Are you leveraging your content to the fullest extent?  Are you maximizing your contents visibility and backlink opportunity?

So many people who create/publish content don’t realize that even one piece of content can equate to hundreds/thousands of backlinks and visitors.  So how to you take advantage of each piece of content you create?

Follow these steps and you can turn 1 post into 10, 1 link into 100, and 10 visitors into 500.

1.  RSS Creation & Submission

There are two core aspects to RSS feeds that you should understand.

First is making sure that your website or blog has an RSS feed.  An RSS feed allows users to subscribe to your feed and will be updated whenever you post new content, via their RSS reader.  To create an RSS feed you can use Feedburner, which is as simple as entering in your blog URL and Feedburner will output a Feed URL for your blog.  This is the feed you will use for your website/blog content. This feed will create a source for backlinks to your site.

Secondly when you create and publish content that is intended to go offsite (web 2.0, article, and social sites), the majority of these sites provide a RSS feed that people can use to subscribe to that content.  This can be a huge opportunity to build backlinks as each website you publish content on can not only point to your site, but so can the RSS feed.

Once you have either created an RSS feed or have the RSS feed provided by the Web 2.0 site, you should head over to Feedshark and submit the feed.  By doing this you not only help to get your content indexed faster, but you are creating a backlink to your website.

You can also take your RSS feed and submit it to a number of RSS aggregators which will publish content based on the posts in your feed.  Below is a quick list of some of those aggregation services.

  • http://www.blogburst.com/
  • http://www.allheadlinenews.com/
  • http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/
  • http://www.rocketnews.com/
  • http://blogpulse.com/
  • http://blogdigger.com/
  • http://www.rssfeeds.com/
  • http://www.zimbio.com/
  • http://www.weblogalot.com/
  • http://weblogalot.com/
  • http://www.popurls.com/
  • http://www.urlfan.com/
  • http://www.gabbr.com/
  • http://www.redtram.com/
  • http://www.gabbr.com/
  • http://www.feedage.com/
  • http://www.feedcat.net/
  • http://www.plazoo.com/

Full List of RSS Submission sites here and here.

2.  Ping

A ping basically is a way you can notify a search engine or web service that there is new content that you would like them to index or crawl.  A service called Ping-O-Matic is a ping service that allows you to add your content title, URL, and RSS URL and it will ping various search engines and news sources on the web.

3.  Socially Bookmark Each Post

Social bookmarking sites allow people to bookmark or vote for content that they enjoy.  In order for your content to be found by active users on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit, each post needs to be “bookmarked” by each of these sites.  There are a few ways to get your content bookmarked.  Ideally if you have an active readership, they will bookmark your content for you.  However if you are just starting out, you can bookmark this content yourself manually or using a piece of software like Social Bookmarking Demon.

Its important to realize that not all social bookmarking sites are DoFollow (meaning  pass link value), but many of them do.  So given that there are literally hundreds of social bookmarking sites out there, you can potentially gain hundreds of backlinks just from bookmarking a blog post.

4.  Create Multiple Content Formats

Once you have created that content, why not re-purpose that content for not only more backlinks, but for the end user.  All users are different, which means they consume content differently.  Some enjoy reading text, others enjoy listening to audio and other like watching video.  By re-purposing that content you can multiply the number of backlinks per post and make your users happy.

  • Turn your text post into a YouTube video that you embed in your website
  • Take a audio interview and publish it to iTunes, while also turning it into text for people to read
  • Take an article that you wrote and turn it into a Slideshow presentation, upload it to Scribd
  • Take a presentation or article and turn it into a PDF, submit it to PDF submissions sites like DocStoc and Scribd

5.  Making Sure You Use Internal Linking

A lot of people overlook this, but interlinking each of your blog posts, can give you lots of different benefits.  First, by interlinking each of your posts will help with getting ALL of your content indexed by the search engines.  A good internal link structure can also help with gaining additional value from search engines.

Also, don’t forget content scrapers.  There are lots of scrapers out there that scrap content and publish it on other domains/blogs.  If you are linking back to your website within your content, you will gain backlinks to your site.  Of course these links to have the highest value, but it still helps.