A lot of emphasis is placed on encouraging visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and why not? They may not visit every day and if you can persuade them to subscribe then they will still get to see your posts. There are however many other outlets where you can market your RSS feed that may actually bring more readers to your blog. Rather than waiting for them to come you and subscribe, deliver your feed to them.
Where Do I start: The best approach is to start with the major players. Google, Yahoo and MSN are probably the top three so by targeting them you will have your RSS feed made available to the vast majority of users. Once you have targeted those three, you can look at various pinging services that will send your feed to all the top feed providers.
Blogging Tip 1: If you don’t already have accounts with the following then sign up for one. They are free and only take a couple of minutes.
Having created these accounts, follow the directions on each account to subscribe to your own RSS feed. This has two effects. First, it forces them to spider your site to collect the RSS feed. Secondly, your RSS feed is added to their database and is then made available to other users. Over a period of time encourage any friends or relatives to also subscribe. This draws further attention to your feed.
Blogging Tip 2: Once your feeds are in the databases add link buttons. Visitors to your blog are then able to add your feed to any of the services that they belong too. The more subscribers to your feed the more these services will take your feed seriously.
Blogging Tip 3: There are many pinging services such as ping-o-matic that will ping (send) your feed to a variety of feed services. A simple search will provide you with a variety of pinging services. Use them to ping your new posts on a regular basis.
Once your feed has been indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN you will start to receive traffic targeted at the keywords used in your posts.
Excellent tips regarding RSS marketing!