Do You Know About RSS Feeds?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

What is a RSS Feed?

Yesterday, I wrote a blog about Google Alerts and how that send automatic email updates about topics that are of particular interest to you and I mentioned RSS Feeds, so I decided to write about RSS today. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndicate and it’s a great way of bringing your research or topics of interest to you rather than you fishing for them over the world wide web. Many people come across that all too familiar icon pictured above, but many people don’t know what it is or maybe they do, but they just don’t really know how to take advantage of it to help their business from a marketing point of view.

Think of RSS feeds as a tool you can use two ways. First, and probably foremost, you can use RSS feeds to publicize and promote your blog by syndicating your message over the internet and in turn, making your content more accessible to your end users. This is an effective way for your feed subscribers to simply open their RSS reader and your latest post will be right in front of them.

The second way you can utilize this tool is for building your very own customized newspaper, for a lack of a better term. You can subscribe to blogs you often read and when you are getting ready to perform some research or to just find out the latest news or gossip on your favorite interests, simply open your RSS reader and all your articles are there at your finger tips. What a time saver, right?

Getting Your RSS Feeds Using RSS Readers

In order to promote and read your RSS feeds, you must have a “Feed Reader or RSS Reader”.  There are tons of them out there.  Here’s a list:

• Google Reader
• FeedDemon
• NewzCrawler
• Omea Reader
• RSS Bandit
• Awasu
• Blog Navigator
• SharpReader
• RSS Owl

As you can see, RSS Readers are pretty popular and there are a lot of choices for you to choose from. You should find out what is best for you, but don’t spend too much time choosing one as they pretty much all provide similar results, but vary slightly in deliver ability.

I keep it simple and just use Google Reader since I already have a google account set up…it was super easy and maybe I’ll even make a short video on how to set that up so you can see exactly what I did and if that works good for you then great! You can just type Google Reader in Google and sign up using your Google account.

So How Do You Bring Your RSS Feeds and RSS Readers Together?

This is basically the missing piece to it all. The missing piece is what I refer to as a “Feed Enhancer or Feed Facilitator”. I don’t know what the exact technical term is, but I do know how important this is with regard to the user ability related to subscribing to your feed. I highly recommend using FeedBurner. It’s a terrific resource to use in place of your default RSS Feeds like you may find that WordPress offers or something like that.

Once you sign up for a FeedBurner account, you will see all the different RSS Readers it supports and how you can customize the look and feel of your subscription page by selecting “See other Subscription Types”. You can get the HTML code to cut and paste it into your email or other platform you would like to promote your feed on. There are several functions available to you once you’ve signed up. You have the ability to get analytics and instructions on how to optimize your feed. Then you can publicize your feed by clicking on the publicize tab to learn how to further syndicate your feed. You also have the ability to monetize your feed by submitting it to Google Adsense and finally there is a troubleshooting tab that gives you instructions on how to repair or solve any problems you may encounter.

This is a fantastic tool to incorporate into your arsenal of internet marketing weapons. Now that you know a little more about RSS feeds, RSS Readers and using Feedburner to bring it all together, you can provide your subscribers with a better overall user-experience. They are able to learn more about you while you instill a level of confidence to motivate them to return to your blog again and again.

Feel free to visit my Traffic Blog Cafe feed to see how I use it to help generate traffic to my new site (don’t worry, I’ll talk about podcasts in a future article…lol).