This post might get a bit long-winded. Wait. They all do. Blogs and RSS directories. How many of you guys submit your feeds to the directories? It’s a drag isn’t it? I’m not talking about blog and ping. I’m talking about manual submissions to RSS directories. I spent the better part of 6 hours submitting 6 blogs to around 55 RSS directories. Manually. Why the masochism? I’m just strange that way.
Why the abuse? I decided to take those 6 blogs and socialize them. Hard. These blogs are built for readers. They are not built for money. They are built for Pagerank. I want people to find them and subscribe to them. I want people to discover them and use them as content on their websites. I want a ton of traffic. Social traffic. The kind that monetizes like shit. But the kind that gets read in readers all over the web. The kind that people subscribe to and use as content on their site. I want tons of backlinks. I want Pagerank of 5 or better. Why? Because I will use them for my crappy niche blogs for building excellent backlinks.
When you go through the RSS directories you may see tons of crap niche blogs listings. You may have a tool like RSS Submitter or something that will submit your blog across tons of RSS directories. You think that’s cool as you are following the commandments of the Church of the Bitching Backlinks. You take the feed off your hamster collar site and submit it across the RSS directory landscape in the hopes that it will mean something to the Big G.
Guess what? It doesn’t mean shit. Why? Your feed, if accepted, will quickly drop to the last page of the directory listings where Pagerank goes die. Nobody is going to subscribe to your crappy PLR niche site. You might, if you’re lucky, have your content used on some splog. Glorious. Pay up and you can be listed as a featured blog but who the hell wants to do that with a dog diaper blog?
A couple of these blogs were previously submitted haphazardly, and without much purpose, to Blog Catalog, Blog Top List and RSS2. They get a ton of traffic from those sites. When I finally went through the stats I realized that I had a ton of subscribers from these sources. When I do a Google search for my posts I rank all over Google for terms with links from these directories. Obviously ranking better than my blog but if you click on the listing it takes you to the RSS directory which slings you to my site. Two Google listings below that you may see my blog. It’s ridiculous.
3 of these blogs are hosted at WordPress. People at WordPress are a social bunch. They love comments and they love to comment. They click all over the place. I added a blog feed from another of my blogs into the widget of one of the WP blogs. When you do that WP puts the datafeed subscription chicklet alongside the posts. Why is that a big deal? People who read your blog can now subscribe to both blog feeds. The main blog and also the blog which is being “scraped”. Make sense? The blogs are directly related so they get a double shot of content that they want to read.
So you’re sitting there thinking, what a waste of time. You can’t make money on this shit idiot?! Well I can’t directly. For sure. WP doesn’t allow monetization. The other 3 blogs aren’t going to make money either. They just aren’t. But they get plenty of traffic. Kind of like Lost Ball. People read and subscribe to this mess yet I make very little.
I realized pretty quick that I was getting a ton of backlinks to these blogs. People were reading. They were subscribing. I was getting ranked really high for cool keywords. Pagerank was increasing. And the joy came when I linked out to other sites and blogs the indexing was immediate. And despite the no follow shit and all that, which I don’t really get, the new sites got a nice PR2 and some a PR3 at the next Google rinse. I attributed it a great deal to these social blogs. And then I got ranked and clicks and sold some shit.
Anyway, when I checked my keywords in Google I found that I was ranking high not just for my site but for the listing in the RSS directories. You do a search for one of the keywords I targeted and I would list in Google at Blog Catalog and Blog Top List. That ranking in turn gives my blog more authority.
I know. Seems like a lot of effort for something that you can’t directly make money from. It’s too bad that I can get 2-4,000 daily visitors on one of these blogs and not make a direct dime from it. But surfers and readers like to click links that relate to what they are subscribed to. I at least give them that. Plus again, I use these blogs for my own backlinks. It matters.
Again, I think it’s a waste to make the big effort to submit to these directories with typical niche blogs. They’ll get buried on the back pages where PR light does not shine. But if you have a blog that people read and rate and subscribe to it will stay at the top of the listings where the PR juice flows.
So what kind of blog works best? Top level niches. Sports. Blog about college football, not football shoes. Blog about TV. Blog about Obama. Blog big. Focused. But big. Go to WordPress and start a few blogs. Write a lot. And get to know tags. Look at the tag listings and note the PR. But make damn sure you blog about shit you really, really like. The blogs that I write now take about 30 minutes a day. Total. I post photos and videos and write about 100 words each post. I goof off on the web for an hour or so on the weekend and collect photos and video links I want to use the next week. It’s time consuming in a way when you think about it but it’s worth it because 1) I enjoy it and 2) I create some super backlink properties. Make sense?
Folks may think it’s stupid to do this. They would say to spend the time writing articles or getting backlinks or building more site that you can monetize. Frankly I have enough sites that are monetized. I need traffic. This is one way to help my own sites. And I like doing it. However, I didn’t like RSS submissions.
After seeing what the few directories were doing for my keyword listings in Google I decided to see if I could submit to a lot more directories. I did a Google search and came to this directory listing at DotSauce to work off of.
Here are the directories that I was able to submit to with success:
- RSSMountain.com
- Feedest.com
- 2RSS.com
- FeedsFarm.com
- FeedsHoster.com
- Plazoo.com
- Page2go2.com
- RSSmicro.com
- FeedFury.com
- FindRSS.net
- RSSmotron.com
- MillionRSS.com
- Yahoo RSS Guide
- ReadABlog.com
- GoldenFeed.com
- BlogDigger.com
- RSSFeeds.com
- 88tem.com
- WeBlogAlot.com
- FeedBoy.com
- Chordata.info
- BlogPulse.com
- IceRocket.com
- RSS-Network.com
- Jordomedia.com
- FeedShark.BrainBliss.com
- FeedPlex.com
- FeedCat.net
- RSSmad.com
- Feedage.com
- NewsIsFree.com
- Syndic8.com
- NewzAlert.com
Out of the 55 DotSauce listed, about 20 were broken. If the site offered an opportunity to create an account I created one. A few of the sites required a reciprocal link. It takes time to add links back to your sites and create and verify accounts. Some of the sites would basically ping your site. But most had to have a description, tags, URL, title, site feed, user name, full name and email. Do that for 6 sites and you can understand the time suck.
Yes, there is software that can do this. I actually have one. But I wanted to do it manually. I didn’t want to get banned. I wanted to be able to write a different description for every single blog at each directory. 6 blogs. Time suck my friends. I got through it.
Like I mentioned before I also submitted to Blog Catalog, Blog Top Area, Blog Top List, Blogarama and RSS2. They made a big difference in my readership I believe. I hope my efforts over the last couple of days with the list above makes an even bigger impact.
Consider that I also bookmark these blogs with BMD as well. The nice thing is that 3 are not hosted by me. Could be a drag if I wanted to sell them but, that’s the breaks. Anyway, I can use them as filler when I bookmark my self hosted sites as they won’t be seen as promoting more of my own sites. Dig?
If you read Griz, you know he’s always talking social bloggers and their struggles with making money versus IM bloggers focused on the cash. Griz and those like him are able to drive lots of traffic to their sites seemingly with ease with an eye on the money. I haven’t been able to crack that nut. But I can social blog with the best of them. But, he’s right, the green just isn’t there. But I feel like I will be able to merge the two. Actually I’m already doing it. I’m going bigger. Hope all this makes sense.
I’m done. Thanks for reading.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
Sounds solid Splork.
Before Griz came along there was a fella named Michael Campbell, “Revenge of the Mini-net” back in 2002 or so who had a similar concept of setting up a network of sites.
Back then it involved simple one page static sites , however the concept is still quite applicable in today’s web 2.0 world.
Yea, I wouldn’t bother but I’ve created these blogs and actually enjoy writing them. 4 of them cannot be monetized because of the platform where they are located but it’s because of the platform that is the reason I get tons, or what I consider tons, of traffic. Each blog gets around 2-4,000 views a day and growing. I remeber being thrilled 6 months ago when I broke 500 eyeballs. Now I’m bummed if I don’t break 3K.
If you do a search in Google for the keyword from a post, my blog is listed 2, 3 maybe 5 times on each page of listings for about the first 5 or so pages of results. How? Because I get ranked for the site. For the tag page where its hosted. On sites that have scraped my content. On RSS directories listings. On bookmark listings. It’s insane. I’ve tried to do this with PLR niches, but it just doesn’t work. It has to have a social element and be very popular. Controversial. Entertaining. People have to want to subscribe to your feed.
At some point I may funnel all that traffic into a collector and get newsletter readers. Then I will attempt to sell stuff. But for me to do this I have to have an interest in the topic. I have no interest in putting up a niche site and writing newsletters and auto responder series on helium basketballs, turtle saddles and candle holders for cars.
You’ve just written what I have been thinking about the last couple of months. I started a couple of blogs on a site which pays me to blog – and gives me free do-follow backlinks LOL. Thats why I started but I have Pr3 inside 2.5 months with little deliberate link building. I am now doing the whole social entrecard shite thing just to see if I can build a decent sized audience – do you think travel is a popular enough topic for this to work on? Lissie
Travel probably is popular enough. After a few months you can tell I think. I’ve built 4 blogs on the same topic and get plenty of traffic across all of them. You could maybe do the same with travel. Maybe travel in Europe. Travel to Caribbean. Big broad stuff that plenty of people want to read about. And you just might get lucky enough to actually monetize it.
Hey Splork,
Thank you for the links.
Franck
vey nice post on this. I kind of seperate the two out. I would promote myself via social blogging. This is really just to get your name out there. In terms of affiliate sites etc. It’s a bit of a different ball game. Although lots of the same strategies still apply. Creating a network of sites is the best one.
Yes I figure for about a days worth of work, I was able to further these blogs into the social arena. I’ll get more readers, more scrapes, more subscriptions and no money. What I might get is high(er) ranked blogs that will help with indexing of other sites, traffic that can be funneled elsewhere on topics that I enjoy writing about anyway.
I think a site Like RSSMountain is worth a lot more than the other ones. I would not even waste my time with the other directories. I placed my RSS feed there and in about an hour, my listing appeared in Google. That was impressive. They also have a couple of cool features where others can display your RSS feed on other people website. You can also share someone else’s feed on facebook and other places and this give you even more visibility.
Every backlink helps.
Heya Splork, you mentioned in your post you did all your submissions manually because you didn’t want to get banned, banned by whom, the search engines (?) or the blog directories?
Blog directories. I do sites I care about manually so the submission looks natural. It probably doesn’t matter but I do it anyway. For those blogs that I build for backlinks to bigger sites I use a couple of tools for submission. Mostly RSS Submission in PGB from PLRPro.