Syndicate Yourself Use RSS feeds to build website traffic and keep your web presence up to date.
By Francine Kizner •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Have a blog? It has an RSS feed. Sell on eBay? That has RSS as well. Have a Yelp listing, a YouTube channel or a Twitter account? They've got one, too. Now don't leave them languishing--start syndicating your feeds to build traffic, reach your target market and keep your web presence up to date. Where can you start?
- Build a master feed of all your online activity. Head to FriendFeed.com and input your various social sites, blogs and other feeds to create a "lifestream" that can link people to all your content--and let them comment on it, too.
- Create different widgets to put on your sites and profiles. Go to Widgetbox.com and enter your feed URL. Then add a custom header, play around with the appearance settings and publish it on MySpace, Facebook or anywhere else you can paste some HTML.
- Turn your blog into an e-newsletter. Sign up for FeedBurner and activate e-mail subscriptions, or set up a FeedBlitz.com newsletter so your audience can get daily updates from you in their inbox.
- Get eyeballs on Amazon. If you're a published author, you can syndicate your feed on your AmazonConnect profile. If you don't have a book, apply to get your blog on Amazon Kindle's subscription list--you'll get a 30 percent cut from each subscriber's fee.
Don't forget to look for other places you can drop your feed (like news services and social site profiles) to send links back to your site and build a dynamic online identity.
