How and why RSS Feed,

RSS


How and why RSS


RSS feeds and blogs (and blogs and ping) are part of the latest frenzy in Internet marketing. Tools and services multiply everywhere.

Unless you want to get into the technical stuff, exactly what an RSS feed really doesn't matter. Now I care because I use them for many things, I work with code and I do geek technology stuff. But from a marketing perspective, the underlying technical structure is only relevant because it gives us clues about why to use an RSS feed. And that is what you have to understand.

An RSS marketing feed is not about the content of the feed in most cases. Feeds that carry large amounts of content are generally called data feeds and that is not what people will put in their RSS aggregators. A basic RSS feed consists of a varied number of elements with a title, a link to the complete content source and a brief excerpt or description of the complete source. There is more, but that's the basics.

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


++++ Great thing happens somewhere
++++ By a writer
++++ Once again something amazing has happened ...
++++ Read full article: URL-link-to-news-story

Title and author - brief description - link to full content

Like an RSS feed item.

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

There are many tools available that will allow you to create your own feeds, manually or with different degrees of automation. One of the most popular media is through blogs. You really don't need any technical knowledge to set up a blog and produce a feed.

You can use a blog as a feed generator. Basically, this is what blog and ping services and software are doing. That kind of feed is not for people, it is for search engines. It is a way of alerting SEs that there is a new site with non-indexed pages.

You can create a blog about anything. The important thing is that new content is added regularly. It is not necessary to be a brilliant writer, many do not require much or no writing.

The best way to verify this is to browse the blog. No matter what type of site you have, or what type of product you want to promote, there is always a way to write about it, find new information, verify 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 is much easier than it seems at first.

Your blog will produce at least one RSS feed. Blogger produces only one atomic source, WordPress and other blog software typically produce one or 2 types of RSS feeds and an atomic source. Services such as feedburner.com can allow you to "burn" your feed and then promote a single recorded URL that will provide any type 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 advertise your feed. You have two different main channels since your blog has real content.

You can first add your feed to the RSS search engines and RSS directories.

And second, because your blog has that real content and is not just a generator of RSS feeds, you can add your blog to search engines and blog directories.

This is a simple, inexpensive or basically zero, but very effective way to get new traffic from at least two sources.

First of your RSS feed. Feeds are an increasingly popular way to save time, search and navigate. If your content is valuable and interesting, people will subscribe to your feed and click through the full articles or publications that interest them: targeted traffic from a group that is relatively rich and knowledgeable about technology.

Second, blogs are extremely popular. A good blog will link, inform, comment, other blogs can collect your feed and report elements of it. All this exhibition can bring valuable free traffic.