RSS Feeds and my competition

After cleaning up my Google Reader tonight, I decided to go around and add some more RSS Feeds to it.  I was mainly focusing on internet marketing and search engine related RSS feeds, because that’s something I’ve been slacking in that I should be reading.  I also focused mainly on blogs, as that is where you get the most information.

For those uninformed of RSS Feeds, I will try and simplify it for you.  An RSS feed delivers all the latest updates on a site, ie: any new articles, to the reader.  You, are the reader.  Are you tired of visiting this or other sites every day looking for new updates and not seeing any?  Now, in this web 2.0 savvy world you don’t have to, thanks to RSS Feeds.  As I said – they will deliver the updates to you.  You can subscribe to them via e-mail, via software, via online systems like Google Reader, via cellphone etc.  This is something that is replacing the whole bookmark feature, and will just steamroll in popularity as the years go on.

So I spent some time adding some of the more important blogs like ShoeMoney.com, and then decided to add blogs of fellow gambling affiliates aka my “competition”, and what I saw surprised me.  I mean I just described RSS Feeds to you above, so surely you can see how important they should be to any website that wants repeat visitors, and that’s what a blog is all about.  So it surprised me to see that many of my “competition” either didn’t have an RSS Feed, or had one and didn’t even link to it on their page(I’d add /feed to their URL to find it). Even if you don’t have a strong knowledge of RSS Feeds, it takes literally 3 minutes to set up on your site, and then it requires no more work from you at all.  The thing is – a lot of these sites don’t even do regular updates – once a week maximum, and so even moreso, sites like that are MADE for RSS Feeds.

It’s things like that which give me that extra bit of motivation in this industry.  When you see your “competition” making big mistakes like that, you realize that they must be making even more mistakes, and it encourages you to work that bit harder, and always have the advantage over them.

And as I’ve mentioned them enough times, click here for Scotsmans Blog RSS Feed, and I highly recommend Google Reader as you can read it anywhere.

Current To Do List: 85. Long night ahead.