As a writer, your blog topics should be on the topics you write about.  using RSS feeds means that each time you publish a new post, your feed will broadcast that around the Web, alerting smart editors and publishers – and readers! – that your blog is a hotbed of content. Plus, you start looking more authoritative too!

Getting your blog contents broadcast everywhere is accomplished when you post your RSS feed, or your posts are subscribed to by other sites and blogs too.  For example, you can add your feed to any other blogs or websites you also currently own. Have your site posts show up in the sidebar of your blog, and visitors to your other sites will find your site too.

You can ask your online friends to do the same with their blogs or sites, by adding your RSS feed to their pages as well. Most blog platforms offer a widget or plugin to allow an RSS feed to display in the blog layout.

Start building additional sites and blogs on your favorite topics, and have your RSS display on those too. Related topics are perfect for driving additional traffic to your site.

Use online feed aggregators to list your RSS feed with directories of feeds. Some good ones are FeedAgg, for example, you simply add your feed’s URL to their database. Some others are FriendFeed, and xFruits. Send your RSS fed out there far and wide, and you’ll see more traffic coming into your site.

So – here’s the video of the reviews of three sites I selected from a few dozen submitted by readers.  I noticed a few themes that ran through nearly all sites I saw: writers are too busy writing to learn about basic SEO-friendly site design, and are taking baby steps when it comes to social networking and Web 2.0.  Yet these are seriously important lessons to learn if you want to bring readers right to your virtual doorstep.

Without considering basic Web design issues, your site comes off like an old-fashioned brochure or resume website. Plus, you want your site positioned and designed to keep visitors engaged once you start using all that traffic generation to bring them there!  (That is, you want them to stay and READ, right? You are a writer right?!

So, with this review I’m providing a starting point for writers to consider when they build or tweak a site.  Warning:  this may be too basic for some writers who are already well-versed in online promotion, but judging by those who sent me sites to take a look at, many more know they need to do something, they just aren’t sure exactly what. Hopefully this will give everyone some ideas.

After your take a look at the video walk-through of my three winners’ sites right here.  then we can have a good long discussion of how writers can use (1) and (2) to build income.   

What would you do to enhance these sites?

The selection criteria was simple: I was looking for sites that were writing-related, i.e., sites built by writers to promote their writing, whether fiction, nonfiction, freelance, or ghostwriting, and sites that had some basics in place, with potential to build upon (in my subjective determination!). Out of a few dozen submissions, I’ve chosen these three sites:

Two of the site owners have published books, two are freelance writers, and each site is in a slightly different stage of development and design.

I’ll be uploading video of each site at least twice: Once when I show you what to look for when assessing your site’s design elements, and next, when I describe the steps these site owners have taken to implement changes to enhance their results in terms of traffic and hopefully revenue generation.

I think as a reader of this blog you can benefit from these reviews regardless of the type of site you have, since many of these techniques are well-known and used by all kinds of online businesses and freelancers.

Take a look at these sites to see what you would do to enhance them, and if you have (constructive!) suggestions for these writers, post them here.

Out of several dozen submissions, I chose three that I think show how different writers approach using the web, and each site is in a slightly different phase of development, from fairly basic to significant content.

For each site, I’ll be suggesting changes, and the site owners will select three to implement and track.  I’ll be posting all the details and progress here on SixFigureWriting, including videos and screen capture so you can follow right along with my analysis.  I’d be itnerested to hear reader’s comments too, things you’d have suggested instead, or questions that you think of when you see what I recommend.

Stay tuned!