If you want to check your own feed or take a look at some other websites feed without any hassles at all, you can simply go to and select 'Add RSS Headlines' from options for what information is shown on your yahoo homepage. www.pheedcentral.com will contain video tutorials of several of processes described within this document (including using my.yahoo rss reader)
6) Promoting/Marketing Your Feed If you haven't already spotted them, there are several advantages to using RSS as part of your business marketing mix. Email marketing has become increasingly at risk of SPAM complaints and ISP email filters deleting legitimate business emails. The fact that 'push' approach used by email (where you 'push' content at people) means that there's always a risk of someone forgetting that they asked for your information. At best it may just get deleted as it's received.
The big advantage of RSS is that everyone who reads your feed has had to select it manually and even though it's not subject to same restrictions as email, submission sites will do some vetting before it goes live (they're usually particularly interested in frequency that it gets updated).
So, in short, you can be pretty sure that when someone reads your feed that they are interested in it. If you update it regularly, you can gain access to a readership that your normal marketing methods wouldn't have reached.
This is especially of interest to newsletter editors who regularly release their newsletter as it effectively publishes content to a new audience and could even help improve search engine visibility of whole site if used effectively.
If you've been put off of idea of providing a feed because you think that people still see ability to access RSS feeds as too 'techie', don't worry because as you'll see when you start to look around that it's rapidly becoming more widely adopted and will almost certainly be simply another function of web browsers. There are desktop versions of reader available and a few are listed at www.pheedcentral.com . You can find a browser that already supports RSS feeds, it's called Firefox (www.firefox.com )
If you are keen to make most of search engine related benefits of RSS and you want an html version of your feed instead you can get a tool called CARP () which will convert feed into html and give you code to put on your site (this will then be updated as your content is). There are other services that achieve same result; some are free, some not.
If you've seen some free JavaScript alternatives and are wondering why we've not mentioned them here, it's simply due to fact that Search Engine Robots can't index JavaScript so it's usually best to avoid it unless you have a specific reason to need to use it. If you're a marketer interested in tracking who reads your feeds then an excellent tool for this is FeedBurner That should be more than enough information to get you started on path to using RSS.
Over coming weeks, I'll be creating tutorials on Blogging, RSS syndication, SSI and other content sharing topics so stay tuned to www.pheedcentral.com.
Andrew Henry
About the Author: Andrew Henry is an Internet Marketing Consultant involved in teaching small businesses how to effectively market online. Current Information Websites include www.pheedcentral.com, www.moneyandmotivation.com, and www.learn-seo.com.