RSS Marketing Toolbox Resource Center 

If you are a publisher who accepts Google ads on your site to make money for yourself (otherwise known as the Google AdSense program), you should be aware that you can also ask Google to place relevant ads within your RSS feed.

To do so, you log into your AdSense account, select the "AdSense for Feeds" ad unit as the type of ad you would like to receive and follow the steps from there.

If you are going to be publishing RSS feeds on your site or out there in the universe, you should know and understand the RSS tools available to your subscribers. Bloglines is an example of a "second-generation" RSS reader, which slices and dices and... actually it's a Web-based, multi-purpose tool that allow users to search for, subscribe to, create and share RSS feeds, blogs, social media and rich Web content.

This "smart tool" will review your stored subscriptions and suggest new ones based upon your preferences. It notifies you when new articles have arrived. It enables you to clip and save information from feeds into customized folders for future reference. It also allows you to compile or "mix" from a variety of RSS feeds and publish your customized creation to your own website.

This is an RSS feed you can set up to feed you the results of its search through discussion boards, using keywords that you specify. What you get is an RSS feed of those discussion board conversations of specific interest to you.

In using the tool, we learned that the more specific the keyword you select, the better your results will be. For example, the keyword "Internet marketing" delivered an overwhelming number of discussion threads that took too much time to read through and follow. Instead, we tried "online fashion retail"and received a manageable number of very informative discussion threads.

This is a very handy tool in two other ways -- you can track mentions of your brand name across discussion boards, and you can track discussions happening at a specific URL of a discussion board by keyword.

Clicky is a fascinating little tool that delivers your site analytics to you by RSS feed. You do have to insert two lines of HTML code into your site to make the tool work.

It offers analytics of similar quality to Google Analytics, and will slice and dice information as desired (actions, time per visit, bounce rate, etc.). The fun part is that you can receive all of this data via RSS.

For example, every time a search result leads a visitor to your site, you will get an RSS post that also shows you the search term your visitor used to get there. Every time a new site links to you, you'll get an RSS post with the URL for that site. For those addicted to analytics, this is a must-have tool. It can be used in addition to your more "traditional" analytics programs.

Here is a quick and easy way to keep up with the world of RSS. Every time a member tags the word "RSS" in delicious, the informational post is sent to you by RSS. New information is frequently added, and each piece of content is also tagged as to whether it pertains to RSS tips, tools, readers, widgets, social media, blogging and so on..

Should you wish to discuss any aspect of RSS with your peers, you may do so at the well-trafficked Digital Point XML/RSS forum. At the time of writing, topics included tracking and measuring RSS, getting more subscribers and generating RSS from HTML pages, in addition to deeply techie discussions. This forum has been in existence since 2005, so before you jump into the fray you might want to do a little research to see if a discussion exists already on your topic. And it's also a great place to introduce a new topic and get help or opinions from hundreds (or even thousands) of your newest RSS friends.

Is your feed bigger than your competitor's feed? Now you can find out. This tool enables you to compare the number of subscribers to your RSS feed to the number of subscribers of up to three competitor feeds.

At the time of writing, this service only worked for sites that run their RSS feeds on FeedBurner. However, if you can find FeedBurner-hosted RSS feeds from your competitors, this is a super sleuthy way to get some competitive intelligence.

Of course, if you run your feed via FeedBurner it will work even better. :)

This is a very handy and very good tool that checks your feed to see if it is working correctly from a technical point of view. For example, we tested a feed (you simply input the URL for that feed in the search box), and we were informed that while the feed was working, there were several issues that might prevent it from working its best with the various RSS readers out there.

The results show you line by line where the problems are occurring (the lines are highlighted in yellow). You are given the reason for each difficulty and suggestions as to you can do to your code to fix each one.

Feedburner (an aquisition of Google) is a one-stop create-your-own-RSS program provider. They also offer CPM-based advertising on the blogs and within the RSS feeds of their content partners, which include Gawker Media, John Battelle's Search Blog, Search Engine Roundtable, Glam Media, Generation MP3, Instapundit and more. Advertising opportunities are divided into "networks" (participating publishing networks) or "channels" (hundreds of smaller feeds divided into topic-specific or demographic bundles). This includes inventory from smaller publishers, who are invited to join.

At the site you will find a plethora of information, including samples and demographics by content channel. The business channel subscriber is, btw, 87.9% male, 25-34 years old, sans children and 21.6% have an income of $250K plus. Advertisers have access to both managed services and a self-serve option. Participating advertisers include Allstate, Best Buy, Blackberry, Geico, Mastercard, Oracle and Verizon.