...ologieslike podcasting. But are they really useful to the seriousInternet marketer or are they just the subjects used bymarketers looking to create new products to grab our hard-earnedmarketing dollars. We also covered the objections andreservations from some Internet marketers about the usefulnessof RSS feeds and blogs to the bottom-line of their ebusinesses.This can be contrasted to our discovery of people like WillieCrawford and companies like Weblogs, which generate 6- an...

...d7-figure incomes from blogs, RSS, and related technologies withGoogle Adsense. To illustrate if the typical Internetmarketers--not just web gurus--can benefit from blogs and RSSfeeds, I promised to share my experiences with my new sites notyet optimized for the search engines. With virgin websites, Icould observe the traffic pulling power of blogging, pinging,and RSS. If you would like to read or familiarize yourself withPart 1 of this article, you can read it at...http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/feb06-rss-prt1.htm Totest the effectiveness of the ability of RSS feeds and blogs toattract and drive traffic to my web properties, I did some quickand insightful research on the topic. Brandon Hong's MarketingRampage with Blogs and RSS was the resource best enabled me tounderstand the techno-jargon associated with blogs and RSSfeeds. Believe me, I have a 10-year background in informationtechnology, and I can't make heads or tails out of the alphabetsoup served up by tech geeks on blog and RSS media. Plus, I runa very busy SEO consultancy and virtual real estate (VREAdsense™ and Affiliate Sites) side business, so I don't have thetime to muck around in nebulous articles on these topics. If youeven remotely feel like me about the complexity of blogs or RSS,do yourself a favor and obtain Brandon Hong's multimedia ebookof screen-capture videos. You can read a full review of the bookat... http://www.searchengineplan.com/articles/hongrss.htm Ihave been blogging for almost 3 years, but RSS feeds have beenharder to grasp in terms of development and marketing. Theeasiest way to start blogging is to setup an account withwww.Blogger.com or www.Bloglines.com. Blogger will actually walkyou through the process. Experienced web designers should nothave a problem setting up a www.Blogger.com account. Blogger.comis actually a good initial choice because it provides an easysetup for RSS feeds. The setup can be done by going to theSettings Tab in Blogger, clicking the site feed link, andfilling out the forms. The next issue to consider is the complexRSS compatibility issue. You can sidestep the decision aboutwhether to go with RSS version 2.0 or Google's Atom standard by"burning your RSS feed" or making them more compatible with allpopular RSS formats with a third party service likeFeedburner.com. After creating your RSS feed in Blogger, youshould have it burned in the Feedburner.com service; it willguide you through the process. The optimized Feedburner.com RSSfeed is then ready to be submitted to the major RSS directories.I would suggest creating a few descriptions of your blog andthen submitting both your blog and RSS URLs to the appropriateRSS and blog directories. My firm fast-tracks blog and RSS feedpromotion by submitting them to about 90 directories thatspecialize in this type of media--including Yahoo! and MSN RSScontent services. Both the Blogger.com service and, moreextensively, Feedburner.com can be configured to ping the majorRSS and blog directories. This means they signal or alert thesedirectories whenever you update posts on your blog in real time.Perhaps most importantly, you get traffic statistics about yourRSS subscribers and readers. The results of my RSS and blogtraffic research over the last 3 months are amazing! I have beentotally blown away by the research. I am excited about RSS andblog usage, despite the good and bad news: The bad news:According to a White paper on blogging, sponsored in part byYahoo!, 88% of Internet users don't know what RSS technology isand 96% of Internet users stated they do not use it! The goodnews: 27% of Internet users experience RSS feed content on theirMy Yahoo and MSN web accounts, although they don't realize it!Moreover, 4% of Internet users actively use RSS feeds. Thismeans 31%, or almost one-third (1/3), of Internet users in theU.S. read RSS feeds. With almost 150 million U.S. Internet usersand 600 million net users worldwide, you do the math on thelarge numbers of people reading RSS feeds (even if unwittingly).More positive stats on RSS and blog usage, according to the PewInternet & American life project: - (1) Fully 19% of onlineAmericans ages 18-29 have created blogs - (2) 11 millionAmerican adults say they have created blogs - (3) 27% ofInternet users reported in November that they read blogs Thistranslates into 32 million American adults who read blogs Thisinformation shows that RSS and blogs are growing technologiesfor serious Internet business people to adapt into theirmarketing mix. My personal research over three months showedthat when I regularly updated my blog sites, burned RSS feedspinging the major directories increased my traffic a whopping25%! Blogs, RSS feeds, and articles distributed regularly tomajor host sites and distribution services actually rivaled thetraffic of my highly optimized top-ranking SEO and VRE sites.More importantly, traffic from blog, RSS, and article-driventraffic actually made twice as much income in sales and Adsense™revenue than my traditional SEO sites. Needless to say, once askeptic, I am now a big believer in the power of RSS feeds andblogs to boost my bottom-line. I will leave you with acontroversial statement for a SEO and Searchpreneur©. Dr. JakobNielsen recently referred to search engines as "the leeches onthe Internet." He feels "Search engines extract too much of theWeb's value, leaving too little for the websites that actuallycreate the content. Liberation from search dependency is astrategic imperative for both websites and software vendors."With Yahoo! and MSN soon to enforce email postage, according toa recent article by the New York Times, RSS and blogging maybecome the best and latest arsenal for small business tocontinue to survive and thrive in the Internet economy. To stayinformed on the latest blogging, RSS, and SEO developments,visit www.searchengineplan.com/blogs/seoblog.htm. Kamau Austinis publisher of www.eInfoNEWS.com and runswww.SearchEnginePlan.com. He is author of Always On Top -- Howto Get the Highest Search Engine Ranking for your Website. Seemore about his strategies at www.AlwaysOnToptheBook.com.