RSS - What it is, How it works...

When Mike asked me to write an article on RSS Feeds, I got all excited and thought of all the wonderful techy, nerdy things I could write about!

But then, I had to consider my audience and the fact I was writing a blog and not a book!

Looking around the Internet, I found a really good article on creating an RSS Feed, so instead of re-inventing the wheel, I'll refer you to that. Wiki How

In addition to that article... go to the WIKI How homepage and enter RSS in the search box and you'll get a number of articles on using your favourite browsers with RSS feeds. Great stuff!

Mentoring & Support - If you have problems in understanding all this, come back to us and we'll show you how with a one to one mentoring session.

RSS is simple really - you configure a file or software that you embed into your website and your audience requests to read that information through RSS reader software. - You write - they request to read and thats all it is!

What is technically different about RSS compared to a web page, is that most web pages are written in HTML, whereas RSS feeds are written in XML. Ugh? Whats that mean? You may well ask! Well, HTML is a language used for presenting and formatting information and XML is a language for sharing information (usually through software applications).

So, away from the technicalities and back to the conceptual side of things; When you make the most of RSS you can feed information which is written once on your website and have it featured through multiple portals. Great!

Handle information once and publish it a thousand times over - Dynamically! That's what makes it a truly efficient and wondrous marketing tool!

Making the most of RSS in business marketing

Here's how I use RSS Feeds as a professional web developer (not just someone looking to read individual RSS articles about interesting things)... Let me show you an example that demonstrates how "sexy" RSS can be....

I own a number of websites (as you may well know). Each week, I get information added to my websites by registered users and I also add information myself. However, I don't always want to keep copying information from one site to another, so I make use of the function that RSS Feeds provide, to share information on the portals I have through the XML technology.

Here's the example...

I have four websites - Alfreton News, Alfreton Online , Alfreton Fellowship and Alfreton History (the latter is still in development).

If you look at each site in turn you (Do it now), will find an RSS feed link on each. Go through each site, find the link, click on it, read some of the info and familiarise yourself with some of the content.

Now... on the Alfreton History portal I have used a different approach to RSS, I have pulled the feeds through from the other three sites! Click here to see this happening.

So, from the viewpoint of just using RSS to read the information that you want to read, consider it from a marketing perspective of pushing information around the Internet to get more people to read and link to the sites that contain your "Messages" that form your Internet Marketing Strategy.

If you have enjoyed reading this blog or if it's been useful to you - please leave a comment below.