Don't forget the freebies

Filed in archive Tools on July 20, 2006

In a post a few days ago on top ideas for bootstrapping your business, I mentioned Inc.com's recommendations for saving money on operations including using freebies.

An important freebie, as I and others have mentioned before, is the use of a blog versus a conventional website to promote your business whether it happens to be a web based product or service or not.

And one of the most powerful tools you can use to gain traffic and interest in that blog and hence in your product is RSS or Really Simple Syndication.

Blogs on the Creative Weblogging network like this one offer RSS feeds enabling a regular subscriber to receive new posts on their personal news readers, including My Yahoo!.

Simply click the appropriate button in the upper right hand box on this site. Some selections also allow you to be notified of new posts via e-mail, instant messenger or mobile phone.

It costs nothing to prepare your blog for syndication and often little or no HTML programming experience. Just place these codesat the beginning and end of each post within the source code.

Of course, with services like Feedburner not even that is really necessary. Simply go to the site, fill in your blog's URL and place an RSS button on your site.

Other blogs and websites can even run your RSS feed by using a tool like this to transfer it into Java Script and following the directions for embedding it within the source code.

You can even use services like ping-o-matic and pinggoat to notify services that routinely use feeds every time a new post is added.