RSS feeds and blogs (and blog and pinging) are part of 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 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 underlying technical structure is only relevant because it clues us in on what to use an RSS feed for. And that's thing you have to understand.

An RSS marketing feed is not about 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 full content source and a short extract or description from full source. There's more but that's basics.

If you subscribe (by email) to something like 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 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.

It is a story about Manku, a blind man who was lost in a maze of wealth. It is a story about each of us. Read and interpret carefully.

Manku was a poor blind man. He worked very hard to feed his family and himself. After day’s toil everyday he could barely manage to survive. He was a talented man but man he worked for did not pay him well. Manku never complained but always got sad when he received his monthly wages.

He wanted a good house. Good clothes for his children, a lot of jewelry for his wife and all possible comforts of life that money can bring. But everything seemed just a dream. He worked hard everyday on same wages as time passed by.

One day he considered going to maze of wealth. He had heard about this earlier too but people were speaking loudly now. He had always laughed at this earlier as he never believed in rumors. But now he had a reason to ponder. Sonkulat, his friend who went there had returned richer now and was all ga ga about this maze.

Manku decided to visit Sonkulat.

It was a maze located in a jungle in southwest and was full of wealth. There was an entrance door which led inside maze. The maze was dead dark inside. Nothing visible inside. One has to grope inside that dark to find anything.

‘It would not make much difference to me, I already do that’, Manku thought.

There is only one door inside in that maze full of pitfalls that will lead to wealth house. But careful! You need to avoid pitfalls. Use my tip. Stay along wall and feel for door.