RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It means that it converts your content into a feed which you can stream into other content with just 1 url.  For WordPress the rss feed is usually mydomain.com/feed/ and that will allow you to feed your blog posts into a number of other websites, which is great for both the promotion of your content and for backlinks to your website.

With all the different rss readers available, it’s much easier for a visitor to subscribe to your rss feed rather than to sign up to your mailing list.  One of the main reasons is that the visitor is then under control over what they read and will not get their email address misused and sold or rented to a third party and receive spam in their email inbox.

Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own readers, which means if you have an account with any of these services, you can add your blog feed to these readers as another way for the search engines to pick up and index your content, especially if you make the reader feed public.

Also there is bloglines which is a very popular blog reader, where you can keep all the feeds of the blogs you follow in one place.

There are also hundreds of blog directories that you can submit your blog rss feed to.  You can just go to your chosen search engine and search for “blog directory rss submission”.

Ning is a community of different groups, and with each profile you create in the different groups you can add an rss feed which is a great opportunity to add your own blog feed.  Only join the groups that relate to your market as these members will be most interested in your content.  Remember that if a Ning group is private, in that you need to join it before you can see any of the content, then the search engines will not be able to index your feed.

I’m sure everyone reading this will have a Facebook group.  You can also add your blog feed to Facebook Notes and have your blog content flowing into your Facebook account too.

These are just a few of the ways you can use your rss feed to promote your blog.  What other ways do you know of?