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.

Okay, let’s back up for a second.

I’ve been giving you tools for your feed, and what I’m slowly starting to realize is that most people don’t understand just how much of a potential traffic increase they are looking at with the proper promotion of their RSS Feed.

And I’ve been trying to be subtle about it, because truthfully, I love the results I’m getting with my feed, and when people finally catch on… only the people who do it right will see the increased traffic I’m talking about here. I want to remain one of those people.

If you take NOTHING else away from this, realize – you NEED to have a feed. I don’t care what you sell. I don’t care if you don’t sell anything at all.

Forget everything about what you heard regarding how “difficult” it is to have a feed. If you can type, you can have a feed. We’ll come back to that in a few.

Here’s an example – let’s be clear, I’m just speculating here, though I got similar results for my favorite terms. You will have to do the work to get these results. I’ve made the steps as simple as I can, but you still have to do them.

So, say your site is about… Bob Marley.

(I’m trying to be as obscure as I can, but still use a term that everyone can relate to.. )

Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tools states that in July, there were 253656 searches for Bob Marley. Some quick study at Wordtracker and SearchGuild tells us that this term is not the easiest to rank for on the first page. And I’d be willing to bet you that you’d have to pay at least $1 to rank on the first page with a paid listing – and that’s per click.

Imagine that you could get ten percent of those results – that only 10% of those people would do a feed search on Bob Marley and would come to your site. And just 1% of them would buy your $15 poster or whatever it is. That’s 25,365 visitors to your site in a month, 253 of them buy your poster. $3795 to you.

Now imagine that those visitors were totally, 100% free. Now that nearly four grand of sales is all profit.

That’s one term.

That’s one feed.

That’s results from having your feed promoted on just one site.

Now imagine you had 20 products. Or you had 20 feeds. Or both. On the same site if you like.

With me now?

The present ability we have to get targeted traffic to our feeds is mind-blowing. To conceptualize it, imagine you were the only person listed in Yahoo for your site’s primary keyword, or one of the top five in Google.

Right now, in most markets, there is NO competition for feeds. In fields like internet marketing, there is still, even now, minor competition for feeds. And you don’t get that visitor just once.

EVERY time you update your headlines, you have the chance to bring a new person to your site, or to get that original person back to your site. (Of course you don’t want to harass them into un-subscribing, that would definitely be detrimental. )

But the point is, you’ll get another crack at making that sale, and another, and another, as long as your content is relevant.

The most common reason that I hear for not having a feed is that it’s too hard to do.

Nonsense.

If you can type, there are so many free tools to help you make a feed that it’s truly ridiculous. I tell you all about them in my book. And if that’s still too hard for you, there are sites that will automatically configure and store them for you. You’ll log into the site, type your update and press publish. Your feed will update. Done.

You don’t have to touch a single line of code if you don’t want to – I’m a certified techie and I don’t. Why should I when it’s super-easy to do otherwise? I’m lazy as hell, don’t let the articles fool you. I type them at 8 am in my pajamas when I can’t sleep then I go back to bed.

And if THAT was not reason enough, you can also get better search engine rankings with your feed. I have a customer whose site wasn’t even IN Yahoo. His site is perfect. But there’s just so much competition for his field.

Then he did one thing. Read my book, added his feed to Yahoo the right way.

Three days later, front page in Yahoo. He even wrote his own book about his experiences.

Personally, I’m ranking for terms I didn’t even think of – traffic tips, free traffic tip, free traffic tips – those are just the ones that send me a traffic trickle – I won’t list the major ones for obvious reasons, though I’d be happy to email you about them personally. I picked the name of my feed and this blog out of my behind. But I lucked out. Because I lucked out, you did too, because I tell you all about how to name your feed.

I was nowhere to be found in listings for those terms before I had one.

And when I moved part of my site to a new domain name, my listings were live in a few days – I purposely did not try to get the spider to my site and it found me anyway because I forgot to Not update my feed.

Haven’t promoted my main feed in two months…. It was 7 am where I am, Pacific time- I’d already had 1352 hits from my feed alone when I started writing to you. Now it’s 7:38 a.m. and I’ve had 1455 hits.

Some of that traffic is from being published in Site Pro News today – most of it is from traffic to my feed. I use Feed Burner to track my feed stats, so matching that up to my site stats gives me a reasonable idea of where it comes from.

News feeds haven’t even gone mainstream yet. And I’m almost at the point where I would feel confident totally abandoning my quest for better search engine rankings – because as long as I follow my own guide, I’ll never be hurting for traffic.

Make no mistake, my friend. RSS Feeds are going to be the biggest thing to hit the Internet since the Standard web browser. It is effectively leveling the playing field between you and the major corporations. As far as people who read feeds are concerned, you are being rewarded for the quality of your content – it’s up to you to write the informative headline and have the great content to back it up.

But the supply of traffic is greater than the demand right now.

Even if you didn’t have a site, you could find an affiliate product, and make an information site about it, and make money by never doing another thing but supply information about that area of interest.

With the volume of potential traffic I’m telling you about, you could really just write about your favorite thing, relate it to an affiliate product, and as long as you don’t bore your reader to death by selling to them in every single post, you could make a reasonably comfortable income from providing free content.

I do. That’s my big secret. It’s just like in the old days when I made most of my money from banner advertising. I don’t have to worry myself to death about my conversion rate or whether or not Yahoo and Google still love me – though I won’t lie and say I don’t appreciate the traffic they send. But if they dropped me tomorrow, I wouldn’t be worried.

This moment in time will not last forever.

You have the chance, right now, to get your feed promoted properly, and get a crack at some of this traffic. And people are calling me insane for telling you about this, instead of signing up for every affiliate product I can find and reaping the benefits for myself, or putting together a $200 package, and a few thousand copies very quietly.

I can’t lie. A couple of times I thought about pulling all the information off the server and doing the greedy thing. But even if I am that stingy, how long would it take me to promote every thing under the sun? I’m lazy, remember?

I have my corner of the web locked up, and I expect to retire in the next few years from the income I generate from this one traffic source. True story. Quit my job months ago and never looked back.

Who knows what can happen for you… I won’t sit here and tell you you’ll be a millionaire, because really, if you’ve been reading my column all this time and don’t have this book… who knows what you’re really looking for…. or maybe I just haven’t been explaining it right. That’s what this article was for – and hopefully, it’s crystal clear to you now.

So get to it already!

What on earth could you be waiting for? Take the free five day course on RSS Tips. by filling out the form below. Do it right now. Someone else is reading this column and buying up all the good Marley posters…