Is Blogging and RSS ALL THAT? Yes, and a bag of chips!

by: Jack Humphrey
Copyright 2005 Jack HumphreyIn a very popular marketing forum recently I saw a post that blew me away. It was from someone asking if having a blog was really that big a deal in marketing their website!Let's put it this way: simply putting a blog on your site does nothing for your traffic and links. Nada. Zilch. Zippo.But what novice marketers fail to realize is a blog that is RSS enabled is a powerful traffic generation tool in the right hands.Webmasters who understand what to do with a blog once they install one are reaping huge rewards in targeted traffic, incoming links, and faster search engine spidering.There are search engines on the web that deal in nothing but blogs and RSS feeds. Meaning you cannot and will not get into those engines without a blog. And you are missing some seriously easy traffic.My blog feed is all over the web, passively linking right back to my site, my posts, and my products. People use my content feeds (RSS) without my having to ask them to do so. Other sites need content that is rich in the keywords I regularly use on my blog, so they grab my feed and benefit from content they don't have to write themselves.Where do they find my feed? Not usually on the blog itself, but in the feed engines! Take a look at some to see what I am talking about:http://daypop.comhttp://syndic8.comhttp://technorati.comSome only take your RSS feed URL while others just want your blog index page. Submitting to the ever growing list of blog and RSS directories is the easiest way to get spidered by the regular engines and get your links into directories all over the world.All you have to do is provide good content on your site's main topic on a regular basis. Whole sites are run on blog software nowadays because the power of RSS promotion makes promoting them so much easier than static html pages and regular search engines.Getting into the directories is one thing. Now you need to beef up your promotion by pinging regularly. Some blogs like Wordpress will allow you to update a list of sites to "ping" every time you post.Pinging is simply sending a quick notice through to each site on the web that tracks and updates the information they have about your blog. New post - new ping. One click and tons of sites all have the most recent posts to your blog!I use http://pingoat.com lately with great results. I like to make sure I am pinging every blog engine out there. They have a considerable list of places to ping and I do it every time I post to my blog.In a matter of hours I have search engines crawling my site for new pages. And since I link from my blog to the rest of my site, the people who come to the blog can get to every other part of my site with ease.All of this is merely scratching the surface of what blogs and RSS feeds can do for your marketing efforts. Everyone is going to RSS to syndicate their content. If you aren't yet, you'd better start ASAP. Because you are getting left in the dust by your competition for your keywords.After actively blogging, pinging, and submitting your blog feed and main URL to the blog engines for a couple months you are going to see amazing amounts of back links. And in far shorter time than it would take you with any other marketing method other than aggressive syndication of articles.So if someone asks you if having a blog is really all that, now you can tell them what it's all about. It's not the blog, it's what you DO with it that counts.