Should Your Website Publish A Feed?

Here’s a real powerful method of gaining mass free traffic to your website. If I was a politician and wanted votes, I’d use a feed. Take our site here for example. I am really too busy working to blog, but to keep everyone up to date, I will post the latest happenings here.  Of course you can always subscribe to our feed. This is the best way to get instant updates, just as soon as you have a moment to read them.

And here comes the real power of feeds. I have been an avid promoter of feeds for some three years now.  Last summer in ‘07 I did a little test on a Live Spaces Site. In just three days I was indexed in over half a million places in Google alone. I did it with one simple exercise. I used the feed feature and simply blogged and pinged MSN. Google Blog Index and Technorati  picked it up in five minutes. Then the Google General Index would pick it up some 13 hours later.

And this all provided hundreds of thousands of backlinks. However, they were not permanent. The reason is my stories were being pulled through mainstream feed directories. Webmasters were simply subscribing to feeds based upon keyword phrases. They would ask for instance, Google Adwords, and Feed Burner and such would retrieve feeds with these keywords in the feed, or at least the title of the latest post. When I found this out, I noticed that if I wrote a story about Google, I would get a big surge in indexed positions from my story showing up all over the web through my brokered feed from my blog.

And when I would write about some specialized software, I would get far less indexed positions, due to limited interest. Even worse, was the links would die off, just as soon as there were other stories out there about the same subject or keyword phrase. I also found out many of the webmasters didn’t even know where the stories were coming from and very few even read the stories from their subscribed feeds. But I did find out one very highly leveraged method of creating a mass of backlinks to my Live Spaces Blog in a fast hurry.

If I simply wrote about what people were most interested in and it was related to my blog content I was in. Now I needed some form of getting my message out there. So I simply pinged my blog and did nothing. It would take less than an hour and three days later I would have another half a million backlinks to my site.  And I also was able to get some top positions, because my feed would be on many existing websites who had good positioning and aging. It was like I got free endorsements wherever my feed was subscribed to.

However,, I also noticed webmasters wanted consistancy in a constant flow of related keyword stories. When I didn’t provide this my feeds were dropped. Now advance eight months in the future to current times. This is no longer the case, becasue webmasters do not have the time to constantly change feeds. So they mash them up and only allow the first ten stories or so to show up. But they realized they could get a really great story from one feed, even though the stories were weekly or longer in being published.

Webmasters realized if they simply mashed twenty or so feeds and placed them in order of importance or popularity, they could have great stories all the time. If the first feeds had nothing new, they could get stories from the other feeds. Even better, some webmasters just rotated their favorite feeds while others randomixed the order of the feeds. This made for fresh content to their sites as soon as it happened. The probelm of providing content for their visitors was solved.

SEO Consultants will tell you it’s all about unique original content though and I am the first to say feeds provide content, but it is duplicate content from the original feed.  But as a marketer, I can tell you this is entirely irrelevant, because it’s all about your visitor’s experience at your website. No one who comes to your website cares were the origin of the content came from. They only care what they can read in from of them. In fact you can build your visitor retention rate by constantly providing the best stories and consolidating them at your website via feeds.

This is why feeds are as popular as ever, even with the threat of ‘07 from Google pertaining to natural and unique content. The web is user driven, not engine driven. This is not the Matrix Movie. It’s reality. And the reality is the web is the largest example of power to the people than any other advancement in the last hundred years of humanity. Even though I am not on the backbone of Live Spaces anymore, let me show you waht has happened here.

Chase Global Media has been up to this point nothing more than an informative information site with updates on our activities. Later this summer, it will become fully functional. It is number three on a list of seven platforms being built. I am still on number one, but it will be released in May now, due to providing major security initiatives which will increase the user experience. But back to the story. I just looked at the log files for CGM and was very surprised to find in just the firts half of April, ‘08 we have had our feed published on over 5,000 websites. At this rate we will be at 10,000 websites in just a month.

This is a far cry from last summer with the Live Spaces Blog. But the point is if you really take a look at the stories, they are only updates about what we are doing here. And they are stories which are very specific to industries where there is not a large percentage of readers.  Even worse, the stories are not even on a regular cycle. They are sporadic at best, because of my work load.  So for a very limited readership, it’s not bad. However, what you can gain from this, is the ratio of visitors who come back to our website.

Your next lesson here is should you publish the whole story or just a snippet in the feeds. To date I was publishing the full story. Meaning no one had to come back to our website unless they found the story useful and wanted to comeback and read some other story. They did, but only three percent. This is due to the nature of the stories. They are not all that enticing. I am not attempting to be interesting, only informative. If we were actually writing to attract visitors, we would be in the numbers well beyond last summer.

Yet, you will benefit better if you use snippets. This should get people curious enough to come to your website. However, webmasters prefer full stories as well and have control whether they want to display the full story or just a snipet. So for todays experiment, I am changing the feed with just snippets and see what difference this makes. The blog of last summer used snippets only.

If you do this, make all your enticing content right up front in the first sentence or two with a good title. Now what was really exciting today was the first platform we are working on and is on another website had in just three weeks had almost 50% of index positions in Google than CGM here.  Since it was still in development, we had left it open for two days for other developers to see how were able to improve on an existing platform over three million webmasters use as a CMS.  In the process, I had just one backlink in a developer’s forum for developers to find the site. Google caught it and spidered the entire platform in seconds. This indexing all the content.

It was sample content, just filler. But it was actually useful content to developers. So we started getting visitors to the site.  It has a market of ten percent of the web which is significant. About 100 million people are interested in that field.  The site is closed at the front gate and has been since late March, ‘08 until we are ready to open the doors. What you can earn here is Google spidered our website here about 500 times. The new site with the platform had Google all over it near 2,000 times in just two weeks! And it’s a closed site with one page. And no I only work behind the closed doors. All ping services are removed and disabled of course.

Yahoo seems to like CGM though. It visited over 1,200 times in the last two weeks. There are only three stories this month so far. If it’s content they want, they are going to get tons of it next month on the new platform.  And maybe this shows we are working in the best place on the web - public software platforms.  The engines are going crazy on it before we even have completed our builds. There’s alot more to say, but I have to get back to work.

All I can say is subscribe to our feed, unless you know anyone who can generate over half a million backlinks in three days. Or gets 2,000 visits on just three posted stories without any other intervention. In the meantime, make a feed of your webiste and submit it to rss directories. And watch your visitors grow.