RSS Information

Article Navigation

Click Here for more articles

You Don't Have TIME to Sit and Wonder When The Traffic Will Come!

by: Jack Humphrey

Copyright 2004 Jack Humphrey

There is so incredibly MUCH you can do to successfully promote your website starting in just a few minutes. In fact, the steps I will give you below can be repeated DAILY for 30 days, an hour a day, for 30 hours of hard-core, tested, proven, traffic-nabbing, sales-producing, profit-driving, marketers' bliss.

It's work, but by now I am hoping you know that the successful people, including me, have worked VERY hard to get where we are today. Online doesn't mean automatic and there is no software that will promote your business hands-off. Lots of tools that help, but there's no way around having to work to succeed in any online business.

That said, let's get to work.

Links Man!

You could spend all 30 hours and much more this next month just getting reciprocal and, more importantly, NON-reciprocal links to your site.

I see so many people just spinning their wheels wondering where to start with their promotion. You don't have TIME to sit and wonder! I am telling you right now that the only promotion tactic that will never EVER change on the internet, no matter what, is getting traffic through links.

There are tens of thousands of places on the web to get good, traffic-driving links.

Go to forums in your niche and get involved. In a year's time you are going to have so many links from just being moderately involved with people in your industry through forums that you will wonder why you didn't sign up as a member of several forums sooner!

You will find so many free resources around the net just by surfing around the sites that your BEST customers are most likely to visit. You don't have TIME to sit and wonder! Get surfing and find out where your customers are and GET YOUR LINK THERE!

I have said a thousand times by now in forums, books, teleseminars, and conferences: If you are going to outlast and outwit your competition and really SUCCEED online, you must show up everywhere your best customers surf. You HAVE to, and that's it.

Given that fact, you have a LOT you can do, really, to get in front of your audience.

Articles

I don't care if you hate writing and have a hard time spelling your name. You have to write informative articles (like this one) to get yourself in front of tens of thousands of people every week or every month, depending on your niche.

If you absolutely refuse to write, hire a ghost writer. You can get an article "ten pack" here: http://webfoxmedia.com

Just don't let this treasure trove of traffic go to someone else when you simply have NOTHING holding you back in this promotion technique. It is one of the most important tools in the small online business owner's arsenal - USE IT!

Get free writing tools and article syndication tools and software here: http://equipmint.com

Blogging

Professional blog software, like Expression Engine, comes with the ability to "ping" the blog search engines. (Getting into those engines is a whole new way to brand your site and products/services and most people are totally clueless to this fact.)

After the presidential race got started, bloggers became very famous. If you don't know what a blog is or how to set one up, or even why it is beneficial to HAVE a weblog, check out this resource: http://expressionengine.com

See my blog here as example (and for way more traffic tools and resources than I can outline here):
http://www.webmastertraffictools.com/weblog/index.php

RSS
Want to learn how to get Yahoo to run your website content via RSS? (RSS is a relatively new trend picking up a huge amount of steam among lay-marketers as a killer tool to increase traffic through syndication of their content.)

Check out this report on how to turn content into RSS and having Yahoo run it for free!
http://webmastertraffictools.com/rssreport/yahoorss.pdf

Forums

Find your forum. Every interest online has one by now, unless you are really into something no one has ever heard about. Sign up today and start participating. Make sure you set up your signature file with your site link.

So many people skip the easy stuff because they think since it's easy it can't be effective. Don't be one of those fools. Take the time to do this right now, today.

There are 10,000 other reasons to get involved in your market arena than just getting a link back to your site by participating, but that set of reasons you will have to discover yourself. Like today! I mean it!

Participate in Blog Discussions

Most blogs have comment areas with lively debates and discussions going on. Another source of branding and "getting to know" people who could turn out to be joint venture partners.

Joint Venture Partners

Getting joint ventures with key people in related industries who have a large reach to YOUR perfect audience is about the easiest traffic in the world to get. If you know how. Here is a free guide to joint ventures you should sign up for:
http://www.jvAlert.com/jvcourse.aspx?id=13

Key-In On What Top Marketers Are Doing NOW

One of the best series of teleseminars which runs weekly is the Perpetual Learning Series by JVAlert. The people they attract to speak to members are nothing less than the best of the best in internet marketing. Learning from them is easy with recorded calls or live events they have for you to choose from with nothing but marketing tactics!

You can even find me there for one of the teleseminars on linking!
http://www.jvAlert.com/LearningSeries.aspx?id=13

Finally...

Get yourself pumped up and STAY pumped up for 30 days. In one month you could be seeing a huge turnaround in your marketing and the results of your efforts. I am pointing you in the right direction. YOU have to take this advice and either do something with it or not. That I cannot help you with.

But as of now, you have no excuse to sit around feeling bad about your marketing and lack of traffic. There are zillions of ways to get noticed. Hopefully the above wets your appetite. Come back to my blog for more every week!
http://www.webmastertraffictools.com/weblog/index.php

About the author:
Jack Humphrey is the author of Power Linking and Power Linking 2: Evolution and is currently working on Power Linking 2005, due for release in December. For more information:

Circulated by Article Emporium

Read Articles:

Website Imperatives and Solutions

Avoid a Summer Sales Slump

Marketers on RSS: The Best Of

Top Five Lead Capture Tools & How They Work

Monitor and Increase Your Search Engine Visibil...

Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engin...

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - Houses on Sand

What is Podcasting?

Why Wordpress is now my Blog of Choice

How to Build a Niche Site With a Blog

How a Multi-Faceted Approach to Site Promotion ...

5 Ways to Entice Your Parallel Market to Trade ...

Does your Website Sell or Smell?

How to get traffic to your website!

Business Blogging - 5 Tips to Help You Barrel T...

RSS and E-mail: How They Can Work Together?

Is Blogging and RSS ALL THAT? Yes, and a bag o...

NEWS FLASH! Article Directories JUMP-ON The RSS...

How To Make Over $20,000 Per Month

7 Profitable Ezine Publishing Tips

Update Your Websites Content 'Automatically' 24...

How To Build A Profitable Niche Site Within 27 ...

Top 6 Reasons for having a RSS feed - Come and ...

Should Affiliates Really Use Blogging and Pingi...

The Copyright Debate and RSS

What You Can Publish via RSS

Podcasting Trend

Is Blogging Necessary to Your Internet Business?

What is Creative Commons?

Promote Your Products Without Annoying Spam Fil...

More Best of From Marketers on RSS

RSS Directory Submission: The Key to Blog Promo...

RSS and Blog Marketing for Real Estate

Short Term vs Long Term Marketing Efforts

ClickZ.com Doesn't Get RSS Metrics - How We Rea...

What is Wiki?

5 New Internet Marketing Opportunities Through RSS

The KEY To A Winning Internet Marketing Strateg...

Is Your Business Podcasting? Well, It Should Be.

How affiliates can have their own radio show...

More Article Pages 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Tracking and Measuring RSS Feeds
by: S. Housley

Measuring and tracking RSS while a fairly simple concept, is really anything but. Unlike websites, RSS have the added caveat of potential syndication, making accurate tracking a challenge to anyone but the extremely tech savvy.

It is not unrealistic for marketers to want to know how many subscribers they have, which items in their feeds attract the most interest, or how many click-throughs are generated as a result of an RSS feed.

There are a number of 3rd party providers who focus on tracking the consumption of RSS feeds. Some solutions are rudimentary but likely sufficient for a small business testing the waters with RSS. Other RSS tracking solutions are more complex and while they can come close to being accurate, with syndication there is no solution that tracks with 100% accuracy.

Techniques Used to track RSS Consumption

Small businesses can view web logs to provide information on how many times a specific file (RSS feed) is requested. The logs and information is rudimentary but will give a basic sense of a feeds success. Many 3rd party tracking options have additional tracking information available.

Hosting

The most common method to track the number of feed accesses or individuals accessing a feed is to use a 3rd party feed host. Companies like FeedBurner essentially track feeds based on accesses. The downside to using a 3rd party like Feedburner, is that the url is a FeedBurner url and any PageRank or popularity associated with the url will benefit the feed host rather than the feed creator. Additionally, no distinction is made between unique views or syndicate feeds.

FeedBurner provides a free no frills service to host RSS feeds and they have been proactive in circumventing user concerns. Recently implementing a service that eases users concerns about migrating from FeedBurner. There is a 3 step process for users interested in migrating from FeedBurner's free service, implementing a permanent redirect, and url forwarding.

Details can be found at: http://www.burningdoorc.om/feedburner/archives/001251.html

Some publishers, who were concerned about lock-in or wanted to retain control of the domain and feed urls often resist a hosting service. The new program FeedBurner Partner Pro is not free, but allows for users to point to their own domain, retaining complete control of their feeds without sacrificing statistical tracking.

The downside to using a service like FeedBurner is that some filtering applications used on corporate proxy servers block feeds residing on FeedBurner or other free hosts.

Redirects

Companies like SyndicateIQ have more complex tracking solutions that generate unique urls for each subscriber. The tracking benefits to such a customized solution is obvious. Individual user habits can be monitored and any users abusing their access and inappropriately syndicating a feeds content can have their feed turned off. The downside of course is that the success of RSS is in a large part due to the anonymity. Users don't want their personal habits tracked.

Considering the venture capital interest in these 3rd party hosting services. It is important to note that their value is in the data that they collect. As with any 3rd party service, it goes without saying that publishers should read the privacy policy carefully, be aware of who owns the rights to the collected information, and how that information might be used. It goes without saying that the value in many of the free services currently available lies in their aggregate data.

Uniquely Named Transparent Images

Uniquely named transparent 1x1 graphics can be added to the description field of an RSS feed. Users can use standard web logs to see the number of times the image is viewed and determine the number of times the feed was accessed.

Companies Specializing in Tracking and RSS Metrics

Pheedo - Pheedo creates tools that enable individuals, organizations and corporations to promote, analyze, and optimize their weblogs and content.

http://www.pheedo.com

SyndicateIQ - SyndicateIQ's position in the content distribution chain provides clients a set of analytics.

http://www.syndicateiq.com/

FeedBurner - FeedBurner offers a full range of services to help you build awareness, track circulation, and implement revenue-generating programs in your feed(s).

http://www.feedburner.com

Each individual using RSS needs to make a decision of the extent and importance of the analytics they require. Realizing that any system they employ is not going to be perfect.

This Static Spot is open for sponsor

This Static Spot is open for sponsor