In previous posts I reviewed how to simultaneously distribute your content throughout social networks and social bookmarking sites. Yet there is a one very important step that was not covered yet.
Have you thought about distributing your web feeds? Web feed (commonly known as RSS feed) not only gives you huge additional exposure through multiple self-promotion channels (I’ll talk about them in a moment), it grants you enormous power of “licensing” your content to other blogs.
RSS is an abbreviation of Real Simple Syndication, one of the most powerful technologies introduced at the end of 20th century.
You give the right to other bloggers to republish all or part of your content at no charge. Of course, you keep all the copyrights to your content, and one of the conditions of this “licensing” agreement is that publishers have to keep your information intact.
When your content is re-published, the link to the content source (or its excerpt) has to be published too.
If your content is good, and it provides great value to their readers, thousands upon thousands of information-hungry blogs will gladly publish your information. This could potentially create a viral effect.
Think about it. If blog is popular, then its content is republished by other bloggers. So if a popular blog re-published your post, it will be automatically re-published by other blogs since it’s now a part of popular blog’s RSS feed.
So don’t underestimate the power of RSS distribution.
How do you distribute RSS feeds and where can you find them?
If you have a blog, RSS feed is automatically created for you, and you can just look for RSS feed button or ”subscribe” link on your blog. Click on it, and you’ll be sent to the page containing your rss feed. Just copy this link, and post it to your popular RSS reader (such as Google reader).
As an example, click on the “subscribe” button at the top of this site, copy rss link, post it in your reader, and see what happens. The excerpts of my latest posts will “magically” appear in your reader.
Now copy your own RSS feed and distribute it through all the social marketing and social bookmarking channels the same way you distributed links to your posts.
Don’t forget that you have personal/profile page in all those networks, and this page also has an RSS feed, so cross-submit and cross-promote all those RSS feeds on all your social networks.
If you follow these steps, your web traffic will increase significantly.
One of the questions that I’m often asked on private social marketing consultations is: “I have a static website, and I can’t find my RSS feed. What should I do?”
The simple answer is: “Static websites don’t have RSS feeds”. Of course, if there is no RSS feed then you won’t be able to use missing all the promotional tactics mentioned above.
So what’s the solution?
You can either add a blog to your site (but your old content still won’t be distributed this way).
Or you can build your own RSS feed.
If you’re proficient in xml, you can easily create your own custom RSS feed. Alternatively, you can use php, though xml provides more flexibility for feed customization.
Of course, many people are not that “fluent” in mark-up languages and programming. So you will probably be glad to know that there is an easier feed creation solution for you.
Download Feed For All RSS Feed Creator. It allows you to build custom feeds for your static websites. Then just upload created xml file on your server, and now your site has its own RSS feed!
Voila! Easy, isn’t it? Now go and create your own viral web feed traffic avalanche.
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