Promote Your Blog Via Syndication Services

One way to increase your blog's exposure is via syndication services that will make your posts available to other websites to republish. If a high-profile website decides to feature your content, you'll get a prominent byline with a link back to your blog, which can potentially generate significant amounts of traffic and increase your online readership.

The best-known blog syndication service is probably BlogBurst, which boasts such notable publishers as USA Today, Gannett, Reuters, and The Houston Chronicle among its clients. By joining BlogBurst, you'll agree to make your blog's content freely available for these publishers to include on their websites, in return for that byline and link back to your blog. If your blog joins the ranks of BlogBurst's top performers, you'll be eligible for their cash rewards program as well, with payouts ranging from $50 to $1500 for the most widely syndicated blogs.

Another syndication service worth considering is Feedzilla, which operates on a slightly different model from BlogBurst. For syndication fees ranging from $9.95/month to $199.95/month, publishers can pay to receive access to Feedzilla's content "widgets". They can then install these widgets on their sites to display news feeds from up to 150 content providers. Like BlogBurst, Feedzilla enables bloggers to tap into a network of major publishers to increase their visibility. Publishers currently using Feedzilla to display blog and news feeds on their sites include BBC, About.com, The Sun, Reuters, and News Corporation. By joining Feedzilla you also get a chance to earn a share of revenues from advertising they display in those content widgets - in addition to any you earn from the extra traffic they send your way.

The third and final syndication service I'll cover today is Moreover's Webfeed Wizard. Like Feedzilla, the Wizard is an interface for publishers to add feeds of the latest blog content to their own sites. The benefit to the blogger, as with the other syndication services, is increased visibility and traffic back to their blog from links embedded in the syndicated content. Moreover offers a couple other services for bloggers worth checking out as well: their Custom Content Aggregation Services and XML Conversion Services, both featured on the same page.

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., content, sindication, sindicate, distirbution, trafic, blog-burst, feed zilla, morover, more-over, web-feed

Turn Your Blog Into an Email Newsletter

I'm sure you've seen those sites with the newsletter sign-up form, inviting visitors to submit their email address and join their mailing list. If you're like me it probably seemed like a great idea, but you found the prospect of maintaining the mailing list, putting together a regular newsletter, and coordinating the mailings too complicated for your taste. And you're right, if you were trying to do all that yourself it could turn into quite a headache.

And yet it's still a great idea. After all, a blog is so much like a newsletter that it makes perfect sense to convert each post into a mini-email update. And there are undoubtedly some readers would prefer to read it in that format. Maybe they only find time to check their email in the course of their day, not surf the web. Or maybe they work someplace where their web access is extremely restricted. Or maybe they have no clue what an RSS feed is and don't really want to know. Or maybe they're just nostalgic for the old days of Usenet, when most important online communication came in via their inbox.

The good news is you can broadcast your blog via email pretty easily with a service called FeedBlitz. I found it while I was searching for sites to help promote blog RSS feeds, and it caught my attention immediately since I've always wondered if there was quick and painless way to distribute a blog via email. That's exactly what FeedBlitz does: they'll instantly convert your blog's RSS feed into an email and distribute it automatically to your subscription list.

Here's how it works:

You sign up for a FeedBlitz account, login and enter your RSS feed into their "New Feed" menu.

After you submit the form, they'll email you a sample email with all your recent blog posts. Double check it to make everything looks OK.

If it does, you can then log into your account and grab their HTML code that allows you to add an email subscription form to your blog. Paste this code into your blog template whereever you'd like it to appear, republish, take a minute to make sure everything's formatting correctly on your blog, and if it is, you're all set - you're now a newsletter publisher as well as a blogger!

Ready to get started? This complete intro to the FeedBlitz service tells you everything you'll need to know.

Promote Your Blog's RSS Feeds

Ever wonder what exactly you should be doing with those RSS feeds that come with your blog? Or maybe you're just wondering what RSS is - well, you wouldn't be the first person.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a data format based on the XML standard, which allows the efficient, standardized transmission of digital information from place to place. That could be from website to website, from database to database, from database to website, and so on. What RSS means to you as a blogger is that you have an easy, ready-made format for syndicating whatever you publish on your blog. And just how would that work? Here are a few examples:

A fan of your blog can add your RSS feed to their RSS reader (sometimes also called a "newsreader"), which will update them every time you add a new post by displaying a link to the headline, along with a few sentences or even the full post, if you choose to include it in your feed. Popular RSS readers include My Yahoo, Google Reader, BlogLines, and NewsGator. (You can find a list of the most popular RSS readers in this article.)

So rather than needing to check your blog every day to see if you've posted something new, your fan can just sit back and wait for your latest post to pop up in their RSS reader. Much more convenient.

Another use of RSS feeds is to syndicate your content to someone else's site. For example, the site StockBlogs.com is based almost entirely on RSS feeds from blogs about the stock market. StockBlogs will display the latest headlines from each blog, along with related information and some advertising (of course), and visitors can then click off to whatever blog post interests them. The result is a nice source of traffic to the featured sites via their RSS feeds, and a useful resource for stock researchers looking for commentary from the blogosphere in one central location.

There are a number of ways you can promote your RSS feeds to take advantage of these traffic opportunities. First, and most simply, just make sure they're prominently displayed on each page of your blog. Place a link in the blog's sidebar with the text "Subscribe to My RSS Feed!" or something similar, and any RSS-savvy visitor will be able to easily grab your feed and add it to their reader.

Make sure your friends know about your blog's RSS feed. Millions of people use Yahoo email, and if they have a Yahoo email account, they already have a My Yahoo page with RSS capabilities. All they'll need to do is sign in to their Yahoo account and add your feed to get instant updates whenever you update your blog.

You can also add small graphic links called buttons to your blog that will allow RSS users to subscribe to your feed with just a couple clicks. You can download the graphics and code for dozens of these buttons from this handy page.

Another RSS promotion strategy is to submit your feed to sites that feature RSS content. These include specialized sites like StockBlogs, as well as RSS search engines and directories. Here's a list of sites I've had good luck submitting my own RSS feeds to:

Bloogz RSS Finder

RSSFeeds.com

2RSS.com

FeedShow
(shares revenues they earn from your feed content with you!)

Plazoo.com

Inform.com

BlogDigger

And this is just the tip of the feedberg - there are many more RSS directories, search engines and aggregators out there. You can find dozens of them on this RSS submission list, one of my favorite bookmarks.

Once you've submitted your feed to all these RSS sites, the next step is to keep them fed with fresh blog posts!

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., Real Simple Syndication, sindication, syndicate, sindicate, feeds, feedreader, newsreader, subscribe, subsribe, subscription, agregator, aggregater