How to Profit Easily From RSS Data Feeds

By: Michael Hehn

stands for "really simple syndication", and as the name suggests, it is relatively easy to take advantage of RSS to make money.

There are many ways you can profit from RSS data feeds. To begin with, since this is a new technology, most people are afraid to jump in and learn how to take advantage of it. This makes it a great opportunity for you because there is less competition.

In the same way you generate traffic, subscribers and money by writing and submitting articles to article directories, you can do the same thing with RSS feeds.

You simply create your RSS feed and then submit it to the various RSS feed directories.

The links within your feeds need to point back to your websites, affiliate links and opt-in list pages so that you can make money.

On the Internet content is king and webmasters are always on the lookout for free content. Especially nowadays, with the Google Adsense craze, a lot of Internet marketers are creating tons of websites constantly with page generators and free content.

This is why an RSS feed will be picked up and used on lots of different websites, and the smart marketers that use RSS feeds stand to profit wildly from this situation.

You may not consider everything you just read to be crucial information about rss. But don't be surprised if you find yourself recalling and using this very information in the next few days.

Since you will be submitting the RSS feed to directories, it is important to use an attractive title, including related keywords. This way, people looking for content will find it when doing a search in RSS feed directories.

Now that you have a fair understanding of what RSS is, and how you can create your own feed, here are some creative ways to put the power of RSS to work and bring in profits:

1. Syndicate your RSS feed in RSS directories to be picked up by webmasters looking for free content.

2. Insert relevant affiliate links in your RSS feed.

3. Insert links to your websites and opt-in list pages. This way you build up your link popularity and attract traffic to your websites.

4. Sell a product directly using RSS by including your sales letter in the feed.

5. Use RSS data feed content from other authors to create a content site using a page generator. Once the content site is done you can add Adsense and related affiliate links.

These are just a few ideas to get you started with profiting from RSS feeds. With application of this technology you will come up with various other ideas, and profit even more. The key is to take action and differentiate yourself from the majority of Internet marketers, many of whom are afraid to deal with technology at all.

This article's coverage of the information is as complete as it can be today. But you should always leave open the possibility that future research could uncover new facts.

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Article Source: http://www.articles.myprofession.org

What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom Business?

By Meryl K. Evans

It's been a long day at work and you're in no mood to cook dinner or go out. Time to count on the reliable pizza delivery guy. The order is called in and he promptly arrives with smokin' hot pizza within 30 minutes as promised. If it were only that easy with a picky family where no one can agree on the same restaurant for dinner. One wants Mexican, another wants Chinese, and another wants a burger and Mexican. Instead of running to three different places, you call a delivery service that goes to all of them and brings it to you. What could be easier in getting a meal without cooking it or fetching it?

RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom are the food delivery guy of the Internet. The content they deliver is mixed and cooked elsewhere on the Internet just like the meal isn't made on your door step and the acronym fellows bring the content to you via software or an online application. Instead of trying to remember all the places where you like to go to get the latest news, it all comes to you once you order your food.

Click on any of those orange or blue RSS, XML, or RDF buttons and you see unreadable text. Some of it is readable, but reading between the is slow and difficult. In this case, you've got the raw ingredients of the content known as a feed. To make it easily readable, download a feed reader that can interpret (aggregate) the ingredients or sign up for an online service that can do the same.

When the software or application is ready to go, click on the orange or blue button (or "Syndicate This Page," or whatever is along these lines) and copy the resulting URL from the address box. Paste it into the application to cook the ingredients where it's delivered to you ready for your enjoyment.

Syndication is a not a new concept on the Internet, but it’s growing in popularity as more Web sites and newsletters are churning content to turn it into syndicated files, which are fed into an aggregator. Think of it as the content that's ready to travel anywhere it needs to go. Grab the feed and feed it to the aggregator, another way of bookmarking (or creating a favorite) a site because you wish to come back again another time. But how often did you go back to the site through your bookmarks / favorites?

Instead of schlepping from site to site in search of information, I have it all in front of me via the aggregator. The feeds are sorted in folders by topic for easy finding. If I'm writing about the latest virus or worm, then I open the security folder with the security-related feeds and scan them. Scanning content through aggregators is easier than on a Web site because it's in one folder with headlines and maybe a short summary. On a Web site, you're only getting the benefit of that site's news and no where else. The folder has news from over ten resources including blogs, news sites, and newsletters.

Any content can be syndicated. It's a matter of having the backend process in place, which is dependent on the application used for managing the content. If a site doesn't have such resources, then there is software for entering content to create a file with the feed for posting on the site.

Most aggregators have exporting capabilities so the feed can be shared with others interested in the same topic. If you're interested in my security feeds, I can export them into, in most cases, an OPML file and you can import it into your aggregator.

Spam filters are preventing readers from getting newsletters or they get lost in the spam pool. Offering a feed for the newsletter is a compromise. Readers can get the content, only instead of it coming to the emailbox, it comes through the aggregator. It's a way around spam. Like everything else, it has its advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:

• Filters can't stop the newsletter from reaching its destination.
• The recipient will get it - if the server is down, it'll download next time and email can get lost.
• The feed can be syndicated providing more exposure for your content.

Disadvantages:

• Rely on readers to open aggregators like they open email client, but some aggregators are built-in with an email client like NewsGator and there are online aggregators like Bloglines, which can be your home page.
• Metrics won't be as complete, but it's still there through the links.
• Not as pretty as HTML-based newsletters.

If the feed is automatically created, what have you got to lose? You're providing another way for your readers to get your content just like you can get pizza in different ways: go to the restaurant, have it delivered, or make it at home. More applications are adding syndication capabilities, which make the process effortless. Some have said they won’t read something unless it has a feed.

Syndication works better than bookmarks. With bookmarks, you click on a site that might have the security information and arrive there to find it doesn't. So, back to the bookmarks to click on another site. Lather, rinse, repeat. With aggregators, there is no jumping from site to site. Scan the headlines right there until you find what you need.

There was a time when we didn't have the option to have pizza delivered to our doorstep. When we're too tired, we know we can rely on the delivery guy. In term of content, expect to see it show up at your doorstep more often than the pizza guy plus it's cheaper with the cost only coming from the software though there are many free options available. Syndication is here to stay and should be added to a company’s communication toolbox rather than as a replacement. Witness it by watching for RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom out there.

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl.net who increases conversion rates by writing and editing content so organization can focus on their core business. She is the editor-in-chief of the eNewsletter Journal and Shavlik's The Remediator Security Digest. Visit her Web site at http://www.meryl.net/blog/.

Get Better Search Engine Rankings with RSS

by: Satyajeet Hattangadi

RSS is the latest craze in online publishing. But what exactly is RSS?

RSS or Rich Site Syndication is a file format similar to XML, and is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be universally understood.

RSS allows publishers to "syndicate" their content through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks.

It has actually been around for a while, but with the advent of spam filters and online blogging, it is fast becoming the choice of ezine publishers who want to get their message across to their subscribers.

However, not much attention has been given to the advantages RSS provides for search engine optimization.

Why Search Engines Love RSS

Many SEO experts believe that sites optimized around themes,or niches, where all pages correspond to a particular subject or set of keywords, rank better in the search engines.

For example, if your website is designed to sell tennis rackets, your entire site content would be focused around tennis and tennis rackets.

Search engines like Google seem to prefer tightly-themed pages.

But where does RSS figure in all this?

RSS feeds, usually sourced from newsfeeds or blogs, often correspond to a particular theme or niche.

By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can enhance your site's content without having to write a single line on your own.

It’s like having your own content writer - writing theme-based articles for you - for free!

How can RSS improve my Search Engine Rankings?

There are three powerful reasons why content from RSS Feeds is irresistible bait for search engine spiders.

1. RSS Feeds Provide Instant Themed Content

There are several publishers of RSS feeds that are specific to a particular theme.

Since the feed is highly targeted, it could contain several keywords that you want to rank highly for.

Adding these keywords to your pages helps Google tag your site as one with relevant content.

2. RSS Feeds Provide Fresh, Updated Content

RSS feeds from large publishers are updated at specific intervals. When the publisher adds a new article to the feed, the oldest article is dropped.

These changes are immediately effected on your pages with the RSS feed as well. So you have fresh relevant content for your visitors every hour or day.

3. RSS Feeds Result in More Frequent Spidering

One thing I never anticipated would happen as a result of adding an RSS feed to my site was that the Googlebot visited my site almost daily.

To the Googlebot, my page that had the RSS feed incorporated into it was as good as a page that was being updated daily, and in its judgement, was a page that was worth visiting daily.

What this means to you, is that you will have your site being indexed more frequently by the Googlebot and so any new pages that you add to your site will be picked up much faster than your competitors.

How does this benefit you as a marketer?

Well, for example, let's says a top Internet Marketer comes out with a new product that you review and write up a little article on, and that your competitors do the same.

Google generally tends to index pages at the start of the month and if you miss that update, you will probably need to wait till the next month to even see your entry in.

But, since your site has RSS feeds, it now gets indexed more frequently. So the chances of getting your page indexed quickly are much higher.

This gives you an advantage over the competition, as your review will show up sooner in the search results than theirs.

Imagine what an entire month's advantage could do to your affiliate sales!

Why Javascript Feeds Are Not Effective

Some sites offer javascript code that generates content sourced from RSS feeds for your site.

These are of absolutely no value in terms of search engine rankings, as the googlebot cannot read javascript and the content is not interpreted as part of your page.

What you need is code that parses the RSS feed and renders the feed as html content that's part of your page.

This is achieved using server side scripting languages like PHP or ASP.

A good free ASP script is available from Kattanweb
http://www.kattanweb.com/webdev/projects/index.asp?ID=7

An equally good PHP script is CARP
http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

But, if you're looking for an easier solution, you should check out Express RSS
http://www.novasoft-inc.net/express-rss

So in conclusion, besides optimizing on page and off page factors, adding RSS feeds to your pages should be an important part of your strategy to boost your search engine rankings.

What is RSS?

By: Nasir

RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML and used for Web syndication. Syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website. RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". These RSS feeds provide a way for users to passively receive newly released content. This might be the full content itself or just a link to it, possibly with a summary or other metadata. RSS feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters.
By having "RSS" plugged into your website with targeted RSS feeds you'll now have a continuous supply of fresh targeted content delivered to your website for your visitors 24/7/365 without you ever having to lift a finger. The other great thing about RSS is it'll keep the 'Search Engine Spiders' coming back more frequently since "RSS" automatically updates your selected feeds 'Daily' with fresh targeted content.
To display RSS feeds on your site, you will have to install software to your server and convert the pages where you would like to place the feeds to PHP. You can also use JavaScript or various other scripting languages to display RSS feeds on your site.

Benefits of Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary:
1. It gives you the latest updates.
2. It saves on surfing time.
3. It gives the power of subscription to the user.
4. It lessens the mess in your inbox.
5. It is spam free.
6. Unsubscribing is stress-free.
7. It can be used as an advertising or marketing tool.

Drawbacks of Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary:
1. Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed.
2. Graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds.
3. The identity of the source website can be confusing.
4. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising.
5. RSS feeds create higher traffic and demands on the server.
6. Since it is a new technology, many sites still do not support RSS.

Displaying RSS Feeds

by: S. Housley

RSS offers webmasters a unique opportunity to display fresh content on websites. While publishing an RSS feed is a great way to generate site interest and increase communication, syndicating and displaying feeds from related relevant sources can also generate interest, increase traffic and improve search engine ranking.

RSS Radars

Webmasters with limited time or capacity can syndicate related content. In a nut shell, webmasters can create RSS radars by combining a mix of content from related sources by grouping similarly-themed feeds. RSS feeds are updated at different intervals, providing an ever-changing collection of related information.

RSS is a form of eXtensible Markup Language or XML. Viewing an RSS feed in a web browser generally produces code that is not easy for website visitors to decipher. As a result, webmasters use tools to display the content contained in an RSS feed.

Content contained in RSS feeds can be added to websites a number of different ways. Each method for displaying the RSS feed has pros and cons associated with it. Webmasters will need to determine which option will best meet their hosting and technology needs.

Using Javascript to Display RSS

Javascript is the easiest way to display RSS feeds on a website. There are a number of sites that will allow you to generate code that can be inserted into a website. The javascript will auto-update, showing the latest headlines as the feed is updated. Each time a visitor visits the website the javascript pulls the data from the feed. Often, the various scripts can be customized so that the look of the feed can be made to match a specific websiteeeds with hopes that the search engines will devour and spider the contents, you will be disappointed. When javascript is used to display RSS feeds, search engines do not actually "see" the contents of the feed, meaning that the search engines will not index the contents of the feed within the website.

Feedroll - Feedroll is a free service for syndicating RSS and ATOM news feeds on your website. Simply select a feed, customize the design, then copy and paste the code provided onto your page.

http://www.feedroll.com

Using PHP to Display RSS

PHP is a slightly more complex solution for displaying RSS. Like javascript, as the contents of the feed updates, the web page contents will update as the page is refreshed. The benefit of using PHP to display RSS is that the contents of the feed displayed with the webpage can be spidered and indexed by search engines. The result is a feed that always displays the most current information from the RSS feed and the web page content is considered search engine spider and robot-friendly.

rss2html.php - The rss2html.php script allows users to create web pages that will always display the most current information from the RSS feed, and because the resulting page is pure HTML, it will be in a format friendly to search engine robots. Using rss2html.php, webmasters can customize the format and look of the web page created from the feed. The RSS feed's contents can easily be integrated into an existing website's theme. The rss2html.php script parses the RSS file, extracts the pertinent information, formats it, and serves it up as regular HTML.

http://www.feedforall.com/free-php-script.htm

FeedRoll Pro - FeedRollPro was really designed to enable publishers to syndicate their own content on other sites. But it can be used to syndicate news feeds from other sites on your own pages. http://www.feedrollpro.com

Using ASP to Display RSS

ASP is similar to PHP. The free ASP/ASP.NET scripts can be used to convert RSS feeds into HTML and display on ASP/ASP.NET web-server.

rss2html.asp - ByteScout has implemented a guide for displaying of RSS/XML feed using free RSS2HTML.ASP script in ASP or ASP.NET environment. This script can be used free of charge on any ASP or ASP.NET web-server and generate HTML from RSS feed. This free ASP script uses MSXML to load RSS feed from URL and display it. You can use it as a standalone or call from script on HTML page to generate HTML content from RSS feed and then display on your HTML page.

http://bytescout.com/how_to_display_rss_using_asp.html

RssFeed - RssFeed is an open-source custom ASP.NET server control that displays the contents of a specified RSS feed in an ASP.NET web page.

http://www.scottonwriting.com/sowBlog/RssFeed.htm

If PHP or ASP is used to update feeds, the website will have free fresh, relevant content each time the feeds referenced are updated.

Export RSS to HTML

If you wish to dress up the feed's appearance you can use a template exporting the feed as HTML or an HTML table. Publishers can incorporate exported tables into an HTML template using a server-side include. Each time the feed is updated, the feed will need to be exported to HTML and uploaded along with the feed. Though this only takes a few moments, exporting RSS to HTML does require webmaster intervention to update the content. The end result, though, is a complete web page with an RSS feed in it that will be search engine-friendly.

FeedForAll - FeedForAll allows users to export RSS feeds from RSS to HTML. The look of the HTML can be modified to match an existing website's design.

http://www.feedforall.com

Using Services

There are a number of services available that host and display RSS feeds, in many cases free of charge. Because these services operate on a different domain server there is little benefit to end-users displaying their feeds in this fashion. That said, the services are generally free of charge, so you get what you pay for.

RSS2HTML.com - Select a layout, color scheme and enter the URL of the feed. A web page URL will be generated that will display the feed in the selected scheme.

http://www.rss2html.com

FeedBurner - FeedBurner provides a number of online services. Among them is a service that displays RSS feeds on a website.

http://www.feedburner.com

Using XSL to Display RSS

Although using XSL and CSS stylesheets to display XML directly is easy to understand in theory, it is rather tricky to implement in the real world and is very tough for novices to use successfully. Webmasters must be fairly familiar with CSS and XSL to have the formatting work well, and webmasters then have to address browser incompatibilities and exceptions. As a result, not a lot of resources or services yet exist to display RSS using XSL.

Using highly targeted feeds, webmasters can enhance their websites with themed content. Ultimately, providing relevant, educational or newsworthy information from reputable related sources will establish expertise in a specific area.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS?

One of the biggest reasons people visit websites is to get information. If you can regularly provide fresh, quality content on your website you can expect to be rewarded by visitors and return visitors. What’s more, you will be rewarded by the search engines. I recommended that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day.

Regularly adding fresh and original content:

Keeps your site visitors coming back
Continually adds value to your website
Makes people more comfortable buying from your site
Establishes yourself as an authority in your industry
Greatly helps your site rank higher in search engines

All of the above factors translate into revenue.

We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is, especially if you’re the business owner. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, and above all, able to write. So what's a website owner or business owner supposed to do? RSS may be the answer.

What Is RSS?

Here's the Wikipedia definition of RSS:
RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats) and used for Web syndication. RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". These RSS feeds provide a way for users to passively receive newly released content (such as text, web pages, sound files, or other media); this might be the full content itself or just a link to it, possibly with a summary or other metadata (data describing the content).

RSS feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters.

"RSS" can stand for any of the following phrases:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

Want to see an example of RSS in action? Go to the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage (Oak Web Works, LLC), and look at the bottom of the right-hand column under the title 'Latest Tech News'. This is actually two RSS feeds from other websites.

Our company homepage was very static. It didn't change very much since the services we offer stay basically the same. Why should any visitors come back if every time they come to our site, the content is exactly the same? They don't have much of a reason.

Interestingly, that's the way search engine spiders were programmed to "think" as well. Spiders are programs written for search engines to regularly surf the Web and record what's there. That recording goes into the search engine's databases ready to be accessed by the next searcher. This process is called indexing.

For example, Google will send out a spider to your site and index a lot of it, but not always all of it. It determines how often to revisit and index your site by how often you update it. If you update it every day, then it will visit much more often than if you rarely update it. Engines also consider the homepage to be the most important page, so it's good to update it even more often than the rest of your site.

Again, if you struggle with adding fresh content, then RSS may be the answer. We didn't write the headlines under 'Latest Tech News' on our homepage. Instead, the RSS feed automatically grabbed it from another site that had created them. Once we set the feed up, we don't have to do anything more, and our homepage has regularly updated content. Every time those headlines change, it updates its feed, which is then updated on any other websites displaying that feed, as well as ours.

RSS feeds can be more than news headlines. They can be lists of any kind. They can be press releases, articles, blog entries, product releases, or almost any other grouping of changing or growing data.

How Do I Set An RSS Feed Up?

There are a number of ways in which you can display an RSS feed on your website. You can use JavaScript or various other scripting languages. Unfortunately, RSS that uses JavaScript is not seen at all by search engines when they come and index your site, so don't use JavaScript.

Instead, use a script that can be handled by your Web server besides JavaScript. Ask your hosting company or IT people what platform your Web server uses and what software or modules are loaded onto the machine. This will determine what scripting language you can use for your RSS.

Check if your Web server has PHP capabilities. If so, then there are hundreds of scripts written in PHP that you can use for free that properly displays RSS feeds that are recognized by search engines. There are RSS scripts written in ASP.NET, Perl and numerous other languages, so you have a wide variety to choose from.

For the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage we used an ASP script called RSStoHTML.

Which one would you choose? After you’ve determined which languages your Web server supports, conduct a search such as “PHP script for displaying RSS feeds in html” or ‘ASP and RSS’, for example. Try a few and see which ones run on your server. If one runs on your server properly, and you check this by simply seeing if it displays RSS feeds on your Web page, then use that one.

When you download the script, look at the code and find where to add an RSS feed URL. There should be a dummy one in there already, so just replace that one with the RSS feed you want to use. Here's what a typical RSS feed URL looks like: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/userland/Technology.xml
The URL's often end in '.rss' as well.

After we inserted the RSS feed URL into the script, we wanted to display the feed in HTML on our homepage. To do this we added the following bit of code into the spot on our homepage html code where we wanted it to display:



Keep in mind that this is for a Windows Web server. The way in which you include it on a website powered by a UNIX Web server will be a little different. If you’re not sure, ask your hosting company.

Where can I find feeds that are relevant to my website's content?

First you can try these:

Yahoo! News – RSS - http://news.yahoo.com/rss
Syndic8 - http://www.syndic8.com/
Feedster - http://www.feedster.com/

You can also do a search for your topic and RSS feeds. For example, search for "RSS feeds and pets', or 'football and RSS feeds', or 'small business news feeds'. Finally, you can go to specific websites that are related to your industry and look for a small, orange, rectangular icon that say ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’. Click on that and you'll get a feed URL to enter into your RSS feed script.

Remember, always be sure to include feeds that are relevant to your website's content. Once you get the hang of the concept, RSS can be a lot of fun, and it definitely keeps your website fresh and updated, just what search engines like, and more importantly, what website visitors like.