How to use RSS feeds to your advantage

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Last week one of my readers asked me if I could explain RSS. A question I can relate to, because I remember thinking what does Really Simple Syndication mean. Can I just ignore it? To make a long story short, I did not ignore it and I am using RSS now so much, that I cannot believe I found it difficult at one point. So here it goes:

We all browse the web on a regular basis. When we come across a site that is of interest to us, we bookmark it so that we can always get back to it later. However, a lot of websites of interest are blogs, that are updated on a regular basis. Bookmarking helps find the blog back again, but it does not keep us posted on the latest information that is published on that site. If it is only one blog we are following that is not a problem. You can simply follow the bookmark back to that site and check what is new. But if you are an internet marketer, you most likely want to make sure you stay up to date on what is new on your niche. This means you will have many blogs you would like to follow. Now it becomes a full time job! On top of the other full time jobs that we have in the internet marketing business. That is where RSS (Real Simple Syndication) comes in. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for that blog, you have a simple way to keep track of what new posts are published on that particular blog.

The way it works is as follows. You look for the subscribe icon on the site. Usually it looks something like this:

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you will be asked where to ‘put’ the RSS feed. You can choose from many RSS readers. My favorite is Google Reader, but there are many others out there that you can use as well. I made a quick video to show you how it works:

[flowplayer src=http://automarker.net/videos/AddingRSSToReader.mp4 height=285 width=402]

Now that you have your reader set up, you can add as many sites/blogs as you want. All you need to do is scan your reader and click on those titles that have your interest. If you are creating so many RSS feeds that it becomes hard to keep up again, you may want to organize your feeds into groups. That way you can check the groups that have your interest at that point in time. Or you can decide to divide the RSS feeds into groups called Monday, Tuesday etc. and check your daily groups as specified by the name.

What I just described to you is the basic use of RSS feeds. However, over time many other applications have come up. Nowadays you can use RSS feeds to create one-way backlinks by submitting your feed to RSS directories. Every time your feed is added to a feed reader you will get links back to your site, provided you actively publish content. After all, every time a new post is published it shows up on the RSS reader of the subscriber. These one-way backlinks for each post and each subscriber automatically contain your keywords, provided you optimize your blog titles for the search engines.

I have added a list of RSS directories to the Social Traffic Club, so if you are interested just sign in (or up if you are new here) and use it to your advantage. I have also added a few tips with that list how to get even more traffic from RSS feeds.

Let me know if this has been helpful for you. As always I am inviting you to leave your comments below this post.