RSS Feed Directories

RSS feed directories are basically websites that function as an online catalog of RSS feeds from various blogs and sites around the web. You can submit your blog or site's RSS feeds to the directories, and it essentially republished all of your content on their site. And every time you publish new content to your blog or site, the RSS feed in the directory will automatically update, publishing your new content.

Until recently I had just submitted my websites' RSS feeds to one or two RSS feed directories. But recently I have been using SENuke, which has an RSS module that currently features 18 RSS directories. There are also other lists online like this one (it's a little outdated, but a lot of the directories still work). At first with SENuke I was only submitting the RSS feeds of the new Web 2.0 properties I created for promotion, but then I decided to submit the feeds from some of my main money sites. I also submitted them to some directories on the list above. The result? I got a pretty sharp increase in search engine traffic that brought my income up by about 50%. This lasted about a week, and then the effects went away. But when I posted new content to those money sites, some of the effect came back (but not all of it).

Basically the benefits of using the RSS directories are that these high authority websites publish your content along with backlinks to your website/blog. Those high authority backlinks improve your site's search engine rankings. That's why I got that huge sudden jump in search traffic, because by submitting my sites to 50 or so directories, I automatically got hundreds of backlinks to each of the sites. The question is why did the effects fade? It could be that Google first notice all my backlinks and gave me credit for them, but then figured out that they were all essentially the same and that I had just submitted my site to a lot of directories, and then reduced the amount of link juice I was entitled to. Or I guess it could be that when you first submit your feed, it is at the top of the list on the directory, but the longer you leave your content not updated, the further your feed slips down on the directory's list and gets less attention. I am inclined to think that's the case because when I updated my money site's content, some of the original effects were restored. Maybe the feed hits the front page whenever you update, then slowly drops down. Honestly I'm speculating, and if anyone knows the definite answer I'd love to know it.

In any case, the benefits of submitting your feeds are obvious and it's a very simple process, so if you haven't done it yet then you should. You can also submit feeds for your accounts on Ezinearticles, Hubpages, your social bookmarking accounts, etc.

Removing Some Affiliate Banners From My Blog

If this isn't your first visit here then you may have noticed that some of the affiliate banners on my blog have disappeared. I used to have a PPC-Coach banner on here as well as a Hostgator banner, both of which had my affiliate link in them so if you signed up for either service I'd get a commission. Just simple affiliate marketing. So why'd I remove them? Well, in the case of Hostgator it's because I felt far too many people get screwed out of commissions they've rightfully earned with Hostgator. They say they pay you $50 per signup, which they do but if person who signed up quits after a couple months it seems they do a chargeback and remove your commission. Hey, it's not my fault if Hostgator can't retain their subscribers. My job as an affiliate is to send them a subscriber. It's their job to satisfy the subscriber. I dealt with a lot of this kind of thing when doing email and zip submit offers, but come on, Hostgator is a big company and should be above that kind of thing. If they want to cover their risks more, then they should offer affiliates a lower payout, saying $25 or whatever, and then pay them properly. I'm not going to promote things that I won't get paid for, because there are plenty of other affiliate programs that will pay me properly.

The other one was PPC-Coach. I don't want to talk bad about this program, because so many people say they get a lot out of it. But I can only feel good about promoting something in the IM niche if I personally have gotten a lot out of it, and in this case I haven't. I'm not the most clear-minded person, I can be a bit of a space cadet, but I can usually make up for that by being a hard worker. On PPC-Coach though, the approach is to basically give you a whole bunch of resources and leave it up to you to make sense out of them and apply them. As a PPC noob and as someone with very little knowledge of scripting languages and the technical side of things, I spent about 4 months being thoroughly confused. And I didn't feel that the staff were interested in dealing with someone who needed handholding. So I quit. Since then I have been using nothing but free traffic methods, but will get back into PPC once I've reached some of my goals for free traffic. But since I quit using PPC-Coach, I didn't feel I could promote it anymore.

In any case, I keep this blog as a kind of diary and way to share what I experience for anyone who gets anything out of it. I don't really see this blog as a source of income, so it was an easy decision to remove the banners.