RSS Toolbot is the site of the day. Combine several feed links into one page to read. Works like a simplistic aggregator (feed reader) – great if you have just a couple of feed you want to read.

If FeedBurner’s mega-features are a little over your head, you can use the services of 2RSS.com to turn your Atom feed into a version of RSS. Then you can offer both at your site instead of participating in that whole Betamax/VHS type argument that’s going on right now about format.

The First Step to Learning About Feeds – Feed Subscription Made Easy
http://freetraffictip.com/firefox
http://freetraffictip.com/pluck
http://www.opera.com/download/

The best education you can get about what web feeds are and how to use them is to start reading the web with a browser that is feed capable, or using online tools you’re already familiar with.

Firefox

Mozilla’s preview release of its latest browser update, Firefox, comes with an easy feature for feed readers called Live Bookmarks. When you come across a site that has its AutoDiscovery tag in place, you’ll see an orange RSS button in the lower right-hand corner.

You can click that button and see all the feeds that site has available, and add the feed to your list the same way you would a bookmark. It creates a folder that has the posts you haven’t read, and the option to open them all in multiple tabs or just click on the headline that interests you.

Some veteran feed readers find the interface too simplistic, but if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to start exploring the feed world and to get automatic updates of your favorite blogs, this tool is perfect for you.

Publishers can take advantage of the growing (and passionate!) Firefox fan base by including the AutoDiscovery tag in the head tag of their pages.

(When am I going to shut up about Mozilla? When you pry my laptop from my cold, dead hands. Or when you download it and fall in love yourself.)

Pluck

If you’re still in love with IE, and you want feeds in your browser, Pluck is your solution. It plugs right into IE, is easy, quick and sophisticated enough for people who are power users already.

Opera

The latest version of the Opera Browser comes with a feed reader, too, and you can download it directly from their site. 6 million users can’t all be wrong.

If you’d rather try feeds out first to see if you like them, you can try adding feeds to your “My Yahoo!” page, or using the free service at Bloglines.com . Either one will help you get a feel for them pretty quickly.

There’s a site called quicksub that helps you create a drop-down button for your XML.gif button. Handy if you’re not using FeedBurner, though I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t.

Though I have the occasional update problem with FeedBurner, a quick manual tweak of my settings normally does the trick. I keep forgetting to write them about that…

My name’s Tinu, and I’m a feedaholic.

I love the sophisticated surfers I get to my site via my own feed, I love how much the search engine spiders love my feeds, and I simply adore reading sites via their RSS Feeds. I do the majority of my research for my column that way.

If your site doesn’t have one and you want to be featured in one of my daily columns, you’re out of luck. It isn’t that there aren’t great sites out there with great tools out there that aren’t feed-capable, it’s just that now that I use web feeds as my primary source of news, unless your site was featured in someone else’s feed, it just wouldn’t occur to me.

To folks like me, your site is effectively invisible, unless you happen to come up on the first page of a search, and since I know where to go to find the information I want quickly, I don’t use a search engine on a daily basis.

True story.

But why should you care. I’m just one isolated surfer, a special case, a techie, a feed nut.

Wrong friend.

We feed readers may be in the minority for now, but we’re a powerful, educated, relatively wealthy group of consumers. In my free course about RSS , I’ll tell you the demographics as quoted from a study done by blogads.com – it’s a little skewed because of the pool of consumers they surveyed, but it’s no less telling of the group studied.

Some hints: we’re a middle-aged group with the money to spend on your premium products. The way you might skim past a product priced at $3.99 is the way we might skip over a $25 ebook – particularly if we can hire someone to do the work for us, for the same reason: we’re looking for a balance of quality and price.

I’m not pointing this out to be mean, or insinuate that your site is less than top quality. I’m just telling you what you’re missing by not having a feed on your site.

Mull that over while I post the next tip.

I was too tired to do the extras day yesterday, and I’m still pretty much feeling the effects of adjusting to this new medication for my back. But I promised I would do another day of fun free feed tools so here it is.

To get you started, you can read the article I wrote this morning: Fun Free Feed Tools for Both the Publisher and the Reader They’re more for the Puublisher than for the Reader, but they’re still fun all the same.

The Resource Box ties this all together.

When you read an article online, at the bottom you’ll find a few lines about the author. Here’s the goldmine, and the reason people give away free information.

You have normally five lines to share your link, brand yourself, talk a bit about your site or products and deliver a disguised sales pitch – which is the invitation to come to your site.

In this area, I link to include my email subscribe link, my feed link if there is enough room, and the link to the landing page I created for this article if there isn’t. I also include a wacky saying about myself (that’s how I brand myself as the crazy free traffic chick) or the statement that will pique curiosity and make them beat a trail to my stie.

For your own purposes with this model, here’s what you should include, in third person.

1 – A teaser that talks about the additional information on the topic, which will lead to your sales page
2 – The link to the landing page that provides this information.

To make this work best, turn it into a question or statement that you don’t answer in the article. Using our earlier example, you can say “Read part two of this article and find out how I get other people to pay for my Britney Spears poster”.Or you can say “Can you guess how I will take over the world with a simple Britney Spears poster?”

Then leave the link to the landing page.

And we’re done.

Here are some places to submit your article:
http://www.freetraffictip.com/members/ftopic-107-0-days0-orderasc-article.html

I’m really tired, so Freedom Fridays will probably be on Saturday. I’m really, really trying to take the doctor’s advice on taking it easy… so far I’m about 70% compliant. I may have some extras for you instead, depends on my score tomorrow…..

Here’s how it should go, if this is done correctly.

You’ll submit your articles to sites and ezines.

Your article gets picked up by some web sites and newsletters.

Your prospect reads the article in the already targeted resource, and search engines pick up the link. Both follow back to your site. (For your prospect, it may only be a certain percentage of people who read it, but this is good because that person must have a high interest to make the subconscious decision to click your link.)

The page at your site converts the prospect to a subscriber and gets a new page into the search engines that has dozens, (or hopefully hundreds) of sites linking back to the article. This is the page with the high-traffic, low-competition keyword, so the plan is that the combination of links and a the content of the page will result in higher rankings. – if not, it’s performed its primary function, which is to convert readers of your article from other sites.

The prospect-turned-subscriber sees your sales page. (In my experience, this is often 33% – 66%) of people landing on the page. If only 3% convert to the sale immediately, that’s great. And if not, they are still a subscriber and you’ll have the chance to sell them that product, or one that they are interested in later.

And that’s how it works. But we’re forgetting the component that ties this all together – your resource box. In this last tip, we’ll talk about what should be in your resource box.

If you can write content for your web site, you can write an article. If your hired writer can write content for your web site, you can hire them to write your article, and have them give you the rights to it, just like they do with your site. Just turn this information over to them when you’ve got the rough outline.

The fastest way to write an article is to write a top ten. If your article solves a problem, it can be a how-to “How to Find the Rarest Britney Spears posters”:. If your article shows easier ways to do something, it can be “the top ten ways to…”The Top Ten Ways to Use The Fame of Britney Spears to Enhance Your Business”. Or, If it is one of those “there should be a book about” you can make it a ten steps – “Ten Steps to Get Your Kids to Stop Listening to Britney Spears”.

Take that idea and go to TopTen.org and scroll down to Create A Nugget, which will take you to this page.Select the top ten list and you’ll come to a page that gives you a really easy template for creating your article.

If you don’t have ten steps, you can use five, or eight, it doesn’t matter (unless you’re going to submit to topten.org).

Easy, right? But don’t submit your article yet. We need to work on your resource box, and set up the landing page at your site. I’ll have the next tip ready in just a second.

Part One of this step is Choosing Your Topic, otherwise known as “What the Hell Am I Going to Write About?”

With choosing your topic, you want to strke a balance between writing about a popular topic and not writing about the same thing everyone else is writing about. For example, I sometimes write a lot about Google, RSS Feeds and Yahoo, and Alexa Internet.

Now, a lot of people write about Google, or Yahoo, here and there about RSS Feeds, and not so much about Alexa. But I picked those three topics because they are things people want to know about. Then I took those topics and illustrated how I solved a problem I had or a challenge I was facing with one of those topics.

So get out a piece of paper (or launch a text file), and put at the top, the heading “There Should Be a Book About” and think of topics related to your product, service or web site that has to do with that title. Then write down five things you think there should be a book about.

Next, write the heading “This Week I Learned An Easier Way to…” and make another list of things – try to stick to things problems other online entrepreneurs face.

Third, write the heading “My Product/Service/Site Solves the Problem of…” and finish that sentence up to ten ways.

With what you have before you, go to Wordtracker.com, and find some keywords related to that issue – find some really both a low traffic general one and a high traffic targeted one – not the top general keyword, a lower rated one with high KEI (their factor for indicating that you’d have a low competiion keyword with high traffic).

Now let’s look at what you have.

With your list, you can pick several topics to write about. You may even be able to combine two. The ones that relate to the minor keyword that you can repeat one or two times in the article, and could perhaps write a sentence about including that keyword, will help you the most.

Use the low traffic keyword you found to make your title. So if you found that “Britney Spears poster” is a low traffic keyword, and one of the topics is “Where to Find the best Britney Spears poster” is your article title, and you know you can mention Britney spears and the word poster several times in your article, you’ve got a winner.

In the next step, we’ll write our article. Hang on to that high traffic keyword info, we’re going to use that later.

Anyone can tell you that writing articles will help your search engine traffic if you do it correctly. It’s an easy concept to grasp, provided you have people to explain it to you properly. Personally, I only put my minor keywords in articles that are on other people’s sites – my major keywords are on the pages that the search engines land on.

With the method I’m about to show you, which is similar to the garden path method I showed you earlier, you’ll get an overview of the methods I use to get traffic that buys from my articles and artilcle series.

Back with step one in a few minutes.