By Brad Callen
Are you looking for dynamic, automatically refreshing, stickycontent to spice up your website?
If you are a webmaster, you'll know how difficult it is tocreate fresh content to attract your subscribers and newvisitors to your website. Paying freelance writers can cost youa fortune when you are just starting out and don't have siterevenues to fund expenses, and writing the articles yourselftakes way too much time and takes you away from other importanttasks (like actually running the site and making sales happen).
Luckily, there's a little-known but extremely easy tool that youcan use to instantly jazz up your website and provide yourtraffic with valuable information. In fact, you might have heardof this tool before. Headline syndication, aggregators, XMLformat?
Sound familiar?
Yup, I'm talking about RSS Feeds.
If you haven't heard about RSS Feeds, or what they are, Istrongly urge you to print out this article, go to a quietcorner where you won't be disturbed and literally devour everyword of the rest of this article. Not only will it probably saveyour business, but it will revolutionize the way you think aboutthe Internet.
And if you've come across RSS feeds before or used them, thenskim through the next section to refresh your memory (seriously,there is a lot of useful information that you might be missingout on) and then dive into the meat of this article, which willshow you how to set up RSS feeds on your website to displaydynamic, self-updating content with very little effort.
What Is RSS?
RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary”, although other terms such as“RDF Site Summary” (which emphasizes the file format) and“Really Simple Syndication” (which highlights the main sellingpoint of RSS) are also useful in defining RSS by the book.However, bookish definitions don't always explain things verywell. What really is RSS?
RSS is a platform over which a webmaster can instantly deliversummarized information about the latest / most important contenton his website. This summary is usually a list of headlines andsnippets – the headline will instantly inform the reader of whatthis new article or page contains and the snippet (usually thefirst few lines of the article) is to further entice the readerinto visiting the website, or to simply give the reader moreinformation. RSS has evolved into a commonly accepted XMLstandard, and many websites now use RSS Feeds (XML filescontaining the summaries) to publish “updates” about themselves.
From the webmaster's point of view, an RSS feed is meant toallow visitors and subscribers an easy way to keep themselvesabreast of fresh content on their website (without having themvisit the website first). Additionally, an RSS Feed also allowsthe reader to “preview” this fresh content, thus letting themdecide immediately if the new article / content is interestingto them or not. All in all, RSS Feeds have the main purpose ofenhancing user experience. Keep that last point as we go throughthe rest of this article – it is an underlying mindset to makingRSS Feeds work effectively.
Using An RSS Feed
As an Internet entrepreneur, one of your most valuable tools canbe an RSS Reader. This is essentially an aggregator – acollection of RSS Feeds (that you can add or remove) fromdifferent websites that you are interested in. A typical RSSReader would include RSS Feeds from news sites, sports sites,and perhaps a few niche sites (such as SEO forums, blogs on SEO,etc.). The main purpose of this software is to keep you informedof the latest news and content on websites that you areinterested in.
If you have used My Yahoo!(my.yahoo.com) orBloglines(www.bloglines.com), you've probably used RSS Feedsalready. These are online RSS aggregators – you get to choosefrom numerous websites and within minutes you can have your ownlaunch-pad for knowing everything that's happening in yourniche, in the world, or in sports.
As a first step to understanding how RSS Feeds work, I'd suggestthat you use at least one RSS Aggregator – either an online RSStool or RSS reading software likeSharpReader(www.SharpReader.net) – and subscribe to a few RSSFeeds to learn how it works from a user's perspective.
Marketing and RSS
Using RSS Feeds, websites can:
• Attract more customers / visitors. • Keep subscribers informedof new developments • Allow subscribers to instantly learn ofnew articles, content and products on their website. • Reducethe load on the subscriber's inbox by reserving newsletters forimportant news, special product offers, etc.
As a webmaster, you can use RSS Feeds to your advantage. Sinceblogging became insanely popular over two years ago, RSS Feedshave become mainstream. In other words, no matter what yourniche, there's a good chance that you'll be able to find a fewauthority sites that publish RSS Feeds, thus syndicating theirlatest headlines.
How can you use this?
By providing your visitors relevant, self-refreshing content inthe shape of the “latest news” by using RSS feeds fromniche-relevant websites.
Now I'm not saying that you should cover your whole website (oreven one whole page) with RSS Feeds. Such practice is frownedupon by search engines and will actually get your website bannedfrom every single search engine index! RSS Feeds are meant forheadline syndication, not for content scrapping.
Instead, you could use headlines from the top 3 forums in theweight loss niche to show the latest discussion threads on oneside of the “News” page of your own weight loss website. Therest of the page would, of course, be covered with information(i.e. latest news) about your own website.
Or you could put a news ticker on your politics blog to not onlygive your blog a look of “being updated” but to also provideyour readers with relevant, useful information.
If you sell sports goods and own an online store, you could runa “sports news” feed on your main page to attract the attentionof your visitors and give your website a more authentic look andfeel. There are many different ways you can use RSS Feeds to addvalue to your website. Make sure though, that you are merelyusing these Feeds as “icing on the cake”, and not as the wholecake itself.
Finding RSS Feeds
Finding RSS Feeds is easy; there are several RSS-specificdirectories and niche search engines for you to browse through.However, the surge of blogging in the last two years has meantthat any RSS search tool is inundated with blog spam. This makesit a bit harder to find RSS Feeds that you can actually use.
I've listed a few resources below that can help you get startedin your search for finding relevant RSS Feeds.
• Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) • BlogPulse (www.blogpulse.com)• Daypop (www.daypop.com) • Feedster (www.feedster.com) •Findory Blogory (findory.com/blogs) • Gigablast Blog Search(blogs.gigablast.com) • IceRocket Blog Search(www.icerocket.com/?tab=blog) • PubSub (www.pubsub.com) •Technorati (www.technorati.com)
Once you've found the RSS Feeds of your choice, it's time tofind out how to set them up on your website.
Setting up an RSS Feed to Display on your Website
Internet Marketers are a particular breed; we're always lookingfor an “easier” or “quicker” way of doing things; notnecessarily shortcuts, but just ways to work smarter. It's thesame with RSS. When I first came across it, I immediately wentto Google and not only picked out a tool that could help mesyndicate my own website (so I wouldn't have to spend timelearning XML), but I also found several tools that I could useto display RSS Feeds from other websites onto mine! These toolsare ridiculously simple, and I'd fully suggest that you try thembefore venturing into learning how to display RSS Feeds on yourwebpages through code.
If your website is in PHP, you can use the following software:
CaRP (www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/)
This software also has a free version, which displays a simplead in the middle of the news display saying something like“these news headlines brought to you by CaRP”. Try it out; it'seasy to use, and will teach a lot about managing RSS Feeds.
There are JavaScript alternatives available as well (in caseyour website uses plain HTML).
Jawfish (www.geckotribe.com/rss/jawfish/)
Like CaRP, Jawfish also has a free trial, which is once againeasy to setup if you can follow step-by-step instructions.
FeedRoll (www.feedroll.com/rssviewer/)
Another JavaScript alternative is FeedRoll – this is perhaps theeasiest to use of the three mentioned here, but it offers lessflexibility and choice of feeds compared to the others.
Of course, if you want more options (or have ASP or something onyour website), go to your search engine of choice and type in“How to display RSS Feeds on my website” to get a quick listingof articles, tutorials and more tools to help you out.
More RSS
RSS is an amazingly versatile platform that can be used fromanything as simple as running a news ticker to something astopical and time-sensitive as providing weather alerts toaffected areas. In fact, any information that is:
• regularly updated • time sensitive • new
can be a good candidate for an RSS Feed. The key here is toremember that there are always new uses for information andtechnology... it's just a matter of pinning them down.
Brad Callen SEOElite http://www.seoelite.com
If you liked the lesson and want to learn more about SEO, visithttp://www.seoelite.com/7DaysToMassiveWebsiteTraffic.htm and getyour free copy of "7 Days To Massive Website Traffic!" rightnow!
Brad Callen SEO Elite http://www.seoelite.co
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