RSS Explained: What Exactly Is RSS And How Can It Benefit You?

Kaz — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:41:04 +0000

So what exactly is RSS? You’ve probably heard about it, but might not fully understand what it means. RSS is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication”, although it’s sometimes referred to as “Rich Site Summary” as well. The word “syndicate” means to publish simultaneously. For example, an author who writes a column might get their column syndicated across several newspapers.

The term you typically come across is “RSS feed”. It’s called a feed because it feeds your content into feed readers, similar to syndicating your content across several readers or visitors. But an RSS feed is really a document. It’s a document created in a language called XML – short for Extensible Markup Language. It might sound confusing, but so does the meaning of HTML – Hypertext Markup Language. That doesn’t stop you from creating websites, does it?

The good thing is, most people don’t need to know how to create an RSS feed or document. Many sites already create one for you. For example, if you have a WordPress blog, your RSS feed is automatically updated and made available to you.

If your site provides an RSS feed, your visitors can subscribe to that feed. You can compare this to signing up to someone’s email list to keep updated on their products or services. You subscribe to the email list and this way, emails are delivered to your inbox.

The only difference with RSS feeds is:

subscribers use a feed reader or online feed aggregator to view your RSS feed items

you don’t have to do anything extra to update your RSS feed except continue to post content to your website.
subscribers get your updates as soon as they become available

RSS feeds are known as a “pull” method of delivering content, while email is referred to as a “push” method. This is because users elect to subscribe and read your RSS content at their leisure (pull), versus with email whereas the user must wait for you to send updates specifically to the email list (push).

You can increase traffic to your website by submitting your RSS feed to several feed readers. These sites are typically referred to as feed aggregators. Some common ones include:

FeedAgg
FeedAge
Technorati
FeedSubmitter
FeedRaider
Yahoo! Feeds
Feeds4All

Those are just a few to give you an idea. There is massive power behind submitting your feeds to the major feed aggregators. Not only do you benefit from the extra visitors that find your feeds on these sites, but you can greatly benefit by the backlinks and SEO benefits.

Creating traffic and boosting your position in the search engines is largely about generating many quality backlinks. RSS feeds give us the ability to gain several backlinks using simple methods. A lot of people aren’t aware of the capabilities behind RSS feed marketing. This is largely due to the fact that the technology itself appears to be complicated and overwhelming.

Well I’m here to tell you there is nothing complicated about this. If you can take your site’s RSS feed url and submit it to the feed aggregators (similar to social bookmarking), you are one step ahead of many of your competitors.

For those of you adventurous enough, I invite you to explore RSS further. You can explode your RSS marketing strategies by taking a look at Rogue RSS Profits.

lushprofits.com » what is an rss feed

RSS Explained: What Exactly Is RSS And How Can It Benefit You?