Free RSS Resources 2009

Welcome to Free RSS Resources 2009

Free RSS Resources — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:00:33 +0000

I hope this information about RSS is as enlightening and helpful to you as it has been to me since I first began researching it in early 2005 — RSS has come a long way in the last 4 years. I’m sure you’ve noticed how quickly things change in the online world of search engines, RSS and internet marketing. One week you’re making easy money with Google ads, the next week you need a website, then an RSS feed, then audio in your RSS feed, then video… Wander over to the right-hand column and scroll down to RSS Archives for the very latest 2009 info.

Since things change so fast on the web, I’ve made my free RSS Resources e-book a living document with hyper-links to my Free RSS Resources website. Whenever I mention a resource on the internet, you can click on the link I provide in the e-book and you’ll end up at the resource, regardless of whether its web address has changed since the last edition of the e-book. If the resource goes away entirely, I’ll direct you to a similar resource or to a note explaining what happened. Dead links are high on my list of pet peeves. You can always check the RSS Resource List on my website. I regularly add things which I think you’ll find useful as you explore RSS feeds and related topics.

Be sure to check out the free VIDEO traffic strategies e-book too!

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free e-books show how.

Free RSS Resources: Data From Last Year Not Good Enough?

Free RSS Resources — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:31:55 +0000

With my new free RSS Resources e-book and Free RSS Resources website, you’ll always be up to date. I don’t know about you, but I’m in this for the long haul. Nothing bothers me more than pouring through a how-to document, only to find out later that everything I just read and got ready to apply is so out of date that it’s no longer relevant, or worse, that it actually violates the latest search engine policies. Been there, done that? Me too. Several internet marketing e-books written in 2004 fall into that category, along with many (most?) which were written in earlier years. Things change fast in this business. Fall behind at your own peril. Look for clues within the content and examples of any e-book you read, to guess when it was really written (hint: don’t rely on automatically-generated dates in the sales letter or e-book). It could make or break your business financially. Just a thought.

With a few exceptions, I’ve actually used every product which I link to on the website and in my e-book, and I’ve given you my honest opinion of each. I really do want to help you succeed with RSS and your business, by telling you all you really need to know about RSS (but were probably too confused to ask), or at least showing you where to find it.

Free RSS Resources: Why You Desperately Need RSS

Free RSS Resources — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 15:46:03 +0000

RSS is the new wave of internet publishing, redefining online communication. Simply put, it’s a standard for publishing regularly-updated content (news headlines, blog posts, press releases, audio and video content, the possibilities are endless) on the web. Consumers select and read the content of their choice at their leisure with RSS feed readers (either web-based or installed on a local system). The feed reader collects a consumer’s favorite feeds together in one place, making the titles and summaries of individual articles, along with links to the actual articles and the websites they’re hosted upon, available as soon as they’re published.

From a publisher’s point of view, RSS is like having your own news wire service, but it’s so much more. It enables you to:

Find more targeted, smart, affluent and hungry prospects, who are looking for and willing to pay for solutions to their specific problems. Today’s early adopters of RSS belong to the most premium consumer group on the web. Why not reach out to them?

Get into the minds of millions of people, get them to visit your site to read your content, and keep them coming back for more.

Have a chance to dominate your niche and search engine keywords related to it.

Boost your site’s ranking in the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Need a way to stand out from the billions of other web pages? The engines are in a race to find the most unique and relevant frequently-updated content. Feeds and blogs provide that content, so the search engines love to list them.

Get your feed listed in Yahoo right away for free. They make it even easier than Google.

Promote your feed and thus your site and/or blog using dozens of free directories and search engines designed specifically for feeds and blogs. Many of these resources make your listing available to the web the moment you submit it.

If your feed includes audio or video podcast content, there are free podcast-specific directories, search engines and sites to make your content stand out even more.

Display other people’s feeds on your website. You get instant, frequently-updated content related to your site’s topic, and if you do it right, the search engines will adjust your site’s ranking based on the additional content from other people’s feeds.

Re-publish your e-zine or other email-based content as an RSS feed, which will quickly and dramatically increase your subscribers and potential customers while also drawing more visitors to your main website.

Get your content syndicated on dozens or hundreds of other websites for free. Every time you post an article to your own feed, it also appears instantly on all those other sites with no extra effort on your part.

Have your feed judged by its content instead of the budget or size of your website.

Re-capture the droves of people who are avoiding their email because of spam. RSS gives readers control: they can anonymously subscribe to your feed, judge your content, remain subscribed for as long as they choose, and unsubscribe at will with no problems or delays. No spam, no lost deliveries, no full email boxes, no worries. To keep them subscribed and to keep new ones coming, you must provide high quality, valuable, useful content – everyone wins.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free e-books show how.

Free RSS Resources: You Need RSS Today

Free RSS Resources — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:55:58 +0000

Implementing RSS technology today will give you a critical edge over your slow-to-adapt competitors. In 2004, not that many people were even aware of RSS feeds, kind of like the old days of the internet, when the web was quietly used and loved by academic researchers but not the general public. But more and more people are hopping on board every day – RSS is poised to be the hottest way to receive regularly-updated information in 2005. It’s certainly the best traffic-building and marketing tool for online businesses today, and should be at the top of your list of tactics.

Big players are moving into this market and ramping up quickly. Yahoo has their own web-based feed reader. Mozilla (creators of Netscape) built feed-reading into their new Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. You just know the next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser will be able to read feeds too. Google acquired the Blogger blog service. AskJeeves recently acquired Bloglines. Microsoft has MSN Spaces, their own blog service. Are you excited about RSS feeds yet?

Now’s the time to get involved, before today’s free feed directories, blog directories and podcast directories become saturated and expensive. Get everything in place now and you’ll be ready when the huge wave of traffic hits, when RSS feeds move from the early adopters to the masses, just like email, websites and blogs did in the past.

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Free RSS Resources: Mozilla vs Microsoft

Free RSS Resources — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:00:34 +0000

Today, the Firefox web browser and its email companion Thunderbird, which are the open-source successors of Netscape from Mozilla, come with an RSS feed reader built into the 1.0 release. They also run on most OS platforms. Microsoft is playing catch-up. MS Internet Explorer has no RSS feed reader capability. But you just know it will, and soon. Microsoft sees the potential of RSS and how it’s taking hold across the web. They see Mozilla trying to take the new browser market away from them again. When that happens, anyone who’s not taking full advantage of RSS for their business or personal promotion will be left in the dust. Even if Microsoft enforces a new RSS standard, everyone else will support it, because of the sheer size of the Microsoft-based market. That’s just how it is.

If you don’t already have Firefox and Thunderbird, download the latest releases here. The Mozilla website says they have been downloaded more than 25 million times already. Every month that Microsoft announces a new swarm of security patches for Internet Explorer and Outlook, thousands more switch to Mozilla’s excellent products.

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Free RSS Resources: Web-Based Feed Readers

Free RSS Resources — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:10:42 +0000

Many RSS feed readers are web-based – you don’t actually have to install anything on your desktop, or even use your own system. Just go online in the internet cafe or the library or on your own computer and you can read any feed you want to. My Yahoo, Bloglines, NewsGator and MyFeedster are some of the popular web-based feed readers, and they’re free. Set up an account at no charge and go feed surfing.

If you set up your own RSS feed, and then tell My Yahoo about it, you’ll wind up with a listing in the Yahoo search engine (which would otherwise be much more difficult to get). I show you how to set it up in my Free RSS Resources E-book.

There are hundreds of desktop-based feed readers out there, and many web-based readers as well. I have a list of RSS feed readers on my website to get you started.

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Free RSS Resources: What is RSS Anyway?

Free RSS Resources — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 16:20:28 +0000

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary depending on who you listen to. It’s also confused with RDF (Resource Description Framework), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and a variety of other related TLA’s (Three-Letter Acronyms). RSS is actually a family of web syndication protocols which provide information in XML files known as RSS feeds.

The issue is further confused by some “helpful” RSS feed readers, search engines and directories, which claim that RSS feeds always end with the .rss or .xml extension. NOT! In fact, RSS feeds can have almost any file extension or none at all. The current version of WordPress, a popular and free (free for commercial uses too!) blog software package which I use, uses the .php extension for all of the feeds it generates. I suspect that many other blog packages written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) code also use that extension for their feeds. Feedburner, a great feed re-publishing service, doesn’t use an extension at all, unless you tell it to use a particular one.

If you’re at all familiar with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code, you’ll be able to read and understand “raw” RSS with no trouble. It’s really just a summary of titles and information about the items you’re publishing in your feed, with HTML-like code wrapped around it so that RSS feed readers and parsers can understand it.

To see the actual raw RSS feed for my Free-RSS-Resources blog on RSS marketing and publishing in your browser, click this link.

The items you publish in your feed can include plain text, HTML, images, links, audio and other types of data files, just like what you can publish on a web page. Think of what an RSS feed sends out as a snapshot of something as small as an email or as big as a web page. Someone viewing your feed with an RSS feed reader will either see summaries of your items along with links to click on in order to see your actual items, or your actual items will be visible immediately in their entirety, depending on how you have your feed set up.

To see how this works, say you have a blog which generates its own RSS feed (WordPress does this automatically from your blog). Every time you post a message on your blog, that same message goes out on the RSS feed to all of your subscribers. If you’re using the default WordPress configuration, the feed contains the title, summary, and various other information about each article you’ve posted. A subscriber will see a pretty version of this information in their RSS feed reader (exactly what they see is dependent on their reader), organized as a list of articles, with the summary description of the currently selected article visible. If they then click on the description, they’ll be able to read the whole article (which is not actually stored in the feed itself – just the links back to your article are stored in the actual feed).

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Free RSS Resources: AdSense Advertising on Yahoo?

Free RSS Resources — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 23:15:15 +0000

Yahoo plans to offer contextual advertising, similar to Google’s AdSense program. The question is , when? According to observations posted recently on Waxy.org, it may only be a few months from now, with testing already underway. Overture’s name is changing to Yahoo too. Sign up with Yahoo here to stay informed.

Read the whole article about Yahoo contextual advertising here.

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Free RSS Resources: Which Version of RSS Do I Use?

Free RSS Resources — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 17:57:44 +0000

Just like anything else in the high-tech industry, the standards for RSS are evolving quickly. For now, most programs which generate feeds seem to have settled on RSS 2.0, though RSS 0.9x and RSS 1.x variants are still around. There’s also a similar standard called Atom, which is used by Blogger and some of the other blog services. Most feed readers will understand and display all of these different formats, and will in fact deal with Atom feeds even though the programs are called “RSS” feed readers.

Many blog software packages and other tools will generate RSS feeds for several standards simultaneously. For example, WordPress generates RSS 2.0, Atom and RSS 0.9x feeds simultaneously, providing a different URL for each standard, as well as an “auto-discovery” mechanism for feed readers which are capable of figuring out which one to use and where to find it. FeedBurner, a free feed enhancer and re-publisher, will take in a live feed created for one standard and put out the same content in multiple feeds for multiple standards (depending upon the needs of the readers who subscribe to your feed through FeedBurner).

To help those of us who create feeds, there’s a free service called FeedValidator which tells you whether the feed you’re generating conforms to all of the rules of a particular standard or not. Some feed readers, feed directories and search engines will only accept properly-formatted feeds while others don’t seem to care.

The bottom line is that this is an easily-solvable problem: just use a program or service which provides your feed to the world in a variety of standard formats.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools, powered by iPowerWeb. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

Free RSS Resources: How Do You Generate An RSS Feed?

Free RSS Resources — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 22:54:04 +0000

There are several ways to generate an RSS feed:

1) Directly from your blog software (if you blog), optionally enhanced by FeedBurner or a similar service. This is how I currently generate all of my feeds.

If you haven’t chosen your blog software yet, I highly recommend WordPress. It’s got a great feature set, it’s been around long enough to have a lot of the bugs fixed, lots and lots of loyal users of other blog software have moved to WordPress because it’s so much better, and it’s free, even for commercial use. It also seamlessly supports audio enclosures (podcasting) in your RSS feed.

If you need a place to host your blog and feed, iPowerWeb is by far the best low-cost service I’ve ever seen. Everything just works, they provide great statistics, site features and documentation, lots of storage and email accounts, proper and current PHP and MySQL support (necessary for many blogs including WordPress) and their tech support folks are responsive and follow up to make sure any issue gets resolved. WordPress installs and runs like a dream on iPowerWeb. With some other hosting providers, I’ve had to rewrite PHP code and place files in all sorts of unnatural places on my site to get it to work, due to silly restrictions and limitations of the hosting providers. I’ve tried several low-cost and medium-cost hosting services and now would never use anyone but iPowerWeb.

You can get your blog’s domain name from iPowerWeb as part of your hosting package, or from any other provider. I’ve had excellent service from GoDaddy for domain names (it usually takes only two or three hours from my order to having an active, redirected domain name live on the net, as opposed to waiting several days from some providers). Stick with iPowerWeb for web hosting services though.

2) Directly from your blog service (such as Blogger), if you use one.

3) By using one of many free or paid third-party RSS feed generation products, which generate feeds from sets of text items or files.

4) Directly from your full-featured autoresponder email service (like Aweber), if you use one in your business to handle your opt-in email list and follow-up messages. That service should provide you with the option (at no extra cost) of automatically generating an RSS feed (from their site) whose content consists of the same emails which you’re already sending to your email list through the autoresponder service.

5) By hand with a simple text editor, if you’re familiar enough with the syntax of HTML and RSS/XML, have a lot of patience and are a careful typist. This gets old really quickly, unless you have a very limited set of text-only messages which you need to get into an RSS feed in a hurry, and you don’t have any of the other tools above available to you.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Powered by iPowerWeb. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.