Submitting RSS Feeds
Hello and welcome back to another edition of Three Money Methods Traffic Tuesdays! This is Jonathan Kraft and I am here today to talk to you about RSS Feeds! Wooohooo! Sounds real boring, right? RSS Feeds, XML Feeds, sounds really technical and boring?
Well, here’s what’s really cool about RSS and XML feeds is it allows people to actually read the content of your website in whatever format they might want to read it in; which is really great for them and not so great for you in a lot of ways! However, what is really great is that it does give you access to an entirely new audience that you may have not been able to reach before. There are all kinds of things you can do with your RSS feeds.
Today we’re going to talk about how to find your RSS feed, what is your XML/RSS feed and what do you do with it? How do you use it to get more traffic to your website?
So, what you’re going to do to find your RSS feed; if you’re currently running a WordPress blog, what you’ll do to find your WordPress feed – actually there’s a bunch of different things you can do; but the default URL for a WordPress feed is yourwebsite.com/feed. You can usually find it there, if not, you can look at /feed/rss2. If you don’t find it there and you are using WordPress, you may need to get someone to help you to find that RSS feed.
I’m going to show you a couple of examples here. We have our Carrie and Jonathan site, if we go to www.CarrieandJonathan.com – this is the website currently. If we go to www.CarrieandJonathan.com/index.xml that will actually take us to the XML feed. I’m going to show you that here real quick; this website is actually built in a Content Management System (CMS) called Movable Type. Movable Type works a little bit differently than WordPress. But if we go to the index.xml page, we can actually see that yes, it does take us to an XML feed of our website and gives us options for how we want to subscribe to this; do we want to subscribe using Outlook, Bloglines or My Yahoo or Google or Live Bookmarks? So it gives you these different options to subscribe to our feed for Carrie and Jonathan.
However, our GreenJoyment store, we have a couple of different things going on at GreenJoyment, but our GreenJoyment store actually runs off of WordPress. So if we go to www.greenjoyment.com/feed/rss2, because this is running on WordPress, it should actually give us a feed for the GreenJoyment store. So I’m going to show you the GreenJoyment store here just what it looks like if you visit it. Here’s what it looks like if you just visit the main page of the GreenJoyment store.
But if we go to that greenjoyment.com/feed/rss2 you can see that the store also has its own feed here and this is done at greenjoyment.com/store/feed. And again, people can subscribe using Live Bookmarks, Microsoft Office Outlook, Bloglines, My Yahoo or Google.
Now, you may not be using feeds yet, you may not be using feed readers; but there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are using feed readers and they want access to be able to read your site using feeds.
What this means is two things: number one, you should have a big “Subscribe to our Feed” on your website where someone can find it very easily and that’s something I’ve done a really poor job of actually. If you look at different sites that we have, I’ve really not done a good job of putting RSS feed links onto our sites. But you can see here on our IdentityTheftSecrets site that I do have all kinds of options on the right-hand side here for where people can subscribe to our RSS feeds. So you need to put that button on your website, this XML or RSS feed which actually links directly to your feed to let people sign up for that.
If you visit some of the most popular websites online … let’s go to ProBlogger, you can see when you visit their website it’s one of the first things you see up here, “Subscribe to ProBlogger via RSS.” “What is RSS?” “Follow us on Twitter.” Those are the first three things that they really want you to see and do when you’re there. And their feed has an 118,000 plus readers! So that might be something good for you to have!
So what you want to do then is take your RSS feed, once you figure out what it is, take your RSS feed and go to the Resource link right below the video right here and submit your RSS feed to the Top 244 RSS Aggregators. Yes! This will take you some time. But it will be very beneficial for you to submit your RSS feed to all these different websites!
You can see here, this is the website that you’ll see when you click the Resource link; he talks about what RSS feeds are and how it works. As of right now, they have 245 RSS feed readers that you can submit your RSS feed to. It’s probably a really, really good idea for you to spend some time, probably take two to three hours one day to go through and actually submit to all of these different feeds. The way I would recommend doing it would be to open five or six of them in a new tab and have all of your information in a document somewhere that you can just copy and paste it over and then you can just put it into those forms.
Alternatively, the way I like to do it is using a service called RoboForm – I’ve talked about RoboForm before; it really, really saves a lot of time, effort and energy because you push one button and it fills in the form for you so you don’t have to spend all day either copying and pasting or typing.
I recommend three things: find out what your feed is and put a button on your site that links to your feed; very similar to what we saw on ProBlogger. Then take your RSS feed and submit it to all these different RSS feed readers and then third and finally, before you do that, make sure you go sign up for RoboForm.
There’s a link below here that will give you a discount on RoboForm; one of the best time-saving tools I use and recommend highly and you can get a discount, a $6 discount on it, by clicking the link.
That’s it! Those are your three steps out of this video!
Be sure to come back and visit often as we’ve got lots of great information coming for you on really how to make money on the internet.
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