There’s a new kid on the Internet communications block, and it its giving newsletters and email marketing as much as they can handle. RSS feeds have become the current favorite tool among Internet marketers, and if you do not find a way to incorporate them into your marketing strategies, your competitors could soon leave you in their dust.

The acronym RSS is widely believed to stand fro Really Simple Syndication, and while that may be inaccurate, RSS does allow you to syndicate your web content so that it will be available via an RSS feed to those sites which are equipped to read from your RSS directory.

RSS offers you a way to automatically have your latest content headlines, accompanied by brief summaries, placed on websites of people who are actually interested in reading it. If that is not a perfect targeted marketing tool, no such thing yet exists. It’s a simple fact of marketing that the amount of product you sell is related directly to the amount of people your marketing campaign can reach.

RSS, unlike HTML website applications, is based on XML coding. An RSS directory feeds the headlines and summary t the latest content posted to your website to websites with RSS readers, and every RSS feed you create is another opportunity for you to grow your customer base and improve your sales. Creating an RSS feed is not at all complicated.

You’ll first have to create an XML version of your feed which includes your content’s headline and a brief description, and the link to the page on which you posted it. Don’t be worried about the technical aspects of doing any of this, because there are numerous RSS feed editors available to help you. Some of them simply require that you save your news or article to Notepad and enter it, where it will be correctly formatted for uploading. You would do best by preparing a minimum of ten articles for your RSS feed.

When the file is finished, you should save it with an .xml, .rss, or .rdf extension, and upload it to your web server via your FTP program. It’s now in a form recognizable to the RSS aggregators.

Because, like all programming, an RSS program can contain errors, you need to double check to make sure your file is clean. You can find applications to help you check for errors; simply run your uploaded RSS file against the checker to look for coding and tag mistakes. It’s the only way to determine whether the RSS aggregators will be able to read your work.

Once you have proofed your RSS file, it’s time to build an RSS directory. The RSS directory is what lets the rest of the world see the file you have uploaded. An RSS feed is designed to send your content to all sites enabled with RSS, so you need to put your feed in at least one directory.

There are both free and paid RSS directories so why not start by finding all the free directories you can and adding your feed to them? If you want to keep going and don’t mind the expense, you can then tackle the paid directories. And for the regular visitors to your site, you should add your RSS feed icon to your homepage

The whole point of RSS is to notify your audience automatically of any change to your content file. You should take the time to update your file regularly with your new content, because many people now rely on RSS feeds to tell them if its time to pay their favorite websites a call.

Almost anyone can create an RSS feed, regardless of his or her technical savvy. There are plenty of applications available to simplify the process; all you need to do is learn how to use them. So why not go head-to-head with your marketing competitors by creating your own RSS feeds today?

You’ll find that RSS feeds bring you far more traffic than other marketing techniques, and the more traffic you have, the more sales you are likely to make. Beef up your marketing efforts with RSS feeds, and be ready to greet your new customers!

Tags: Blogging

Popularity: 2% [?]

Share This