Home > Articles

How and Why to RSS

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

RSS feeds and blogs (and blog and pinging) are part of the
latest hyper-frenzy in internet marketing. Tools and
services are mushrooming all over. But there seem to be
some rather distorted ideas about all this.

Unless you want to get into the technical stuff, exactly
what an RSS feed is doesn't really matter. Now I care
because I use them for a lot of things, work with code and
do geeky tech stuff. But from a marketing perspective the
underlying technical structure is only relevant because it
clues us in on what to use an RSS feed for. And that's the
thing you have to understand.

An RSS marketing feed is not about the feed's content in
most cases. Feeds that carry large quantities of content
are usually referred to as data feeds and that's not what
people are going to put in their RSS aggregators. A basic
RSS feed consists of a varied number of items with title, a
link to the full content source and a short extract or
description from the full source. There's more but that's
the basics.

If you subscribe (by email) to something like the daily New
York Times headlines, think about what a typical item looks
like:

++++ Big deal thing happens somewhere
++++ By A Writer

++++ Once again an astonishing big deal thing has
happened...

++++ Read Full Article: URL-link-to-news-story

Title and author - short description - link to full content

Just like an RSS feed item.

What should be obvious from this example is that RSS feeds
are about change. New content. Updated information. They
are not about static content.

The group you want to reach, people who surf via RSS, are
looking for an efficient, fast way to identify new content
that they are interested in. So if you're going to do an
RSS feed, you need it to link to and report on new and
updated content.

There are lots of tools available that will let you create
your own feeds, manually or with varying degrees of
automation. One of the most popular means is by blogging.
You really don't need any technical knowledge at all to set
up a blog and produce a feed.

You can use a blog just as a feed generator. Basically
this is what blog and ping software and services are doing.
That kind of feed is not for people, it's for the search
engines. It's a way to alert the SEs that a new site with
un-indexed pages exists. Blogs used that way are not what
I'm talking about here.

You can create a blog about anything. What's important is
that new content is added regularly. There are many ways
to add valuable content to a blog. You needn't be a
brilliant writer, many don't require much or any writing.

The best way to check this out for yourself is to
blog-surf. No matter what kind of site you have - or what
kind of product you want to promote - there's always a way
to write about it, find new information, check and report
on similar or related products and sites, report on
industry news, provide your own opinions and ideas.
As most people quickly discover, it's far easier than it
sounds at first.

Your blog will produce at least one RSS type feed. Blogger
produces just an atom feed, WordPress and other blog
software normally produce one or 2 types of RSS feeds and
an atom feed. Services like feedburner.com can allow you to
"burn" your feed and then promote a single burned url which
will provide any kind of feed a user wants.

Now that you have content and an RSS/atom feed that links
to that content, your next step is to publicize your feed.
You have two different main avenues since your blog has
real content.

First you can add your feed to RSS search engines and RSS
directories.

And second, because your blog has that real content and
isn't just an RSS feed generator, you can add your blog to
blog search engines and blog directories. You could even
use blog traffic exchanges like BlogExplosion.

This is a simple, low - or basically zero - cost, yet
highly effective way to get new traffic from at least two
sources.

First from your RSS feed. Feeds are an increasingly popular
way to save time, search and surf. If your content is
valuable and interesting people will subscribe to your feed
and click thru to those full articles or posts that
interest them -- targeted traffic from a group that is
relatively affluent and tech savvy.

Second, blogs are extremely popular. A good blog will get
linked, reported, commented on, other blogs may pick up
your feed and report items from it. All of this exposure
can bring valuable free traffic.

And finally, as an extra good thing, search engines like
blogs because of the regularly updated content - they are
nuts about fresh content - and the easily spidered
structure blogs use. So as your blog pages get indexed in
the SEs, you can also get direct search engine traffic.

------------------------------

Richard has become a blog/feed freak largely because of the
traffic implications and because he likes to write. For
more on RSS Marketing visit
http://www.MarketingWithRSS.com/blog and for general
eCommerce check out
http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites.com/

More articles by Richard Keir - http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Richard-Keir-352/

RSS Feeds for Teachers Can Stop Classroom Management Problems and Streamline Your Time

(Submitted by: Ruth Wells)

It may be a new year, but you are probably still dealing with the same old "kid problems." The bad attitudes, disrespect, peer conflict, lying, school failure or family problems didn't change when you flipped the page on the calendar. Don't ... Read article

RSS Revolution and Definition

(Submitted by: Vinay Rana)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is channelizing or syndicating the flow of content from different sources to different target WebPages or websites.It has helped in content providing website to distribute their data across the globe using ... Read article

Displaying RSS Feeds on Your Web Page

(Submitted by: Sanjay Johari)

RSS feeds have made it very convenient to syndicate information from various sources. Most of websites and services that publish fresh content, such as ezines, press release, new agencies, blogs make their content available thru RSS feeds. As new ... Read article

RssToBlog Review

(Submitted by: Tony Guribal)

Here is review of RSStoBlog by an owner of the product The RSStoBlog software is an wonderful piece of automation. Developed by the author to have all blogs updated, it has evolved into a feature packed auto blogger update package. No ... Read article

The Basics of RSS

(Submitted by: Jonathan Coupal)

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a standard, public format designed for sharing headlines and the content of web sites (previously known as the RDF Site Summary). But RSS feeds are not just for news anymore. Almost anything ... Read article

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92