How Does RSS Work ?

What is RSS ?
One of the earliest forms of content syndication is the Dear Abby column.
As most of you know, Dear Abby writes one column and it appears, or is syndicated,
in many different publications.
That was the “old school” way; today we have RSS readers and feeders.
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication.
RSS is a format for syndicating news and other content that can be
broken down into discrete items.
RSS is really a delivery channel that allows you to send content to subscribers and also to other Web sites.
Once information is in RSS format on a site, an RSS reader can check the feed for updates
and react to the updates in a predefined way.
RSS can deliver many different types of content including text, audio, or video files and can distribute them quickly and easily.

How does RSS work ?

To publish your promotional material and make it available to the masses for their review or publication on their Web site, you first need to create an RSS feed.
To do this you need to develop an XML file structured in the proper format, upload it to your server, and then provide a link to that file on your Web site.
There are many tools online that make this an easy process.
There are RSS software programs that enable the user to quickly and easily create and
publish syndicated content.

Once you have your RSS feed developed, you need to develop your content and update it on a
regular basis; be sure to include a catchy headline and a link to your site in your content.
Usually you will provide a summary letting the subscribers to your feed know about the new content, with a link directly to it.
Alternatively, you could provide the full content in your feed. Your subscribers need an RSS news reader or news aggregator that will enable them to access and display the RSS content.
There are many different RSS readers and news aggregators available for free.
You might want to provide a little education to your visitors as some may be new to RSS, and also provide links to recommended RSS readers from your site to enable new users easy access .
The news aggregator helps viewers keep up with all their favorite resources by checking their RSS feed and displaying the new or recent items from each of them.

There are also Web-based RSS services that work with your browser.
After you run through your initial setup, you subscribe to any RSS service you want to access on a regular basis.
The RSS readers automatically retrieve updates from sites that are subscribed to, providing the user with the latest content as it is published.

Benifits of RSS ...

The benefits of RSS are many:

1. You are guaranteed 100 percent delivery. Spam filters are not an issue. This means that your marketing and other messages to customers and potential customers are getting through.

2. You can quickly and easily get exposure on other sites that have the same target market you do by having your content published on those sites through content syndication. You immediately increase your reach.

3. Through your RSS feed opportunity, you can build your targeted database.

4. You can improve your search engine ranking through providing keyword- rich content that is distributed to other sites with the link back to your site.

5. You will increase targeted traffic to your site.

6. You will increase your brand awareness.

7. Through distribution of great content, you can establish yourself as a great resource.

8. You have a great potential to increase revenue through your use of RSS with the delivery of coupons, specials, and promotions with the links back to your site.

9. You don’t have to worry about compliance with legislation, privacy policies, spam, or age guidelines.

10. You will build trust, your reputation, and credibility.

11. RSS feeds are significantly less work than maintaining and promoting through private mail lists. You don’t have to worry about cleaning lists, running your content through the spam checker, or removing bad e-mail addresses. This does not mean that you should switch everything previously provided through permission-based e-mail to RSS.

12. RSS content is seeing significant click-through rates.