Does Your RSS Feed Work

The posts below are some that I have written on the importance of RSS Feeds and how it can greatly increase the traffic to your Affiliate Marketing site.

• RSS Feeds, Equals Increased Traffic
• RSS Feeds, A Benefit For your Blog
• Publishing Your RSS Feeds
• Promoting Your Affiliate Marketing Business
• Promoting Your Affiliate Marketing Blog, Additional Information

Since writing those posts, I have subscribed to a lot of RSS Feeds from other blogs. Initially while subscribing to them, they appeared to work fine. However, some actually did not and some have become invalid over time. After receiving an e-mail notification today that another of the RSS Feeds I subscribe to is invalid, I thought I would write this post so that anyone who reads this can verify if their RSS Feed is valid.

As noted in my previous posts, RSS Feeds are very important and are a benefit for your Affiliate Marketing blog. Having a valid RSS Feed equals additional traffic, both new and returning. So, with that fact alone, its imperative that any blogger hoping to make money validates that their RSS Feed actually works.

I found this free and simple tool on FeedValidator.org. All you have to do is enter or paste the address of your Affiliate Marketing website (or any website) and it will scan your RSS feed for validity. Once it scans, you will get results on if its valid and what could be improved with it.

Thats it for now, until my next post.

Affiliate Marketing & RSS Feeds

Traffic is the life blood of any website, for Affiliate Marketing or any other business If don’t get any or have very little traffic, it seriously limits your chances of success. I have done several posts (Promoting Your Affiliate Marketing Business, Generating Traffic, Indexing Your Affiliate Marketing Website)  now on how to increase traffic. The subject of this post is on RSS Feeds, another valuable tool to help increase traffic.


RSS (real simple syndication) feeds provide online business owners, bloggers, and Affiliate Marketers the opportunity to connect with members of their target market in an ‘ongoing fashion’. While it is still essential for a website to feature valuable content which interests others to be successful, RSS feeds have the ability for a site owner or blogger to send out notification of new content or promotions to interested subscribers. Thus, allowing them to stay in contact with previous visitors like never before.

Visitors who find a site or blog useful and entertaining could easily subscribe to the RSS feed and receive notification and have and easy access to any future site updates. This adds to an advantage of being able to keep in touch with past visitors, and in this way, would increase repeat business for a site. There are a couple other reasons why businesses are now embracing the use of RSS feeds:

1. RSS feeds increase your chances of others linking to your content, mentioning your site, and spreading your business around by word of mouth.

2. Having an RSS feed to your site aids in your ranking with search engines.

3. With RSS feeds, you could be able to get your content indexed with search engines much faster.

4. You can attract traffic to your site that does not originate from search engines results pages, if you have RSS feeds installed on your site

5. Since your content is distributed to all subscribers, the is always the chance of your content catching on and “going viral” as it spreads from one person to another.

When you have RSS feeds operating with multiple sites, you could essentially get free marketing and traffic for your Affiliate Marketing site which is beneficial for your business! Some websites which operate RSS feed directories receive thousands upon thousands of visits every single day. So, if you are listed with them, you get to benefit from the constant flow of traffic which you do not have to pay for!

Most people do not realize how powerful RSS feeds can be. Unfortunately, they are not using this tool to its greatest ability. They use it to some minor extent, but they do not understand or know how to get the back links that they should be receiving from the usage of RSS feeds. Additionally some do not understand that RSS feeds can improve their page ranking with the search engines. All in all, if you could grasp the concept and understand the application of RSS feeds, you could take a huge leap ahead of all your competition!

Adding a RSS feed is fairly simple. You should be able to use your web creation software to easily create it. I recommend you stick with the universally known orange rss button.
If you want to see substantial increases of traffic to your site and watch your Affiliate Marketing business grow by leaps and bounds, then you really can’t afford to pass up on RSS feeds.

So, maybe you are struggling with the decision of whether to implement RSS feeds or not, consider the following benefits for those who use RSS feeds as part of their content and communication plan.
The benefits for anyone who decides to implement RSS feeds on their Affiliate Marketing blog/website can be and are numerous:

1. RSS Feeds Save You Time

RSS subscribers can quickly scan RSS feeds, without having to visit each and every website. Subscribers can then click on any items they are interested in, to get additional information.

2. RSS Feeds Are Timely

RSS feeds will automatically update themselves any time new information is posted. So the information your subscribers receive via their RSS reader or news aggregator is timely.

3. RSS Feeds are Spam Free

Subscribers don’t have to worry about wading through huge amounts of spam in an attempt to get to the information they are actually interested in.

4. Opt-In Option

The RSS subscriber chooses what they want to see. Subscribers also choose what information they wish to receive. Subscribers are more likely to opt in since they know that they have full control, and that they do not have to provide any personal information to subscribe.

5. Unsubscribing Is Easy

At first thought, this may not seem to be a benefit. However, in the end it is since unsubscribe (or cancelling) an RSS feed is very simple. So, if for some reason, your reader does not like information contained in an RSS feed, they can simply remove the RSS feed from their RSS reader or news aggregator.

6. Alternate Communication Channel

RSS feeds provide you with alternate communication channels for your Affiliate Marketing business. The more channels you provide, the more opportunities you have to connect with your customers and potential customers.

7. Expands Audience Through Syndication

The very nature of RSS feeds is that it is designed specifically for syndication (i.e. publication by others). Any sort of syndication can expand a company’s reach and strengthen the company brand.

8. Can Increase Backlinks

When an RSS feed is syndicated, it can increase the number of links back to the original website. Additional incoming links will help a Affiliate Marketing website rank better in organic search engine rankings.

9. Increases Productivity

RSS increases productivity by allowing your readers to quickly scan new posts and headlines. That way your readers spend time on the items of interest.

10. Competitive

Your competitors probably use Rss Feeds. So one way to remain competitive is to implement RSS feeds. That way you can keep your competition from getting ahead of you.

While there are plenty of positive for Rss Feeds, unfortunately there are a few negatives

1. Some Readers Do Not Know How to Subscribe

While Rss Feeds are becoming more and more popular,  some people do not know how to subscribe. This mostly applies to the new internet user, in which you would not think is possible, however it is.

2. Your Content Can Easily Be Copied

RSS feed content can easily be copied and replicated. This can happen whether you want it to be or not.

3. Tracking Subscribers Can Be Difficult

It can difficult to accurately track the number of subscribers who read an RSS feed or the items contained in an RSS feed. This is due in part to the fact that at its heart, RSS is all about achieving the widest syndication possible.

4. Source Origination Difficult

With RSS feeds it canb sometimes difficult to discern the origin of an item, especially when its syndicated. Unfortunately, the metrics available are not always reflective of the traffic received.  

There you pretty much have it. Enjoy!!!