| By Dejan Bizinger
The latest trend in e-publishing is that more and more publishers are using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to enhance deliverability of their email newsletters or readership of their web sites.
In plain words, RSS is technology that enables publishers to deliver their content more effectively to their visitors or members of their email newsletters. Today, RSS is still an evolving applicatoin. RSS is often mistakenly associated with blogs because many blog services automatically offer ability to syndicate content using RSS or Atom.
Here are some interesting facts about RSS usage.
- Forrester Research announced in September 2005 that six percent of consumers use RSS feeds once a week or more, compared with 2 percent in 2004.
- Only 9% of Americans have a good idea and 65% are not sure what RSS feed is – according to a research made by Pew Internet & American Life Project published in July 2005.
- 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators – according to Pew Internet & American Life Project research announced in January 2005.
More and more email publishers are beginning to implement RSS in their Internet marketing mix because they are aware of the fact that average deliverability and open rates are not as good as they were several years ago because of email overload. Deliverability is very much affected by your email marketing software. However, even with email marketing software that has high deliverability ratio you can be quite sure that your deliverability is never 100%. Many legitimate publishers are faced with problems that their emails can be blocked by ISP filters and this won’t happen using RSS to deliver your content.
You can use RSS as a supplemental vehicle to publish your email newsletter or drive traffic to your web site. For example, if you have a section on your website with Internet marketing articles, you can make an RSS feed so anyone who subscribes to your feed will be automatically notified when you add new articles. This way you will have repeat visits.
There are some debates on email versus RSS. It shouldn’t be viewed that way. Internet marketers have to use all available tools, technologies and channels to deliver their content. So they should use email, web site and RSS to deliver their content and communicate with their target audience. It isn’t an either-or situation. Effective online marketers are create viral content that is available on multiple messaging channels.
The process of RSS content delivery is simple. You have to create a RSS feed. RSS is actually a XML file. You can see its structure if you enter it in your browser. The good thing is that you don’t even have to know to make an RSS feed “by hand” because there are several tools that will do that for you.
As with all software and services, you can choose whether you want to use desktop RSS-generation software or hosted online RSS-generation software.
If you want a desktop feed service, a good choice is FeedForAll at http://www.feedforall.com (fee-based, one-time fee).
If you prefer hosted web-based services, you can check services like http://www.nooked.com (free and fee-based options), http://www.myrsscreator.com and
http://www.press-feed.com (free and company subscription).
Also, you can try free services at
As we have mentioned above, RSS is usually a standard feature on all blog services so you won’t need additional tools for RSS if you are a blogger. One of the free blog services that have good RSS support is b2 Evolution at http://www.b2evolution.net.
If your RSS feed isn’t online you will have to upload it to your web server first. If you visit web sites that offer options to subscribe to RSS feed you will probably see an RSS feed address that looks similar to http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml
After that anyone who wants to get your content via RSS will have to copy this address to their RSS/News reader. The most popular RSS readers are
This way people who want to get your content won’t have to give you their email addresses. RSS is pull-based technology which means that visitors need to get the content and you can’t send them. That’s why they can’t get unwanted messages. This is similar to double opt-in for email subscriptions with the main difference being that with email newsletters you *send* your content and with RSS your members *retrieve* your content.
If you are an email marketer, it is recommended that you place an RSS button (orange is standard colour for RSS button) below your subscription form so that your visitors be aware that they can get your email newsletter in RSS format, too. If you offer RSS, your orange button has to be highly visible on your web site, to be “above the fold”. You can also include it where you will give a brief explanation about RSS.
RSS technology is evolving. Today, you can measure how many RSS subscribers you have, get click-thru ratios for each RSS feed you have, check popularity stats of each RSS feed, personalize your RSS feed, and even place ads like Google AdSense or Pheedo in your feeds.
When you have your own RSS feeds you should promote them. We can recommend you to make a My Yahoo! and My MSN account and to list your feed URL there. When you place Yahoo! and MSN buttons (with links below) on your web site you can expect to be indexed much faster than usual.
To list your RSS feeds on My Yahoo!, after you have created your account click on “Add Content”. After that you will see a large “Find Content” field and on the right an option “Add RSS by URL”. Enter your RSS feed URL and click on “Add to My Yahoo!” button. In order to enable your readers to place your feed in their My Yahoo! you have to place the Yahoo! button (you can put that “Add to My Yahoo!” button, but in smaller format) and link it to http://add.my.yahoo.com/content?url=http://www.yourdomainname.com/yourrssname.xml
If you want to add an MSN button on your web site, place the MSN button with this link: http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://www.yourdomainname.com/yourrssname.xml
You can also use useful services like Syndic8, Pingomatic, Pingoat, and FeedShot to promote your web site and RSS feeds to the most popular blog and RSS search engines. |
