Increasing Your Article Distribution & Exposure: 6 Ways To Use Your Article Rss Feed

Most article directories will offer each author their own RSS feed for their articles. Whenever you publish an article, your RSS feed will be automatically updated with your latest content.

What is RSS? It stands for Real Simple Syndication.

RSS is a way for online content to be syndicated (shared, republished on the web, etc).

Have you ever wondering if there's anything that you can do after you submit your articles to help increase your article distribution? Yes, there are quite a few things that you can do with your author RSS feed to bring more exposure to your articles:

1 - Market your RSS feed on your website.

The RSS icon is widely recognizable--you've likely seen the orange and white icon on several sites. Underneath it you may see instructions like "Subscribe to this blog's feed" or "Subscribe to my article feed". You click the link or the icon and then you can easily subscribe to have new content sent directly to your RSS feed reader.

When you're marketing your own author RSS feed, you want to be sure to have an icon like this on your website or blog. Be sure that the instructions are clear about what the RSS is for--it's to receive your latest articles.

2 - Another place where your RSS feed can get a lot of attention is a feed aggregator. Aggregators index RSS feeds, and they provide a way for people to read the feeds that they're subscribed to. People can search for feeds on their topic of interest, and your RSS feed can show up in the list of results once it has been added to the aggregator. Here are some to add your feed to:

Bloglines

Reddit

Pipes (from Yahoo)

Google News

Friendfeed

3 - Bookmark your author RSS feed.

Social bookmarking sites such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, Friendfeed, Slashdot, and many others can be used to bring your article feed to the attention of people interested in your niche. All you have to do is set up an account at the bookmarking site and follow their instructions for bookmarking. When you do so, you will be asked to add tags that identify the topic of the web page that you're bookmarking (in this case, it's the web page that your author RSS feed is on). Be sure to pick tags that clearly identify what the topic of your content is.

4 - Add your feed to your web site or blog.

For instance, in the side bar or on a web page, you can use your RSS feed to post automatic updates of your latest articles, showing the title and the short description. When someone clicks on the title of your article, they will be taken to a web page that shows the full article. This is a great way to keep your readers informed of your latest articles.

There are even more things that your article feed is useful for--did you know that publishers can use it to automatically update their websites with your articles?

5 - Index your feed with the search engines.

When people do searches on Google and the other search engines, RSS feeds can pop up in the results. Sometimes people in your target marketing will be searching for RSS feeds for content such as yours. In order to benefit, though, your feed needs to be indexed in the search engine. Just like your web site can get many more visitors if it shows up in Google's rankings, so can your RSS feed.

Here are some places where you can add your author RSS feed link:

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php

Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

6 - Your author RSS feed can be used to post automatic updates to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. You can use a free service such as TwitterFeed to accomplish this.

Your author RSS feed has more uses than you probably expected! If you've feeling a bit overwhelmed, take things one step at a time. Just try one of these simple ways to use your RSS feed to bring more exposure to your articles. All of these are one shot deals--do them just one time, and you're set!