Often the key to loyalty is just reminding people that you’re still there. Don’t forget me.

One way to keep your audience coming back is to provide them with a community toolbar from Conduit. Toolbars may seem like unchartered brand territory, but if you think about it, they’re a perfect vehicle for keeping your content front and center. With a Conduit toolbar, you can syndicate blog articles, website updates, and community conversations, as well as, customize your toolbar with your logo and hand-picked gadgets and applications that launch directly from your browser. Check out the feed growth! toolbar we created to keep you up-to-date on all of the fishy goodness.

Conduit community toolbars are free and can be created in a matter of minutes. Simply submit your URL, then walk through the step-by-step process to add your logo and desired accoutrements from the library. Conduit earns revenue by taking a piece of Google’s ad revenue pie (ads appear on results page, not your toolbar), so they can offer these features to you at no cost:

• Google Search
• RSS Readers
• Media Players
• Podcasts
• News Tickers
• Community Conversations (Chat and community messages)
• Buttons for Gadgets and Applications
• Links Menu
• Pop-up Blocker and Cookie Cleanup Tool

Think of Conduit as a natural extension of your website. For your toolbar subscribers, it’s a great way to see content as it’s updated, learn about breaking news and events, and keep tabs on community activity and chatter. Your branded toolbar can even be used to launch promotions or special features on your site.

You can easily track the performance of your website or blog through a number of web analytics tools. But, for the crowd that receives your content through an RSS feed, it’s a bit of a guessing game.

That’s where AideRSS comes into play. AideRSS helps filter and rank feeds based on user preferences and settings. It was developed for the overwhelmed RSS reader, who pulls content from numerous news sources and blogs but doesn’t have time to weed through it all. The standout feature of this product is the PostRank scoring system, which ranks articles on their relevance and reaction in the blogosphere. It’s the engine that drives AideRSS and also a great tool for measuring readership levels and general buzz factor.

To get started, enter your site’s feed URL in the AideRSS search bar. We use and have covered Feedburner RSS system, so our URL appears like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedgrowth Immediately, we see the PostRank for individual articles and the number of conversations taking place through feed growth! comments, Digg, and del.icio.us. The site also breaks down your entire content library and assigns the Top 20, then the “Best”, “Great”, and “Good Posts”.

AideRSS is a free and easy tool for gauging your site’s RSS feed performance. You may not know your RSS audience, but at least their reading habits aren’t such a mystery anymore.

Although the iPhone lets you surf the web with a regular browser, despite the hype, most of the world is not on a smartphone. It’s still a good idea to make your site mobile-friendly.

A service called Mofuse (short for mobile fusion) will create a mobile version of your website or blog in a matter of seconds. Technically, it’s an RSS feed with mobile-friendly packaging, but all your readers will notice is the fact that they can browse your site from their hand-held device. To get started, enter your url or RSS feed into the Mofuse mobilizer (found on their homepage). The system will generate a custom .mobi url (check out http://feedgrowth.mofuse.mobi on your phone) and prompts you to create an account. Your new mobile site launches immediately and through your account administration panel, you can customize the design of your site, add your logo, or switch your mobile site to your own domain.

Mofuse already counts feed growth favorites!, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, as users. The company recently discarded their old subscription-based business model to focus on developing a mobile advertising network, which they hope to release later this year. This means you get the Mofuse mobile platform for free, including site analytics and customer support.

One of the biggest challenges of maintaining a blog (or newsletter) is keeping your content fresh. It requires meticulous monitoring of the Internet and other resources to find the one idea worth sharing. And the energy to repeat the process every day (week, month). No need to stress. With a little artificial intelligence, you can just delegate the work.

Favebot, which is short for “favorite robot” is a content aggregation tool and very easy to use. Sign-up for a free account and create a “Tracking List” by entering keywords in the topic field. Choose any and all types of content you are interested in. Favebot will track local events, new music/dvds/books, news articles, blog posts, and media (photos, podcasts, and videos). With daily searches and multiple updates on blog and news content, Favebot can be relied upon to deliver fresh content.

You can browse search results in your personal “Discoveries” tab or subscribe to updates via RSS feed or an RSS-to-email service. Its an easy way to stay up to date without an army of interns.

We know it better than anyone else. Creating and sending out an email newsletter is a huge pain.

Luckily, there’s now a free replacement that can turn your blog posts into emails. It’s Feedburner email. It’s so absurdly easy, there’s really very little to tell. Just “burn” your RSS feed using
reliable Feedburner. Once you’ve done this and indicated a desire to enable email delivery, every time your site visitors subscribe, they’re provided the option of subscribing with an RSS reader or by email. You don’t have to do any more work. Your blog posts will be sent as emails to your recipients.

Your can even set it up so your users see a standard looking email signup. They won’t even have to know that you’ve figured out how to deliver email newsletters for free using your RSS feed.

If you’re spending a fortune sending email newsletters, why don’t you just concentrate on creating blog posts and just let your feed handle all of the work for you.

Sometimes the best investment you can make to grow your site traffic doesn’t come from investing in your site at all. It can come from creating a branch of it somewhere else.

You can create a widget or a min-site with a tool like Sprout. This system lets just about anyone create slick looking, dynamic, content-rich widgets or mini-sites. You can include slideshows, jukeboxes, and even web-services like Twitter as sources of data. Sounds impossible, right? Check out these examples to get a better idea of what’s possible. Once you’ve used the drag and drop tools to create what you need, you can simply get the code that you can then put on any website (like a blog or a social networking site).

If you’re looking for a great way to get your customers or fans to spread the word, here’s an easy way to make it happen.

With so many different places on the web to join, create or upload content, and then share - it’s almost impossible to keep track of everything.

But with Friendfeed, you have an easy way to keep everyone in your circle up to date with your latest Flickr photos, YouTube video, addition to your Facebook profile, and so on. First, you sign up. Then, you invite a friend. Then, this system will import anything that’s been shared from sites across the web. If your friend marks a video as a “favorite” on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. if your friend indicates that he likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. While this may be obtrusive for faux / online friends, it’s just right for family members, real friends, or. . . even your brand zealots out there.

If you’re looking for a way to let your most passionate customers follow your brand’s activities online (photos, videos, preferences), here’s a way to let them follow even more closely. For individual driven businesses (musicians, artists, etc), this tool makes a great way to keep your list of fans connected, no matter where you are on the web.

Remember the lowly trading card? If you were a baseball fan, it was a great way to keep up with players, statistics, and just stay connected to the game. Oh, and remember, they were for trading. I’ll give you this Thurman Munson for your Hank Aaron. Widgets are just like that, but they can live anywhere on the web.

Thanks to Clearspring’s widget ad network, sites like NBA.com have figured out that these modern day trading cards (check out all of these NBA widgets) can help fans stay up to date . . . with just about anything - photo highlights, video highlights, statistics, standings, etc. No matter what you’re selling, it pays to think about how you might break up your site content and distribute it.

Also, by delivering both ads and widgets in one little package on sites like Facebook and MySpace, you’ll have the chance to make your widgets value go even further. Give it a try.

Not everyone is hanging out in front of their laptop or desktop. They’re on the move. What good is a blog then?

Just as useful as when you’re at your PC, as it turns out. Thanks to Pimp My News, you can get your favorite blogs delivered by voice. Here’s how it works. Simply visit pimpmynews.com/m on your phone to get to their mobile-based site. Choose a story or a category, and then you’ll receive the feed content (that has been converted to voice) as a downloaded file. It just works, meaning that now you can stay on top of everything from politics to Paris Hilton’s latest antics. You can get more customization (like a personal playlist) by signing up for the service, but feeds are also available if you don’t.

So, how can this help you? Make sure that your feed gets converted by sending an email submission to the service. Then, make sure that your fans know all about it. This system works particularly well on the iPhone (I tried it). It’s a little strange at first, but would be a great way to stay connected with your favorite feeds (Yahoo! News, TechCrunch, Perez Hilton). Or, a great way for your customers to stay connected to your news.

What’s great about RSS and syndication, as we discussed in Bring it on, is that it’s a great way to put your content anywhere on the web. However, just having a feed isn’t enough. You need to create a widget, so your RSS feed can sit in places like iGoogle, Facebook, or the Vista or Mac dashboard. Problem is that creating a widget is hard to do.

Or at least it used to be. Yourminis has changed all that. Here’s how they describe what they offer: This platform offers a set of re-usable components and an advanced API framework to enable rapid development of widgets, ranging from simple badges to complex miniature applications. Here’s how we describe it: they make making widgets easy. While you will need someone with technical ability to develop the widget (meaning we can dispense with the gory detail), it can be done in less than an hour. Once you have a widget developed, you can put it just about anywhere.

How do we know? Well, we built one just to show you. If you would like a feed growth! widget, here are some options: fg for facebook, fg for iGoogle, fg for Vista, fg for Mac. While this one is quite simple, we’ll be adding sex appeal over time.

If you’re looking for a way to take your site content and evangelize, it’s going to be hard to beat this option for making it happen quickly.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that there are low cost service providers offshore. However, while the price may be right, can you really rely on someone you’ve never met, thousands of miles away?

Odesk may be able to put your mind at ease. The online service connects you with web developers and designers across the globe. Here’s how it works. Create a profile, and then create a project description. Then you can either bid out your project or peruse the database for workers based on their abilities, work history, or prior client feedback (similar to the reviews on eBay). The system mediates the entire process, letting you engage and interact with qualified applicants / partners before you pull the trigger.

You can outsource the nuts and bolts of an entire project or complement your existing workforce with specialized talent on a project basis. What are you waiting for? Try it this year.

As we discussed in Freshly Squeezed, Joost is a big player in internet based or IPTV. Once TV programming is available online, advertising options go well beyond the 15 second spot.

Just one example can be found in Coke Bubbles. This sponsored service lets users share Joost clips and send commentary through widgets known as bubble messages that carry the Coca-Cola brand. In the same way that you can send an e-card today, so can you use Coke Bubbles to send a snippet of any TV program on Joost. Now when consumers want to share a cool scene, they can, while also carrying your brand.

This is what happens when TV and the web get married - everything gets turned upside down. Try not to be a wallflower at the reception because these advertising opportunities won’t always be so easy or accessible.