RSS doubts

[susan]

HI all
I have a site cooking class related. I thought of creating RSS feed for this site.
When I read many articles, forum postings etc on the Net, what I read is we can create a feed.xml file (the format also we can get it from some other site, or free tool is also there to create it), upload it to the root of the server, validate the feed and then start submitting to RSS directories, SEs and aggregators.
Is this all enough to get traffic to our site?
So in setting up an rss feed for a site, we don't have to spend any money or what?
Also I read about feedintegrators, commision agent's site etc etc...but i didnt get a clear idea about all these.
Iam an organic SEO person and I want to know more about rss feeds and their usage, advantage etc etc.

Can you guys help me, please?

Regards
Susan

[DarkMatter]

an easier way to do it is to use blog software, which will automatically save all your posts in the popular formats and make them available to your visitors and to some of the aggregators. It doesnt cost you anything to setup an create a feed. It can be a great source of traffic, but people have to find the feed and subscribe to it. I would not rely on feeds alone to drive traffic to your site, especially since people don't actually need to visit your site to read the articles.

Your best bet to make the feeds popular IMHO would be to break them up into specific types of recipes....you don't want your feed to be about "cooking" or "recipes", way to broad... you want it to be about "cajun cooking" or "pasta recipes"....

if you're completely unfamiliar with rss feeds, I'd reccomend going to bloglines and setting up an account so you can look at some others site's rss feeds and see how it all works.