If you read last month’s article on creating a blog, you should have a pretty good understanding on how to get your blog started (if you didn’t read the article, you can find it here: http://www.concentric.com/blog/?page_id=9#article2).

Whether you’re an individual, simply wishing to get your personal thoughts out to the world, or you’re the CEO of a big corporation, spreading the word about your next product launch, the big question is how to make your blog available to the most amount of people.

And while there are multiple ways to get your business noticed on the Internet (email marketing, banner campaigns, pay-per-click advertisements, podcasting), RSS marketing is one of the easier, yet more powerful technologies available to online marketers today. In fact, because of the stigmas attached to direct email campaigns, blog RSS marketing is quickly becoming the preferred method for disseminating legitimate information out to individual market segments.

And the best part…it’s free!

But first things first. As discussed in the previous article, you first want to get your blog listed in many of the blog aggregators, such as Bloglines or Technorati. This first step will, at the very least, get your blog on the Internet radar, enabling people to find your blog either through a query on your company name or via your company’s product or services category (e.g. your company makes widgets, so if anyone searches for “widget blogs,” your company’s blog will be listed in the results). This will also give you a chance to see what places will also list your RSS feed.

The same strategy holds if you’re an individual blogger, wanting to get your latest personal movie reviews on the Internet for everyone to read. If your blog is about something specific then you’ll want people to find you as easily as if you were a big company.

Once your blog is listed with the blog search engines, you’ll want to capture and promote the RSS feed of your postings. An RSS feed (short for Real Simple Syndication) is the ability to “push” your latest blog entries out to those interested in your latest posts…without those people having to come directly to your blog. If you’re unfamiliar with the ever-widening world of RSS, you may be surprised to hear that you probably use RSS more frequently than you realize. Sites such as My Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) and Google News (http://news.google.com) are mainstream examples of RSS feeds, aggregating news and information in an easy-to-read format. Each story you read on these sites is an RSS feed from somewhere else. Therefore, once you make your own RSS feed available to the world, you—and everyone else—can add your RSS feed to any RSS aggregator page. And just as those mainstream news stories update automatically, so will your own blog entries.

“Okay, I get it now. So how do I do it?”

Good news. If you’re using WordPress with your hosting account, your RSS feed is automatically built for you. Once your blog is up and running, WordPress has a built-in RSS feed already created. If you look at the navigation portion of your blog, you’ll see there is a built-in category called “RSS Feeds.” Click on the link that says “posts.” You’ll see a page that seems like a bunch of code mixed in with your postings. This is your RSS feed in RSS aggregator language (called XML). Fortunately, you don’t need to understand a single word of this mumbo jumbo. The only thing you need is the URL of this page. This URL is your own personal RSS feed. (It will look something like this: http://www.concentric.com/blog/?feed=rss2)

Once you have this URL in hand, you can put an RSS graphic on your website, linking to this URL. You can also put a simple text link, but it’s pretty much a universal icon these days to see that orange RSS button. Once your link is available on your site, those interested can now add your “real-time” blog feed to their own aggregator.

As a quick aside, you may be interested in adding your own RSS feed—and other feeds—to My Yahoo. Here’s a quick rundown on how to do that.

1—Click on the “Add Content” link in My Yahoo
2—Click on the “Add RSS by URL” link, just to the right of the “Find Content” search box.
3—Past your RSS URL into the box and click “Add”

That’s it! Your RSS feed is now part of you’re My Yahoo page.

Next time, we’ll tackle specific ways you can market your company via blog and RSS feeds.