Steps to Create and Promote RSS Feeds

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication as it is commonly known, is a technology that gives webmasters ability to easily distribute and publish syndicated content on Internet. It seems like all Internet businesses now have RSS feeds available; at least your competitors do. You have finally made decision that you have to have one. Where do you start?

Steps to Creating an RSS feed

1.) Build a Feed

There are a number of desktop and web applications available that make feed creation easy. I would encourage anyone creating a feed to use one. Though not overly complicated, hand-coding an RSS feed can become a bit confusing and time-consuming. Most desktop software applications for building a feed include a wizard and contact-sensitive help, simplifying process of creating a feed. Following a few simple steps in a wizard generally will produce an RSS feed in just a few minutes.

Publishers control what information is syndicated in RSS feed, so ultimately it is publisher's decision as to whether to include teaser copy or full articles. Consider what you are trying to accomplish and who your target audience is when building feed.

Software to Build a Feed - http://www.feedforall.com Tutorial for Creating Feed by Hand using XML - http://www.make-rss-feeds.com

2.) Transfer Feed Onto Your Server

Once you have constructed an RSS feed you will need to transfer feed to your server. This can be done using a standard FTP client (if it is not built into feed creation software). The feed is usually placed in domain's root directory like this: http://www.mydomain.com/nameoffeed.xml , but as long as you know where it is it doesn't really matter.

3.) Display Feed on Your Website Using a Graphic of Some Sort

In order to signal to website visitors that an RSS feed containing content related to website is available, include a colorful graphic on website. It has become a standard that nearly all websites that have RSS feeds available use colorful graphics such as flags as indicators that RSS feeds are available for specific content. The flags were initially bright orange rectangles but as popularity has grown, webmasters have bent rules a bit. NotePage has made a free online RSS graphic tool available that allows users to quickly customize buttons by selecting text on button and color scheme of button. Once color and text is entered, a custom graphic is instantly created. Webmasters can easily match style of RSS button to a website's theme. Graphics experience is not required. Simply select alternative colors and insert text to personalize RSS feed graphics. The RSS graphics tool can be used by clicking following URL http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm or choose ready made graphics fom: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-graphics.htm .

3 Tips to improve your RSS marketing

You have created an RSS feed, or maybe you have several feeds and you post at least once a week to keep your RSS subscribers interested. So now you can sit back and watch your hit counter tally up all those extra visitors. Well you may think you have finished but there are a few things you can do to improve things still further.

1. Let browsers and search engines know you have an RSS available.

To do this you need to add a line of HTML to every page that has a link to your RSS feed. The link will be:

link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="title" href="http://www.site.com/rss.xml" rel="nofollow"

This line will need to be enclosed by angled brackets and placed between your HEAD tags of your page. Once you have done this some search engine bots and web browsers such as Firefox will know you have an RSS feed available.

2. Submit your RSS feed to RSS and Blog directories.

Like you would submit your site to search engines you can submit your site to RSS specific directories. This will give your RSS greater exposure to an audience that is already interested and educated about benefits of RSS. This is a list of Alexa ranked RSS directories and another can be found here.