What is RSS and Why You Should Offer It

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. This is a method used to subscribe to a website feed so you don’t have to go visit the website to read the latest content. Instead of going to each of your favorite sites individually you can collect all the RSS feeds of each of these sites, and consolidate them into what’s called a feed reader. Having all this info in one place makes it more efficient for you to take in all your favorite content in less time! This is one of the reasons you want to offer RSS to your customers. To help them make better use of their time.

But there’s another reason why you should be including it on your websites. Because for every feed reader you have… you have a potential customer to advertise to. It’s not hard to find out how many subscribers you have. Many online businesses use a special third party service called FeedBurner that adds extra features to the feed. The most important of which is that it provides these statistics I mentioned as well as some handy tools for you to use when posting your feed on your website - and it’s free of charge too!

Remember, the number of feed subscriptions you have tells you how many people are visiting your website and how often. What a powerful set of data for you to have when testing marketing campaigns, selling advertising on your website, and launching a new product line! Why would you not include your RSS feed on your website?

RSS feeds are not limited to blogs; many webspace owners provide feeds for their website and almost any media content online such as music, video, and audio files have RSS capability too! If you want to know all the techy parts about what’s going on behind the scenes of an RSS feed, simply run a web search using the term “syndication RSS feed”. You will get more information than you can handle in one day.

There are basically two options available to you when it comes to reading feeds. You can purchase software, install it on your computer and read your feeds from there or you can use an online feed reader and then view your information from any computer you are using to connect to the web. My preferred method is this second option because I can quickly skim through my feeds while sitting at an airport or the local coffee shop, while in front of any computer that has access to the internet!

You can learn more about the two feed reader options and how they differ, by clicking over to our RSS information page at DSD-Pro. You can also learn how to subscribe to the DSD-Pro RSS feeds from this same article.

All blogs have this RSS capability. Many of your customers now expect to see it on your website in plain view. If you aren’t
putting in top right corner of your blog - you are missing out on capturing some new potential customers. If you aren’t including it on your website at all - I can guarantee, you are losing some of your readership. I’m not alone when I say I use my RSS feed far more than I click around to the websites I track. If I found your site, but I didn’t find an RSS feed… it’ll be a long time before I return! So make your feed easy to find and very obvious to your readers!

An added note here - RSS feeds are sometimes listed on websites with links titled Atom, or Syndicate, but they all do the same thing.

Remember - busy web surfers use RSS feeds to make their life easier and access the info much quicker. Business-bloggers use them to offer a service to their readers AND to track stats for marketing, etc. If you have a business blog and you aren’t using your RSS feed… well shame on you!

I encourage you to dig up the information on how to set up the RSS on your website so your readers can find it and subscribe right away!

That’s it for today’s business reports briefing. I do hope this issue gave you something new to think about for your scrappy business!

Very Respectfully,
Cindy Angiel (aka - Paint Chip)
paintchip[at]dsd-professionals[dot]com