RSS Marketing Toolbox Resource Center 

Pheedo is "content distribution" network that publishers join in order to make money from said content by allowing ads to be shown on their blogs and within their RSS feeds. Ads that appear within their RSS feeds are either basic graphical banners (no rich media) or 50-word text ads plus a graphical logo. The ads show up in the subscriber's reading pane at the bottom of the individual RSS feed. Publishers come in five flavors:

1. IT Professionals Channel (InformationWeek, O'Reilly, Slashdot, etc.)
2. Automotive Channel (Popular Mechanics, TheCarConnection.com, etc.)
3. Business Channel (Nasdaq, Forbes, ABCNews, etc.)
4. Consumer Technology Channel (Popgadget, MacDailyNews.com, TechnologyGuide.com, etc.)
5. Entertainment Channel (PerezHilton.com, Jossip, Blogcritics.org, etc.)

Participating advertisers include Expedia.com, Ford, Adobe, ESPN and P&G.

Pheedo retrieves RSS feeds several times an hour and updates the FeedPowered advertisements with any newly published items, which makes the platform ideal for time-sensitive news and offers.

Here's an endless list of what appears to be every possible RSS resource you might ever need. Alas, the list is alphabetized rather than categorized, but we soldier on. You'll find a plethora of fanatically specific tools that do interesting things such as WordPre.cio.us. This is a PHP script that will grab the RSS from del.icio.us and add/update the entries in your WordPress blog. There's also RSStatic, which will take the information from the feeds you choose and generate static HTML pages for each item in the feed. You will also find beaucoup resources such RSS tutorials and primers to get you started with RSS publishing.

TIP: If you click on over to the RSS Feeds category in this website, you will discover another endless list. This one is a list of all kinds of companies that have RSS feeds. Luckily, this list is somewhat categorized so you can cruise from Companies/Business to Education to Finance and all the way down to Shopping. Eventually you will hit "Unsorted". Oy. However, it's a very good way to get inspiration for your own RSS content and also to see which of your competitors are moving into RSS publishing.

To publish your RSS feed you need to segment your data, links and tags and whatnot into a number of individual fields, some of which are required and some of which are optional. The title, link and content are easy, but what about "text input" or "TTL (Time to Live)" or "GUID (Global Unique Identifier)"? If you're flummoxed, this is the go-to place for descriptions of all the settings and fields you need to know.

The "text input" setting allows a data entry box to be displayed within your feed. That data entry box can be filled out by the subscriber, who then pushes a button and drives an action. The action may be to send information back to the publisher, or the publisher may allow the subscriber to do something else, such as enter a keyword and then be driven directly to Google for those search results. "TTL" refers to the number of minutes that the feed is allowed to be cached by a server before the feed needs to be refreshed. And the "GUID" is a string that uniquely identifies an item. When present, a feed reader may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new.

If you would like your RSS feeds to appear in major and/or specialized directories, you must submit your feed to said directories. That is why this ever-growing list of blog and RSS directories is so important so that you get your feed in all the right places. Each entry handily has the direct link to the submission area for said site.

No matter where you decide to submit, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with each directory to understand the company that your RSS feed will be keeping. Much like the early days of the search engine wars, there are a lot of contenders, some better than others. Note that in most places you will need to pick the specific category in which your feed will live, which warrants some thought. You will also discover that there are many ultra-specialized feed directories that you can submit to should your content be on topic, such as politics, sports, finance, realty and the like.

This site's mission is to collect over 1 million RSS feeds, and to offer an easy-to-use resource where you can find and subscribe to those feeds of interest. We like this site because -- unlike many of the RSS search engines out there -- it is also a directory. That means you can click on a topic of interest to narrow down your choices, rather than blindly searching by keyword and turning up hundreds (if not thousands) of useless results.

There are categories devoted to "Marketing and PR", "Marketing and SEO" and even an entire category for "Matt Cutts", who is Google's well-known unofficial tech spokesperson. Remember, this is a nascent field so it's not like you are looking at the polished work of Google search results here. But it is useful.

This blog is an excellent source of down-in-the-trenches RSS news, information and trends. While some of it may be a little too down-in-the-trenches for you, a recent visit to the blog led us to guides to the best practices for RSS, which literally contains every single technical detail you need to know in order to publish or troubleshoot your RSS feed. There was also a review of the pros and cons of the most popular RSS readers and updates on the latest tools and widgets from big players ranging from Google to MySpace. The blog has been published since 2004, so all you RSS'ers have a lot to catch up on. ;) Thanks to Randy Morin for creating this resource, who's a self-proclaimed "startup junkie" based in Toronto.

As the name says, this is the ultimate RSS toolbox for every reading or publishing tool you might need. This includes a review of RSS readers by platform, mobile RSS readers, email to RSS converters, RSS feed formatting checkers, stat packages, ping tools and on and on.

You will also find a well-rounded guide to RSS "mixer" tools. These mixer tools are basically RSS editors that allow you to blend RSS feeds from different sources together, getting on the feeds that correspond to your preferences, which are created by choosing and assigning keyword tags. You can also add in content from other media sources such as podcast or audio feeds. Publishers can use a mixer tool to create customized feeds culled from a variety of (accredited) sources for your subscribers. The benefit to your subscribers is that you are the discerning editor who merges specific content from multiple sources (including your own) to create feeds that are uniquely targeted to your readers' needs.