Yes, RSS feeds is a standard for most off the shelf blogs. Making good use of them however is another story. Most site do not optimize their feed to help in their marketing efforts. Here is a quick list of pointers you should consider implementing in order to optimize the RSS feeds of your blogs.

Consider 3rd Party Service

Although common blogging software such as Wordpress includes RSS feeds, you should consider using a 3rd party service to add additional benefits to your feed. For starters, the free service allows you to get detailed statistics and demographic information on your subscribers. You also get to use additional features such as indiviual news reader signup and email based feeds. There aren’t many negatives to the service and it’s used by many of the leading bloggers on the Internet.

Make It Noticeable

Placement of your feed subscriptions is important. Consider adding an image or rss logo to the feed and place it somewhere above the fold of your pages. When you reach an amount of subscribers that will help promote the feeds, switch to the image that dynamically inserts the amount of readers in your blog. This site is waiting until it hits aroung the 500 subscriber range.

Links In Your Posts

Full news feed readers sometimes grabs your entire post for viewing through the reader or website. In this case you won’t get the traffic value and in turn advertising is not shown to the reader. By placing links to other posts on your blog or to sites you mention (with affiliate code), you can benefit form additional traffic or revenues derived from your subscribers.

Summary

These are the basic optimization techniques for your feeds. In the future i’ll discuss more advanced strategies that allow you to promote your website on the Internet. For now, implement these concepts and you’ll benefit from the results.

Popularity: 70% [?]

When we think of paid search engine marketing, the first program to come to mind is Google Adwords. There are many other options out there that may prove to be valuable to you based on your niche and the quantity of words you are interested in. In recent weeks, several other major search engines have launched or intend to launch their own similar version of Adwords.

Microsoft Adcenter

The is a recent addition to the mix and I have yet to try a campaign with them. Based on what i’m hearing from other however. It’s an opportunity to get good traffic at a low cost. The program is new but their reach is much good, it appear that now is the best time to test it out as you’ll probably be getting great value.

Yahoo

Formerly overture.com, Yahoo has its own paid listings program which is probably number 2 in the industry right now. Depending on your industry, you can get good long tail keywords and a good rate. This can equate to good value if you carefully manage.

Others

Let’s not forget about the tier 2 options out there. Although the traffic levels are lower and the quality of the visitors is not as good, you should have a look at them and test out a compaign to see if it works for you. Some of the popular tier 2 engines are ABCsearch.com, Findology, and Enhance. Each have their own network and can deliver some quality traffic to you over time.

Popularity: 68% [?]

Nowadays, it’s getting harder to go out and manually do linkexchanges with related web sites. There are so many sites doing it with an automated program, that most website owners ignore requests altogether. There are however several ways you can go out and buys links to your website. Here are some of the ways websites are purchasing links to help their link popularity.

Text Link Ads

The Text Link Ads service is the most popular way to buy text links. It’s a marketplace where you can search for websites related to yours who offer a link on their site for a fee. We promote this site cause it’s a proven way to get quality links to your site and has become an industry standard source to purchase text links.

Sponsored Templates

This is an up and coming tool that allows you to purchase links on templates that are created to use with wordpress which is a leading free blogging software. This method has its pros and cons, you want to make sure your link will appear on a template that you think with want to be used by websites. Get a sponsored link on a site that is used by 2000 wordpress users and that equates to alot of quality links.

Sponsored Posts

This is a new service that allows you to sponsor individual blog posts on popular websites. The pricing is based on the pagerank of the page and starts at around $10.

Site Reviews

ReviewMe is a service where blogs are willing to review your website for a fee. Within the review are several links to your website which serves as a link. It’s important to note that they do not guarantee a positive review so make sure your website can stand up to the critiques.

In summary, these are some of the popular ways to go out and buy links to your website. I haven’t done all of these methods myself, but I can say that most work.

Popularity: 67% [?]