Well, you have a website set up to promote your books, music, and other products that you want to sell. With a bit of internet savvy, she has created an engaging design to grab the attention of internet users, and with his expertise on the subject at hand, she is able to provide thoughtful and thought-provoking content. You are sure that your site is optimized for good search results, with good keyword saturation in your content. Your site is easy to navigate, fun to read, and yet informative enough to be highly appreciated by the engines. You are ready for the world!

However, you feel that what you are doing is not enough. You may enjoy a steady increase in traffic through traditional means of online marketing, occasional metadata tweaks, and email advertising. Offline advertising is not in the budget right now, and you want to try another cheaper alternative before delving into pay-per-click advertising. What’s left to do?

Have you considered creating an RSS feed for your website? If you are in the business of promoting and selling many products and services, having an RSS feed attached to your website can be beneficial in attracting new visitors to your website. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and is a specific format for adding news and information to other websites and Internet users who read news through aggregators or special readers.

Think of RSS as a distant cousin to the news tickers you see on your favorite 24-hour news or sports network. As new information becomes public, the wires pick up the story and distribute the content to interested third parties looking for information to distribute. An all-sports network, for example, would select only the latest sports news from various syndicates to put on television. RSS works in a similar way.

Not sure how? The next time you log on to the Internet, take a look at your home page, if you use My Yahoo or My MSN or something similar. Do you see? Maybe you have up-to-date bytes of news from the Associated Press or Reuters, daily comic strips, weather and horoscopes, etc. You know, of course, that such pages can be customized to display only what you want to see. If you’re only interested in entertainment news, you’d adjust your page to only get gossip and movie reviews, and news from major entertainment magazines, right? All of this information is syndicated and their home page acts as an aggregator, collecting only the relevant information that you want it to collect and display.

Now stick with me, because here’s the fun part: by creating an RSS feed, you can become a syndicate! Let’s say he’s a romance novel author, and offer a series of gripping stories that he knows fans of romance novels will love. You can create an RSS feed with news about your books and information related to writing, romance, and the publishing industry to create useful content for aggregators. With proper promotion and distribution, users who are interested in romance novels can add your feed to their private readers or even their websites, thus increasing your exposure. This, in turn, can increase traffic to your site and lead to more sales!

Sounds like something you want to do to further promote yourself on the internet? If so, great! But if you’re new to the concept of RSS and aren’t sure how to get started, don’t worry. Once you learn the basics of creating and promoting an RSS feed, you’ll discover that it’s as simple as creating a website. Here is a basic step by step to create a simple feed. Once you’ve mastered RSS content and want to work on something more advanced, a good Real Simple Syndication how-to can help you achieve so much more for your books, music, and products.

For now though, let’s go over the basics.

1) Happy

Before you even think about tinkering with RSS software or hand-coding the proper markup language, you should carefully consider the type of content you plan to use for your feed. Syndicated content in this context will differ from content on a standard website in that it must entice readers to click through to your website and purchase your books or take advantage of your services. If you give too little, readers may not be interested enough to visit your site. Too much, and readers may feel overwhelmed, or think they don’t have to click on your links.

Study the RSS feeds that typify what you plan to distribute. Especially if you’re trying to promote a book, CD, or other items, you’ll want to look at shopping RSS feeds in particular to see how they perform. Think of your content like a 30-second commercial: Depending on the types of aggregators used to collect your feed data, users may see only one headline first, so think of one that grabs attention. Use easy-to-understand language in your content: sharp, lively, and to the point. Emphasize purchase links and any sales or discount incentives.

Some RSS aggregators accept code for images, so take advantage of it. Show off your book or CD cover, an image of your product, or your logo. For readers who don’t add images, be sure to use the ALT option and describe the article.

Plan your food in advance. An RSS feed should be treated like a regular news wire. So if you think you don’t have enough content to need a regular feed, consider the supplementary information related to your site and plan when you plan to add new items to your feed. Once you have a work schedule, you can now start working on creating your feed and have some real fun.

2) Creation

If you are completely new to the idea of ​​RSS and only have moderate skills when it comes to website development, you can still create an attractive and effective feed for your site. Before you do, keep this in mind:

An RSS feed is a file hosted on your server, identified by an .rss or .xml suffix instead of the .html extension. Most browser updates will allow visitors to see the feed as it is supposed to if a link to your feed is clicked. However, don’t panic if someone clicks on the link in your feed and claims to see “gibberish”. They will likely only see the raw code.

Now that you are ready to create a feed, it is highly recommended to use software designed for this purpose. An Internet search for “RSS freeware” or “RSS software” will point you in the right direction. I personally use RSS Builder to create my feeds. It is easy to use and easy to install. As you learn more about RSS, you may want to try a few programs before settling on one to use regularly.

Choose a name for your feed that is indicative of your products or site. The author of romance novels may want to use romancenovels.rss or romancebooks.rss, while a freelance consultant may want to try consultingnews.rss. There’s no guarantee that having that name will increase search referrals, but having a relevant keyword in the file name can help readers in their search for content to add.

Check your RSS feed to see if there are options for entering metadata or your feed description. This is important, as the metadata in a published feed helps RSS spiders determine the relevance of your feed to various searches. As the internet grows, so does the ability of search engines to mine data such as blogs and feeds, so you need to be careful about this. If the metadata options ask for an image URL and logo, provide them.

Now, depending on your schedule, you have the options to add and remove topics, set posting times, and sort by appearance. This is the heart of the feed, where the information goes. If you approach this part of RSS creation like you would a blog, you’ll find it remarkably simple.

Each topic is a new post. Depending on the volume of news you want to distribute, you can create new topics daily or several in a day. Do not give too much information in your posts. Compelling copy should entice readers to click through to your main site, where the action (and point of sale) is. Use keyword-enriched text to attract those spiders that mine RSS data. As your catalog grows, you write more books, or you take on new projects, you’ll have more material for your feed.

3) Delivery

Once you have a few entries in your feed, you can now upload your RSS file for reading and distribution. Depending on the RSS creation software you are using, you may be able to upload directly to your site using the software. If not, you may need to use an FTP program to do this.

Make sure you know your ID and password for your website, and make sure the feed file has the correct name with a .rss or .xml extension. Once it’s live on your site, check the file in an RSS aggregator or in a web browser that reads RSS to make sure it’s working to your satisfaction. If so, congratulations! You just published an RSS feed.

But you’re not done yet. To help site visitors know that you have a feed, you need to do a few things. First, you need to place links on your website that indicate that you have a feed. You would do this the same way you would create a hyperlink to another URL. In the HREF anchor tag, indicate the full URL of your feed with a note that says “Subscribe to our RSS feed.” You may also want to use a small graphic to draw attention to your feed. Many sites use a small orange rectangle with RSS or XML in white type to direct visitors to the feed.

To direct RSS aggregators and spiders to your feed, you’ll need to place a LINK REL tag in the HEAD section of your HTML code. It will look like this (just put carats before and after

link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”Your RSS URL goes here”

This lets the spider know that RSS content is available.

4) Promote

Once your feed is live, you can actively promote it. A quick Internet search for “RSS Search Engines” will take you to many resources where you can submit your feed information. You would submit your feed the same way you would submit a website, just make sure you provide all the necessary information.

Also, you may want to consider some form of viral marketing for your feed. Include the feed URL in your email signature or contact other relevant topic websites and let them know you have content to syndicate in RSS. Websites similar to yours looking for material may want to add your feed and place the content on their sites. You, in turn, get free exposure and increase your sales chances.

5) ping

If you know where to look, there are websites and software available designed to notify, or “ping,” RSS directories and search engines when a feed is updated. It is believed that this will speed up the update process on your end. The sooner they know that new information is available, the sooner they will pull data from your feed. A quick internet search for “RSS pinger” will give you information on how to regularly notify users of updates to your feed. Some sources will allow you to notify multiple engines at once and can be a useful tool in your promotion.

From writing content to advertising your products, using RSS feeds to enhance your website can go a long way in increasing exposure for your books and music, services, and products. Syndicate your content and watch your site traffic and sales grow.