Promoting Article Marketing with RSS Feeds

Many people think of article marketing as simply a way to build a backlink or traffic to their website, to build their reputation as an expert, or to make money online via article writing. But not many think about their articles as promotional items and actually promoting them.

Benefits of Article Promotion

By going beyond simply writing and posting articles and actually promoting them, you will help your articles move up in search engine results and gain more traffic, resulting in the following:

• Higher PageRank (based on incoming links).
• Better ratings on each article
• Increased clicks on your website link
• Recognition of the author as an expert in their niche or industry.
• Additional earnings on sites that give authors revenue sharing options based on the number of views each article receives or the number of ads that are clicked while readers are on your article.

So no matter what your motivation for article writing and article marketing, you will certainly want to promote your articles. One way to do this is by utilizing a feature that most article marketing networks provide for each author – the author’s individual article RSS feed.

Getting an Author’s RSS Feed

Let’s start with how to find the author RSS feed (or if a RSS feed is offered) on different article directories.

Author’s Profile Page

Take a look at the author profile page, which can be found by simply clicking on the author’s name in an article. This page will usually have an RSS icon or “subscribe to this author” link. If it does not show up here, but the author profile page shows a link to view all articles by this author, then the RSS icon or link might be on that page instead.

Article sites that have easy to find author RSS feeds include EzineArticles, ArticleBase, Suite 101, Helium, GoArticles, Article Alley, Idea Marketers, Bukisa, HubPages, and many, many more.

Firefox Navigation Bar

If that fails, and you are in Firefox, while you are on the author page or on the page with a list of articles by that author, look at the navigation bar and see if the RSS icon is available.

When you click on it, it should take you to the feed – if the items are all by that author, then this is the feed link you want. Article Snatch is one example where you have to go to the author’s page, click Browse My Articles, and then use the Firefox navigation bar’s RSS icon to subscribe.

Custom Feed Creation

Some article networks require you to go through more of a process to find or create an author feed. In Squidoo you have to export your lensmaster RSS feed using the SquidUtils. In eHow, you have to extract the RSS feed from the featured articles widget, and that will only allow you the 5 eHow articles you have marked as featured.

If you can’t find the feed easily, simply Google something to the effect of author RSS feed on ____ network (be sure to replace author with lensmaster or any other custom name the network has for it’s authors). If it can be created, someone has written a guide for it.

Utilizing RSS Feeds for Article Promotion

Now that you (hopefully) have a specific author’s RSS feed, here are some ways you can go about using it for promoting your articles.

1. RSS Submissions

Bloggers are always encouraged to submit their blog feed to RSS submission sites as a way to get deep links to your posts as well as traffic, and authors at article directories can do the same.

Assuming you don’t go with a submission service and want to do this manually, it would be best to start with the highest quality RSS submission sites, which can be found sorted by PageRank and Alexa in the Link Builder’s Toolkit. After you hit the best and you want to keep going for more, try this RSS submission compilation which lists over 250 RSS submission sites with a short description and direct link to the submission page if different from the homepage. It is also updated very often, but not in any particular order based on site authority or popularity.

2. Feedburner

Curious how many people subscribe to your articles on a particular network? If you have a blog or other way of enticing readers to subscribe to your articles, you can always burn a custom Feedburner URL for your articles, giving you the ability to see stats for how many subscribers are there, and even enable email subscriptions, just like you can with blogs.

One idea, if you are not already using the maximum number of links allowed at the end of your articles or in your author box, would be to include a link to your RSS feed so that if someone likes one of your articles, they can easily subscribe right from there, hopefully giving your articles loyal readers.

3. Blog Commenting with CommentLuv

CommentLuv enabled blogs allow commenters to leave a link to their website as well as a link to their latest blog post. The same system can be used with article directories that offer RSS feeds for authors. You simply have to register your author RSS feed with ComLuv (free for the first feed / article account) to have access to your latest 10 posts in the dropdown below the comment form.

Since I have my blog and several article networks registered under one account, the latest posts and articles are all available for me to comment with so I can use the most relevant one, which will encourage additional clicks. Learn more about promoting your article marketing strategy using CommentLuv.

4. Subscribe and Share on Google Reader

Speaking of subscribing to feeds, I always subscribe to my own feeds for two reasons. One, to make sure everything looks ok in RSS, as some fun scripts can create havoc in an RSS item. Two, if you have people who subscribe to your reader’s shared items, you can go in and share your articles using the Share option at the bottom of the feed item.

I don’t know exactly how many people actually visit shared items, but if you connect your Google Reader to your Google Buzz account, it will Buzz your shared items to your followers there for added exposure.

5. Social Media Syndication

You can add your article RSS feed to any social site or application that allows you to syndicate an RSS feed to your social media profile. These are not limited to but include:

• FriendFeed – allows you to add RSS feeds as blog items.
• TwitterFeed – posts new RSS feed items to Twitter and/or Facebook.
• HootSuite – posts new RSS feed items to any accounts linked to your HootSuite including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, and PingFM.
• Forums – certain ones allow you to enter a feed on your forum profile and it will put your latest post (or article) at the top of each post you make.

The possibilities are endless – if you don’t have a blog and have a social or forum profile that allows you to enter a feed – use it with your best article network RSS!

Compile Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

Do you want all of your articles in one feed? You can use Yahoo Pipes to compile all of your individual feeds into one. Simply login to your Yahoo account and create a new pipe.

Use the Feed Fetch modules under Sources for each of your Feed URLs. Combine these to the Union modules under Operators. Then connect the Union modules to the Sort module under Operators to sort the feeds by date. Finally, connect the Sort module to the Pipe Output module (which is usually added to new pipes automatically) and Save it.

It will save and give you an option at the top to run the pipe. When you run it, it will give you the option to publish it publicly so others can find it and use / share it, and you can also grab an RSS feed based on the output of the pipe, which will be a feed compilation of all of the feeds piped compiled together.

As a side note, I just started using pipes, and I’m not fully sure if it will automatically updated every time you add a new article or if you have to go and run the pipe to update the feed. I’m also not sure if this is the best way to do this, so if an experienced Pipe user would like to add some feedback, it would be welcome.

Your Article Promotion Methods via RSS

Do you utilize any of these methods of article promotion via RSS feeds, or ones that weren’t mentioned? Have you seen results? Let’s discuss in the comments! And be sure to share this with your article marketing colleagues so the can get the most out of article marketing promotion with RSS feeds as well!