UND-Pilsa Blog

In our first part of this article, we raised the question of
whether blogging and its distribution tool, RSS feeds, are
really useful for Internet and Search Engine Promotion. Are RSS
feeds and blogs really the next big thing in web marketing,
distribution, and content creation–or are they just hype? There
is a lot of hype around RSS, blogs, and derivative technologies
like podcasting. But are they really useful to the serious
Internet marketer or are they just the subjects used by
marketers looking to create new products to grab our hard-earned
marketing dollars. We also covered the objections and
reservations from some Internet marketers about the usefulness
of RSS feeds and blogs to the bottom-line of their ebusinesses.
This can be contrasted to our discovery of people like Willie
Crawford and companies like Weblogs, which generate 6- and
7-figure incomes from blogs, RSS, and related technologies with
Google Adsense. To illustrate if the typical Internet
marketers–not just web gurus–can benefit from blogs and RSS
feeds, I promised to share my experiences with my new sites not
yet optimized for the search engines. With virgin websites, I
could observe the traffic pulling power of blogging, pinging,
and RSS. If you would like to read or familiarize yourself with
Part 1 of this article, you can read it at…
http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/feb06-rss-prt1.htm To
test the effectiveness of the ability of RSS feeds and blogs to
attract and drive traffic to my web properties, I did some quick
and insightful research on the topic. Brandon Hong’s Marketing
Rampage with Blogs and RSS was the resource best enabled me to
understand the techno-jargon associated with blogs and RSS
feeds. Believe me, I have a 10-year background in information
technology, and I can’t make heads or tails out of the alphabet
soup served up by tech geeks on blog and RSS media. Plus, I run
a very busy SEO consultancy and virtual real estate (VRE
Adsense and Affiliate Sites) side business, so I don’t have the
time to muck around in nebulous articles on these topics. If you
even remotely feel like me about the complexity of blogs or RSS,
do yourself a favor and obtain Brandon Hong’s multimedia ebook
of screen-capture videos. You can read a full review of the book
at… http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/hongrss.htm I
have been blogging for almost 3 years, but RSS feeds have been
harder to grasp in terms of development and marketing. The
easiest way to start blogging is to setup an account with
www.Blogger.com or www.Bloglines.com. Blogger will actually walk
you through the process. Experienced web designers should not
have a problem setting up a www.Blogger.com account. Blogger.com
is actually a good initial choice because it provides an easy
setup for RSS feeds. The setup can be done by going to the
Settings Tab in Blogger, clicking the site feed link, and
filling out the forms. The next issue to consider is the complex
RSS compatibility issue. You can sidestep the decision about
whether to go with RSS version 2.0 or Google’s Atom standard by
“burning your RSS feed” or making them more compatible with all
popular RSS formats with a third party service like
Feedburner.com. After creating your RSS feed in Blogger, you
should have it burned in the Feedburner.com service; it will
guide you through the process. The optimized Feedburner.com RSS
feed is then ready to be submitted to the major RSS directories.
I would suggest creating a few descriptions of your blog and
then submitting both your blog and RSS URLs to the appropriate
RSS and blog directories. My firm fast-tracks blog and RSS feed
promotion by submitting them to about 90 directories that
specialize in this type of media–including Yahoo! and MSN RSS
content services. Both the Blogger.com service and, more
extensively, Feedburner.com can be configured to ping the major
RSS and blog directories. This means they signal or alert these
directories whenever you update posts on your blog in real time.
Perhaps most importantly, you get traffic statistics about your
RSS subscribers and readers. The results of my RSS and blog
traffic research over the last 3 months are amazing! I have been
totally blown away by the research. I am excited about RSS and
blog usage, despite the good and bad news: The bad news:
According to a White paper on blogging, sponsored in part by
Yahoo!, 88% of Internet users don’t know what RSS technology is
and 96% of Internet users stated they do not use it! The good
news: 27% of Internet users experience RSS feed content on their
My Yahoo and MSN web accounts, although they don’t realize it!
Moreover, 4% of Internet users actively use RSS feeds. This
means 31%, or almost one-third (1/3), of Internet users in the
U.S. read RSS feeds. With almost 150 million U.S. Internet users
and 600 million net users worldwide, you do the math on the
large numbers of people reading RSS feeds (even if unwittingly).
More positive stats on RSS and blog usage, according to the Pew
Internet & American life project: - (1) Fully 19% of online
Americans ages 18-29 have created blogs - (2) 11 million
American adults say they have created blogs - (3) 27% of
Internet users reported in November that they read blogs This
translates into 32 million American adults who read blogs This
information shows that RSS and blogs are growing technologies
for serious Internet business people to adapt into their
marketing mix. My personal research over three months showed
that when I regularly updated my blog sites, burned RSS feeds
pinging the major directories increased my traffic a whopping
25%! Blogs, RSS feeds, and articles distributed regularly to
major host sites and distribution services actually rivaled the
traffic of my highly optimized top-ranking SEO and VRE sites.
More importantly, traffic from blog, RSS, and article-driven
traffic actually made twice as much income in sales and Adsense
revenue than my traditional SEO sites. Needless to say, once a
skeptic, I am now a big believer in the power of RSS feeds and
blogs to boost my bottom-line. I will leave you with a
controversial statement for a SEO and Searchpreneur©. Dr. Jakob
Nielsen recently referred to search engines as “the leeches on
the Internet.” He feels “Search engines extract too much of the
Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually
create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a
strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.”
With Yahoo! and MSN soon to enforce email postage, according to
a recent article by the New York Times, RSS and blogging may
become the best and latest arsenal for small business to
continue to survive and thrive in the Internet economy. To stay
informed on the latest blogging, RSS, and SEO developments,
visit www.searchengineplan.com/blogs/seoblog.htm. Kamau Austin
is publisher of www.eInfoNEWS.com and runs
www.SearchEnginePlan.com. He is author of Always On Top — How
to Get the Highest Search Engine Ranking for your Website. See
more about his strategies at www.AlwaysOnToptheBook.com.