This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. If you have a blog, you have an RSS feed. Its job is to talk to other machines about your site on your behalf. Those bot to bot conversations increase your traffic and help more people see your site, either directly through listings, or indirectly by helping your search rankings. Do at least the basics to take care of your feed.
2. No one loves RSS, okay? I never actually liked it much, but I always understood that it was necessary to grow. Stop trying to hug it, and start having a basic understanding of how it helps your business.
3. If you don’t have a site newsletter, use RSS to make your blog posts into email newsletters, then put the email subscription box at the top right of your site, as a fade-in after entering or as a slide-up from the bottom of the site. Aweber will do this for you automatically.
4. About once a week, make sure your feed is validating. Sometimes all it takes is a rarely used character in the title to break your feed.
5. Submit your feed to the top RSS search engines. There aren’t hundreds of them as there once were, but for the good ones remaining, like Syndic8, the links can’t hurt you.
6. RSS is what helps your site speak to social media sites automatically, but what if you aren’t sure what is helping and how often? Try FeedBurner. It’s my opinion that the service has been on the decline since Google took it over a year ago, but that take into account the height it was at when the fall began. It’s still does a decent job of tracking your traffic, (< vent > even if I can’t log into my account after asking for a whole YEAR what happened during my feed transfer (< /vent >)
7. Google Reader. Yes, that’s the whole tip. Of the minority of people who use a Feed Reader, Google Reader is the top choice. Stick the button on your site, glance over your headlines in Google Reader now and again. Wouldn’t hurt you to share some items over there too.
8. In the full-feed vs excerpt feed debate, it depends. You get more RSS readers with full feed, and more comments. You get more page views with excerpts, and less theft of your intellectual property. My solution with new sites is to offer both, and allow the short feed to be syndicated by anyone, with a link at the bottom of each short feed post letting readers know we offer full text as well.

When this site was on the Blogger platform and had a members section, I had a bunch of feeds, some were full text, some were partial, some had both. At the time, partial feeds meant less scraping and more more page views.

Now, I wonder if page views even matter when the bottom line is really getting read, not getting displays – unless of course you’re running a site where you don’t get paid unless the ad is clicked or at least displayed, on a web page. And I hear the de-emphasis of the page view as a measurement echoed across the Net.

So a couple of days ago where I read that Steve said “Want People to Read Your Blog? Go With a Full Text Feed” it got me to thinking. Here’s a quick quote – short because I think you should go read the whole thing. If you’re a blogger or a blog reader, weigh in.

Someone should commission a study on bloggers who choose to syndicate the full text of their posts in RSS feeds vs. those who abstain. Something tells me they’re read more. Consider the contrasts between these two bloggers.

I thought about the time when I had about a third of my audience following me by feed instead of around 14%. And the big difference was the full text feed. I’m thinking about jumping into the deep end again…

What will determine that is what you think. Would you rather have my posts in full? Or are you pretty much cool with the way things are? Or do you not care at all?

Holla back…

… of the Year, is now online.

You have no idea how close it came to being the last one ever…

Whew!

In this Christmas Issue:

Five Seasons Freebies
Four Traffic Weapons
Three Blogger’s Resources
Two On-Going Contest
and a Funny Chirstmas Video of Me!

Can’t wait to see you there!

I haven’t been around for a while, and I’ll probably post an update on that later. I’ll be flying back to Vegas on May 2nd, and by the 7th, I’ll officially be around full time again. While I have a few minutes, I thought I’d talk a little about business blogging, since I have a press release out about it today.

One of the reasons I talk about blogging so much is that I know a lot of webmasters who are absolutely desperate for traffic to their sites. They often have a budget of less than one hundred and fifty dollars, a few hours a week of free time for marketing, and desire search engine traffic above all else.

If this sounds like you, let me ask you this.

What’s wrong with a method to increase your search engine traffic in the time it takes to write a medium-length email every weekday for 30 – 90 days? Especially if, after 90 days, you can maintain those results with one update a week?

This time three years ago, if someone had told me that I could get hundreds of first page rankings in the search engines that I got to keep, month after month, and I didn’t have to spend $100 – $1000 a month on AdWords or Overture, I would have done backflips.

And apparently, I’d be a millionaire today as well. All from learning the right way to blog to rank for 200 search terms instead of two.

It absolutely confounds me why anyone who could write an email wouldn’t find the time to try this method of generating additional traffic to their site – free, high quality, targeted search engine traffic.

Of course, some people believe that all the answers to how to do this are available for free online. And for sure there are some great resources, like Wayne’s excellent Blog Business World.

But if all the information for how to increase your traffic from search engines with a blog was available online – wouldn’t everyone have great traffic right now?

And yet they don’t. Because it’s not just about how to pick a good keyword, or getting links from submitting to blog directories, or knowing where to ping when you blog.

It’s about building relationships – document relationships, the relationship between you and your reader so your traffic will stick.

I talk about some of that in the podcast I did with PRWeb today. It should be out in a few hours. In the meantime, open up the attached PDF file and look at some of the sample resources and ask yourself – are you really happy with how much traffic you have? If there’s an ethical, step-by-step way to learn to do it better, that other people are getting great results with, what’s your reason for not trying it?

How valuable are sales and leads to your business anyway? Are they worth spending a couple of hundred dollars? A couple of thousand? A few hours a week?

You can download the attachment in PDF format. In an upcoming post I’m going to talk about the first case study I have for Adsense and Blogging using my method, which got my personal coaching student 300 visitors a day in three weeks, who are helping him earn over $500 a month in AdSense.

What if he had ten blogs? What if he sees the plan through to the 90 day mark and has ten times the traffic?

What if he were YOU? We’ll talk about that soon, maybe in a few hours, maybe tomorrow.

Which is my birthday, incidentally….

The RSS Marketing Help and all the other forums and as well as this blog are now back online at their new homes. The member’s resource area is as well, I’m just still working on the RSS Feeds for that part of the site. That’s gonna be a project, so I’ve just re-opened the site after a bit of testing. There will be more changes over the next few days.

I’ll have a few extra traffic tips in just a few.