Looking for another way to draw web surfers to your RSS feed? Consider making audio and/or video content available through your feed. Right now, without doing anything special at all, you can put a regular link to the content in one of your feed items, and a visitor can click on it to download the file (an MP3 audio file or a Torrent file for instance). In RSS 2.0, however, there’s a new feature called an enclosure for digital media items. Enclosure-sensitive client software, such as iPodder, iPodderX, Doppler or Nimiq can utilize the link, content length and content type stored in an enclosure to automatically download the content in the background. The media content could be automatically transferred to an attached Apple iPod (thus the term podcasting), to some other attached media device, or stored for later enjoyment.

Why Podcasting Will Help You

Podcast content is a very fast-growing segment of internet media. Simply having podcast content in your feed and advertising that fact by listing your feed in one of the free up-and-coming podcast directories will draw more traffic to your site.
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You probably noticed that I missed posting about podcasting yesterday…

My taxes are just about ready, so you’ll hear about podcasting tonight after I drop them at the post office along with a lot of the rest of the U.S.!

Whether you’re a one-person company working from home, or the Marketing Director in a thousand-employee international corporation, here’s why RSS is critical to your success:

• To ensure that your prospects and customers receive and read your content, rather than losing it to spam filters, changed email addresses and email overload;
• To ensure that your prospects and customers are comfortable and interested in receiving content from you, and that they can control that reception;
• To reach a wider internet audience more quickly than before;
• To increase the response to your marketing efforts;
• To build stronger relationships with your target audience;
• To improve your ranking and visibility in the internet search engines;
• To leverage the well-known websites of others in order to bring more traffic to your site;
• To find and take advantage of opportunities to deliver your content in new ways;
• To more fully utilize the internet to market all kinds of products, not just information products;
• To decrease the amount of time and effort it takes to provide frequent and timely information updates to your prospects and customers;
• Because sophisticated prospects and customers expect RSS delivery today, and everyone else will come to expect it in the near future.

The Best Corporate RSS Marketing Resource

Rok Hrastnik’s excellent and extremely comprehensive e-book on creating, using, publishing, promoting and profiting from RSS feeds, Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS, addresses all of these issues and more. His 2005 e-book is packed with over 550 pages of solid, practical tips, examples and case studies on how to use RSS to your best advantage. Rok and 41 of today’s RSS and marketing experts tackle best practices, planning, metrics and many other relevant issues which apply to large corporations and individuals alike.

You’ll come to understand internet content delivery, identify the problems you’re currently facing, discover what RSS is and how it works, understand how RSS can help you improve your marketing, examine the opportunities which RSS provides, plan your feeds and how you’re going to include RSS in your marketing strategy, learn how to create and promote your feeds, and how to measure and improve your RSS content delivery. Rok’s e-book, released in early 2005, is continually updated through his website. I refer to it almost daily — highly recommended.

Tomorrow we’ll delve into podcasting and why it could bring your site even more attention than a regular RSS feed.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources: RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools, kept fresh and up-to-date. Powered by iPowerWeb, amazing web hosting for just $7.95 a month. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

As promised yesterday, here are a few more ways to create a profit stream from your RSS feed, blog and website:

Amazon Products

You can earn affiliate commissions on Amazon products by customizing and placing one or more of their targeted RSS product feeds on your site. Not just a single product advertisement, but a whole collection of targeted products, all of which earn you a commission. Say you have a site targeted towards owners and potential owners of digital cameras. You could create a customized Amazon RSS feed which earns you commissions from the sales of books, e-books (yes, you can sell your own e-books through Amazon too), audio books, DVDs and videos about digital cameras, as well as actual digital cameras and all of their accessories. (more…)