Put An RSS Feed On Your Website

There's a new kid in Internet-town. Actually, this kid has been around for a couple of years, but the buzz is starting to pick up. The kid's name? RSS.

Why Should I Care About RSS?

Well, RSS is a very cool way of distributing information about your website, like new additions or updates. Most of the major websites out there have RSS feeds for their content. All the news services have it. They publish all their news stories in various RSS feeds in addition to having the stories on their websites.

The story goes that about 5% of Internet users know what RSS is and use it. That, apparently, is a whopping 46 million people!

The Major Benefit of RSS

An RSS feed allows people to stay up-to-date with their favorite topics, like the topic of your website, without them having to give away their email address by subscribing to a newsletter. In our current SPAM-filled lives that is a major benefit!

I can hear you thinking, "But I want their email address to build my user database!" Yes, I understand that. I'm not saying you should dump your email collection efforts.

I do however believe many more people will happily subscribe to your RSS feed, but may be hesitant to give you their email address. This way you can build a bigger loyal user base. As your user base builds, odds are that many of your RSS users will eventually take some or other action that lets you have their email address anyway.

So What Is RSS Really?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In reality an RSS feed is merely an XML file, hosted on your website, that contains news items for your website.

It's not just any XML file. It follows the RSS specification. There are a couple of RSS specifications, but the latest is RSS 2.0. (There are also other formats like Atom, but RSS 2.0 is widely used.)

The file will contain the title, description, and publish date of your RSS feed. It will also contain one or more items. Each item has a title, description, link to the full article on your site, and the publish date of the item. The RSS 2.0 specification allows for more information, but these are the basic required elements.

So you can see that an RSS feed is easy to provide on your website. It provides extra value to your website's audience, and can help to build a loyal user base.

My next article will be on exactly how to create your RSS feed, put it on your site, and how to make the world aware of it...