Why You Need to Know about Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) dodges spam filters and sends out updates from your website with little effort on your part. Here’s what you need to know.Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS—Really Simple Syndication—or maybe you’ve noticed the small orange rectangle that’s popping up on all kinds of websites. One version has white radio waves, others have the letters RSS or XML in the orange rectangle. But they all mean the same thing: the site offers Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a method of distributing content published on a web site.

There are two sides to the RSS equation those who produce the content and those who view the content. If you’re on the receiving side of RSS feeds, you’ve downloaded an RSS reader or you use a web portal that has RSS capability (see below) and then requested RSS feeds from favourite websites. When the site is updated, summary information appears in the RSS reader box, and you can click on it to go to the site where the full update appears. For the purposes of this article we’ll focus on how you can produce and strategically use RSS feeds for your business.

Making Use of RSS

How could a business make use of RSS? Pretend that you are a busy accountant and want to keep your customers informed, throughout the year, of cost effective ways they can reduce their tax bills. By publishing an RSS feed, your customers can receive tax and accounting information specific to them whenever you have the new information available with a minimum of effort from you. Businesses with 2,000 customers are going to need different advice than those serving 50 customers. Publishing an RSS feed will let you easily and quickly provide distinct information to each customer segment.

Perhaps you already use email or email newsletters to communicate with customers and prospects. RSS offers some advantages over those channels. For one thing, once they’re set up, RSS feeds are generated automatically, without any specific action from you, when your website is updated or changed. While email and email newsletters are popular for sending out information on a weekly, or monthly basis, they’re not the best use of your resources for information that changes more frequently. Since email isn’t integrated into your website publishing, you have to create a separate email newsletter to send to your customers when you update your web site.

Perhaps you have several different parts of your web site that are updated and you want to give customers a choice to receive information on specific topics. After all, marketing experts agree that we live in an age of segmentation and those companies that offer customers exactly what they’re looking for get higher success rates, You can easily create a different RSS feed for each section of your web site to meet your customer’s needs. To accomplish the same objective with email newsletters would require you to put together several different versions.

Another huge advantage to RSS is that because it goes to an RSS reader, rather than into someone’s email box, it doesn’t get caught up in spam filters. Information sent via email is constantly in danger of being blocked by spam filters or simply being lost in the clutter of someone’s in-mailbox, which may well receive a couple of hundred emails on any given day. You can also use RSS to display RSS feeds from other web sites on your web site. Maybe you provide temporary staffing services to clients. You can find RSS feeds that publish tips on temporary staffing and provide additional content on your web site to your customers. (Of course you need to make sure the RSS feeds are not coming from your competition and delivering visitors to their web site.)

How do you use RSS?

Some web site publishing tools (and nearly all blogging tools) make it easy to automatically create and update RSS feeds every time your website is updated. For example, when you generate a new press release, those customers who have signed up to receive your press release RSS feed will automatically be notified of the new press release and have it waiting in their RSS reader.

In general, there are two ways to generate RSS feeds. If you want to generate feeds from your existing website, speak to your webmaster about creating a page that will generate “XML” files. The second method is to use some of the blogging tools out there, such as TypePad (www.typepad.com), Blogger (www.blogger.com), WordPress (www.wordpress.com) or any number of other blogging services. These services create RSS feeds of your posts as part of their blog publishing. One option is to cut and paste content on your website in one of these blogging tools. Once you are shown the path for the RSS feed (it might be something like (http://yourblog.typepad.com/rss.xml) you can give this to people to view your new RSS feed in their RSS reader. After you move from “testing” out an RSS feed to really doing it, you can display the RSS feed link on your web site. (You don’t want a lot of people to subscribe to your RSS feed, and then have to tell them that you’ve decided to discontinue it.)

Will Your Customers Read Your RSS Feed?