RSS - The Intelligent Marketing Medium

Written by Brendon Turner


Are you new to RSS? If so here is a introduction to what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is and how your website will benefit from offering an RSS feed to your visitor's.

RSS is a smooth channel of communication between publishers and visitor's. Since RSS has grown in recent popularity, more website owners are beginning to experiment with and use RSS feeds to deliver content in new and exciting ways. Usually RSS feeds contain news headlines and small content summaries. The summaries have just enough information to allowrepparttar visitor to decide whether he or she would be interested in readingrepparttar 151155 entire contents without overwhelmingrepparttar 151156 visitor with excessive details. Ifrepparttar 151157 visitor is interested they can click onrepparttar 151158 headline inrepparttar 151159 RSS feed and accessrepparttar 151160 website which has additional details.

RSS readers are software programs that run either client side or server side and their purpose is to aggregate multiple feeds, making it easy for visitor's to quickly and efficiently scan information contained within each feed. Feeds are usually themed, which allows visitor's to subscribe to feeds that are of interest to them.

In a time when spam filters are blocking much ofrepparttar 151161 content visitor's have asked for,repparttar 151162 biggest benefit to using RSS is that RSS gives publishers and readersrepparttar 151163 chance to connect, and for good ideas to be shared, withoutrepparttar 151164 clutter of unsolicited email messages. There is no opt-in or opt-out requirement. This means visitor's don't need to give out their email address and ultimately rules out any fear of receiving unsolicited email torepparttar 151165 visitor's inbox. Forrepparttar 151166 website owner using RSS to deliver their content nullifies any lingering doubts about whether their content is actually getting through torepparttar 151167 visitor, which is an issue to consider when using traditional newsletter marketing.

What Kind of Information Can be Delivered in RSS Feeds?

Blog Feed

Many blogs are catalogued in an RSS feed, with each blog entry summarized as a feed item. This makes it easy for visitor's to scan blog posts for items of interest.

Article Feed

Articles are often placed into feeds to alert readers when new articles and content are available. The feed entry is typically an article summary or introduction. Readers can then ascertain ifrepparttar 151168 article is of interest and read further.

Forum Feed

Many forums now have add-ons that allow participants to receive forum posts via RSS. The RSS feeds often will showrepparttar 151169 latest discussion topics; if users are interested they simply click to enterrepparttar 151170 forum to participate inrepparttar 151171 discussion. Asrepparttar 151172 topic is updated they will see new entries inrepparttar 151173 RSS feed.

RSS - How to Promote and Profit From Your Feed

Written by Brendon Turner


Let me ask you three questions to get you thinking. Does your website offer an RSS feed? Are you promoting your feed effectively? Are you seeing an increase in profits as a result of offering a feed to your visitors?

I'm going to outline several actionable steps you can take to promote your RSS feed both internally on your own website and externally on other websites. Then I'm going to show you a couple of effective programs to generate more profits using your RSS feed. Read what I have to say carefully, and then act onrepparttar information. I guarantee you can take it torepparttar 151154 bank! I'm not just reiterating what others have said before. I actually acted and performed on my own websites everything I'm about to tell you andrepparttar 151155 results are awesome.

Promoting your RSS feed effectively requires a two prong approach. Start with examining your own website. Educate your visitors aboutrepparttar 151156 benefits of using your feed first. Then focus on external promotion second.

The average visitor won't understand what RSS is about, why it would benefit them to use it or how it even works. So there's no point in slapping uprepparttar 151157 little RSS Syndication logo on your website, linking it to your feed file and hoping people will subscribe. The simple fact is that they won't. You need to spend some time building a page on your website that briefly explains to your visitors what RSS is about and then show them how to use your feed.

Let me show you a solid example. Point your browser to this URL: http://www.profitgazette.com/syndicate.php On this page of my website I tell my visitorsrepparttar 151158 various ways they can receive my content. Along with subscribing torepparttar 151159 newsletter, a visitor is also able to subscribe torepparttar 151160 RSS feed. I don't want to overwhelm them so I keep it brief and educate them with four points. "What is RSS? How can I use RSS? How do I get a News Reader? Can I use these feeds on my website?" See also inrepparttar 151161 top ofrepparttar 151162 left column of that page (and every page on my website) how I giverepparttar 151163 visitor a quick teaser, mention a benefit to them and give them a link to my "RSS education" page? That's how I get my visitors to discover what RSS is all about. Then if you look inrepparttar 151164 center nearrepparttar 151165 top ofrepparttar 151166 page you'll seerepparttar 151167 little orange RSS image which doesn't just link only to my RSS feed file, I actually use a small snippet of JavaScript to make it easy for my visitors to automatically subscribe themselves to my feed with whichever news aggregator they happen to be using. Just mouse overrepparttar 151168 RSS button on that page to see what I'm talking about. You can download a copy of that JavaScript for free at http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

What's next? External feed promotion. There are lots of websites that accept RSS feed submissions. I'm not going to drop a large list of sites into this article but I have put together a large list of them here: http://www.profitgazette.com/rss-submission-list.php Visit that page when you're ready to submit your RSS feed. I personally submitted my feed to each of those sites and took a brand new website which I own from zero traffic to consistently maintaining an average of 80 unique visitors per day in two weeks fromrepparttar 151169 date of submissions. So that really is a powerful submission list.

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