How to Increase Blog Traffic with your RSS Feed | Turn your Subscribers into a Goldmine!

3 Apr 2009

How to Increase Blog Traffic with your RSS Feed – Turn Subscribers into a Goldmine!

Author: Jim | Filed under: Traffic Techniques

Check out our other posts on traffic techniques for more ways to boost your traffic!

When Really Simple Syndication (RSS) was first created, many thought that it was little more than a gimmick… and could never possible prove to be of much value to site owners. As time has gone by, RSS has become an industry standard across the board, and NOT using one can really damage your viability. Not only is it ultra-useful, but it can be pretty darn valuable if used correctly. Let’s walk through some ways you can make your RSS feed bring in traffic!

Getting Your Blog an RSS Feed…

To take advantage of the tricks we outline here, you are going to need an RSS feed. I am 100% behind a service called FeedBurner, which is an RSS service used by almost all of the pros out there. If you already have an RSS feed through your blog system (WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, etc.), it’s really easy to sign up and convert your blog to a Feedburer feed. Best of all? It’s 100% free!

If you own a website that does not have a built-in RSS module, you will have to manually convert everything that you write into an XML format so that it can be picked up by an RSS reader. This is definitely possible, but will be a bit tedious. You can find out how this all works here: About RSS. Once you get your RSS up in basic XML format, again just convert it to a Feedburner feed and you are good to go.

Trick One: The Nature of RSS

Our first traffic technique is to simply use RSS as the tool it was designed to be: an easy way to encourage visitors to come back to your website. I wanted to mention this method because it is simply an obvious way to get users back to your blog. When you own a website, you want to not only be able to get loads of traffic, but you want your users to like your content enough to come back again and again. This is the magic of RSS feeds. They allow your users to have an easy method to see when you are updating your content, and it gives them the opportunity to check out your latest articles any time you add a new RSS feed item to your blog. Use the nature of RSS to promote your blog and add some traffic by getting your users to subscribe and generate hits every day to your website!

Trick Two: Add Your Feed to a Squidoo Lens

Do you have your own Squidoo lens? A Squidoo lens is a lot like a Wikipedia page, but is much easier to get approved… in fact, it’s downright automatic! If you aren’t capitalizing on the SEO and traffic benefits to operating Squidoo lenses, than I want to seriously encourage you to get on the bandwagon and start promoting your material. Don’t know how to profit from Squidoo? Check out this post on Garry Conn about Making Money with Squidoo.

One way to capitalize on your RSS feed is to add it to all of your Squidoo Lenses. Not only is it super easy, a virtual “set and forget” method to traffic, but you can get potential hits every day to your website. The more Squidoo pages you have, the more recurring traffic every day! Here are the steps to add an RSS feed to your Squidoo lens:

“Edit” your Squidoo lens
“Add Module” to your page
Use the “Add Your Own Feed” feature

Once you have added your RSS feed to your Squidoo, you should modify a few of the settings to be able to take full advantage of the SEO and traffic synergies going back and forth. Specifically, you need to go in and edit the title of your new module, changing it to a keyword phrase or a title filled with keywords. Then, you should add a description, and set the RSS tracker to pull your feed as frequently as they allow you to do this. Once you have the settings the way that you feel best with, hit save… and relax, you’re done!

Trick Three: Submit your RSS to Multiple Feed Directories

Much like there are directories around the internet to promote your website, there are also many services that focus on promoting RSS feeds by themselves for added traffic. Because there are literally a hundred services, I am not going to list all of them here. Instead, here are a few of my favorites, and the more popular places:

You can get a massive list of places to submit your blog at RSS-Specifications.com, which runs a huge constantly-updating roster of the best websites for submitting your blog and rss feed url. Additionally, you could pay for a service called RSS Submit to do all of this in an automated fashion, which could save TONS of time and effort.

Bottom Line: You can really turn your RSS feed into a traffic goldmine if you use the methods above, and perhaps more useful tricks to getting all you can out of your feed. Anyone have another way to get added exposure with RSS? Post your idea or link below (no spamming!), and we’ll include you in the next update!

-Jimvesting