various reasons.  The biggest being so both search engines and the lovely webmasters who scrape content can find you.  When those webmasters scrape your content any links inside your rss feeds are going to show up on their site – a link back for you.  In the case of RSS Rebound you will have feeds based off categories and you can define how many ‘items’ to display for each one.

So if you have the health category you can have a feed with 10 items, or 100 items.

The next step is to make sure those bots, scrapers, and web crawlers can find you.

That means you either have to use a rss directory poster (most of em suck) or just do a quick run through by hand.  In my case I usually pay (outsource) others to do this part for me since I can get them submitted pretty cheaply.

In future tutorials I’ll cover auto discovery of feeds, and a lot of little tricks to make things cooler and more effective.

I had to break this up after all. It was just to long with the list of places to submit your feed to.  It’s here.

Also in case you didn’t catch it.  I’ve made rss rebound free for everyone for a limited time.  Enjoy!