Affiliate Marketing: Do I need RSS?
By: Donald MacKenzie, Current Not yet Rated

A rough rule of thumb for the affiliate is that without at least 100 hits per day to his website, he will struggle to make a reasonable online income. This is because many site visitors do not click on affiliate links and of those that do, very few buy the affiliated product or service. For many products, the ratio of unique site visitors to completed product sales can be more than fifty to one.

As a result, the affiliate needs to pursue every possible opportunity to increase traffic to his website. Indeed most of his efforts should be directed at this task on an ongoing basis.



RSS refers to Really Simple Syndication although when first developed it referred to Rich Site Summary. An RSS document, with the .xml extension, is known as a feed, or web feed. It includes full or summarised text, links to the original HTML documents and specifies the dates when these documents were published.

Use of RSS is an important and effective way to generate new and repeat traffic to your website. It is particularly good for sales because it is people with a specific interest in your market niche that you target via RSS.

RSS allows you to automatically syndicate your content and those wishing to follow your regular bulletins can suscribe to your feed (via an RSS aggregator - available free online) to get automatic updates. All the leading web browsers are able to display RSS feeds.

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RSS is a good way to attract new visitors. The usual way it is used by affiliates is for the dissemination of newsletters or a blog. Either of these can be a good promotional vehicle. It is easy to set up your own on-site RSS feed which will link to your webpages with constantly refreshing content. As constantly refreshing content is attractive to search engines, this will assist your search rank even if RSS uptake is limited.

You should include the RSS title tag in the webpage head of any pages that link to your RSS feed(s). Affiliate product listings can also be presented via RSS.

You should submit your RSS feeds to as many RSS directories as you can identify. These directories can be pinged when new items are added to your feed.

Interesting and informative news items are a good way to attract repeat visitors via your RSS feeds as some may choose to subcribe to your feed and will automatically receive new posts. It therefore pays to put some effort into making your RSS feeds content attractive to readers.

Tutorials on how to set up an RSS feed are easy to find online. Given that it is not difficult to set up, it is best to provide your own on-site RSS feed.

Off-site blog providers automatically provide an RSS feed of your blog. Affiliates should have at least one off-site blog to drive traffic to their site and this is therefore another potential source of RSS-driven traffic.

Some believe that RSS will become increasingly popular. Download times for RSS feeds are extremely rapid. This renders surfing news items via a dedicated RSS aggregator one of the most efficient ways to surf. All the leading news providers offer RSS feeds. While few make use of this, it is possible to surf all the leading newspapers’ stories by category, for free, from your desktop.

If your RSS feed becomes part of those automatically checked by a routine RSS user, that is a powerful marketing opportunity for the affiliate.

As it can be time-consuming to write your own original content for your RSS, it pays to use other authors’ articles which can be easily obtained free of charge from article directories. This has the advantage that you can provide new RSS content on most days with minimal investment of your own time, simply by selecting from relevent categories on your favourite article directories.

Note that these directories provide their own RSS feeds with new articles to make this process even easier. Regular posting of these articles on your website is a powerful way for affiliates to grow their websites to several hundred pages of relevant content, rendering them much more likely to attract high ranks from search engines and draw in traffic via relevant keywords.

As adding additonal pages with other people’s content is so easy, it is surprising that so few affiliates make use of this powerful traffic-generating opportunity. RSS can be recommended for routine use.

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Donald MacKenzie is a Consultant and Affiliate Marketing Expert. He wrote the Successful Affiliates Guide and runs several affiliate websites including for car insurance and another to compare car insurance.

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