rss feeds for promoting your website

Hi Johnathan.

To answer some of your questions:

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it's just a way of publishing a collection of your latest posts in a special format that people can subscribe to in various ways.

This is a great way to get your content 'out there' as people can subscribe to your RSS feed and keep up to date with any new posts you have made without actually visiting your website. However, if you provide just a snippet of the new post in your RSS feed and the post is interesting or compelling, then the subscriber will probably click through from the RSS feed to read more on your site.

You can also submit your RSS feed to several directories, from which you may get traffic as well as a backlink every time you post new content.

FeedBurner (now owned by Google - make of that what you will) - is a service that allows you to 'burn' your RSS feed through their system and you can then track subscribers and other metrics. FeedBurner also gives the subscriber other ways to read your feed.

The usual way for people to read items in an RSS feed is through an RSS reader such as Google Reader. Lots of those around and you can search for lots more information on Google.

You will also find that your RSS feed may get picked up by news aggregator sites, thereby spreading your links even further.

As well as subscribe to the FeedBurner feed through a Reader, subscribers can also subscribe via email and a few other services.

For those subscribed by email, FeedBurner sends out just one email a day to your subscribers informing them of any new blogs posts or news from your site. No new posts, no email.

The number you see in the counter on peoples websites is the number of people who have subscribed to that RSS feed thorough FeedBurner. Some will be regular RSS Reader subscriptions, some will be via email.

Hope that helps, I'm sure there are plenty of other people who can give you an even better understanding of RSS feeds.

Tim

RSS is the most powerful way to promote your sites. It helps with SEO. It spreads your content far and wide. It makes it easy for your regular visitors to access you.

If you're not using it, you might as well be posting clunky static html pages with table layouts... in 1995.

Yea, RSS is something that I admittedly am very unfamiliar with.

Having multiple blogs (video and text) attached to my site, I sure would like to RSS them and have them start SEOing for me.

Anyone have any solid strategies for doing RSS right?

Sorry it took a while to get back on this. I started to write a response here and decided instead to do a blog post about using rss to promote your website. The only thing I didn't say over there that I will say over here is that you can also monetize the feed by throwing ads in there. Good luck.