Using RSS To Promote Your Website

By Kathryn Lively

You have the website, the product, and compelling content to attract readers to purchase your book, your CD, or whatever items you choose to sell. You may notice a surge in traffic as you build your site and employ various search engine optimization tactics, but are not wholly satisfied.

You know you can attract more visitors if you could just reach them. You have a weblog attached to your site, and you write wonderful articles which receive much praise. What else is there to do?

Have you considered syndicating your content and products to users with an RSS feed? Do you even know what RSS is?

Simply defined, RSS is an XML-based format. XML, for the novice, stands for Xtreme Markup Language, a special coding language that represents information for resources in the World Wide Web. Using the XML, one can permit the distribution, or syndication, of content to users who collect such data through specialized aggregators, or readers. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and once you get used to the idea it really can be simple.

By creating an RSS "feed" (think of a news ticker on a cable network, providing up-to-date information in real time), one can distribute product content, articles, pictures, and even embedded video, audio, and links. This information is used to entice users to click through to the host site.

RSS allows a person's computer to fetch and understand the information, so that all of the lists that person is interested in can be tracked and personalized for them. RSS differs from a traditional website in that the information is usually presented elsewhere. Say for example an Internet user has a personalize start page with My Yahoo! On this start page is information on various sports teams so the user can keep track of the playoffs. Yahoo allows the user to edit what information is displayed so only the information the user wants is visible. The user may aggregate information from various sports websites that offer RSS data, and place it on the Yahoo page.

When the user visits his start up page, he will see headlines from the many sports websites fed into the page. If there is a headline that appeals to the user, a click on the link will direct him to the site. Think of RSS feeds as puzzle pieces, brought together to create custom designs for Web users all over the world.

Sites that allow for the opportunity to generate updated, fresh content can benefit from offering an RSS feed. Whether you sell products or services, want to promote a new book or film, an RSS feed attached to your site can extend your site's reach and increase traffic. Having an RSS feed attached to a site also allows for the opportunity to submit to RSS specific search engines, thereby increasing awareness of the site. As you research RSS, you may find there are feeds for just about every subject of conversation, from sports to movies, multi-cultural issues to religion. Shopping sites use RSS to advertise sales, while travel site promote discount airfares for frequent flyers. There is no limit to what you can promote with RSS.

Creating an RSS Feed

Now that you have decided to promote yourself and your products with RSS, it is time to create a feed and attract the traffic you want. Creating a feed is different from creating website. Though there is content involved, you do not need to worry much about presentation and design, as different RSS readers tend to presently only the text and links associated with the feed content.

If you are unfamiliar with hand-coding XML, it would be best to create your RSS through either special software or through a third-party website that creates and hosts feeds. A quick Internet search on "RSS builders" and "RSS host sites" will lead you in the right direction.

If you have a weblog with a third-party host, you may note that this content is already being syndicated. If so, you may want to consider changing the focus of your blog to better sell your products, or create a second feed for better sale emphasis.

Once you have decided on the method of production, it's time to produce!

Writing RSS content can be likened to ad copy. You want to use attention-getting headlines that will entice readers to click through to your site. As some RSS readers display only the headline rather than an abstract of the content, you want to be concise and compelling. "Save now on special purchase," "Buy one, get one free!" Make the reader want to click to read more.

Depending upon the RSS aggregator, the reader will immediately click-through to your site, or be taken to your RSS content. Either way, it is important that all clicks eventually lead to the point of sale. Keep RSS posts short and direct. Tempt the reader to click through to your site to learn more about buying your book, CD, or product. Link to the sale page rather than the home page so a reader won't become frustrated with having to navigate your entire site. Hot link a photo of the item using the IMG tag to give your feed an attractive look. If you use an RSS software or third party site, you may be able to use such coding, be sure to check.

Promoting with an RSS Feed

As search engines become more adept at collecting information, they are devising new ways to get this data. Some engines, like Google, have special spiders that mine the Internet solely for RSS-based information. If you want your RSS feed to be found, whether you host it on your site as an RSS or XML file, or host through a third party website, you will need to have the URL of the feed on your front page so people can subscribe to it.

Clicking on the link will not open the feed like a website, but depending upon the browser being used to view the feed it may take the user to an option that allows him to save your feed's information. A quick Internet search on RSS tutorials will give you a special code you can put on your site to alert spiders to your feed, too. Also, there do exist RSS search engine where you can submit your feed for inclusion.

The one advantage to having an RSS feed is that what content you provide remains available to users who find it during search. To improve the likelihood of traffic increases, add to your RSS feed regularly, advertising all news and specials related to your books, music, or services. Your ability to prove Internet savvy can attract a new audience to your site, and in turn improve your sales.

The Write SEO writes content for CINIVA Systems, and award-winning Virginia Beach Website Design company.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathryn_Lively

RSS Marketing Power

By S. Falkow

"RSS is a technology that has the potential of overcoming many of the internet marketing challenges we are facing today," says Hrastnik of the RSS Diary. "It's becoming a strong, if not preferred, content delivery vehicle."

RSS is a simple to use content delivery tool for marketers and publishers, which allows them to easily get their content delivered to end-users, without it being stopped by any spam filters or similar problems along the way. Hrastnik says that the RSS marketing and business opportunities range from general marketing communications, direct marketing, PR, advertising, customer relationship management, online publishing, e-commerce to internal enterprise communications and internal knowledge management.

The greatest appeal to RSS is that it's really an all-encompassing marketing and communications channel, which can be used to power most of your online marketing activities.

RSS is now mainstream. It's gaining popularity with readers of USAToday.com, the NYTimes.com and is now even on the AARP website. Adding useful and relevant content to your website is one of the best ways to increase your search engine visibility and keep visitors coming back to the site.

Successful marketing online depends on building trust and relationships. To build a relationship you have to have a reason for them to come back. If you offer them a flow of useful and relevant content you become a credible source of data. PRESSfeed makes it easy to add newsletters, press releases, updates and articles to your website instantly - without having to know web design or HTML. Placing them in an RSS feed and syndicating the content adds power to your online marketing.

Sally Falkow is founder and co developer of PRESSfeed, an RSS service for marketing and PR use. She is co-author of The Power of Online Syndication in Public Relations. For more information on RSS visit http://www.press-feed.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=S._Falkow

Submit RSS Feeds For Endless Traffic!

By Davion Wong

Why do people submit RSS feeds? Surely there must be reasons behind them doing so faithfully. Webmasters submit RSS feeds when they update their website with new web pages or build new websites, while companies do so when new products enter the market. The one sole purpose is to drive traffic, or get visitors to their websites.

Where does the traffic come from? We need to understand how RSS feeds work so as to appreciate the whole mechanism of deriving traffic. RSS is simply put, Really Simple Syndication and in XML format. These are files that need to be parsed or read using aggregators or RSS readers.

Before you get drown in a complex myriad of terminology, I will explain things in simple digestible language. RSS feeds essentially displays news or content that refreshes and updates itself whenever the source is updated. Try to imagine that your website is a TV set, and each TV channel is an RSS feed. Each time the channel changes, we see a different image or content on your TV. The same goes for RSS feeds.

People use feeds to convey messages and bring news about finance, stocks, weather, entertainment, latest product reviews, shopping discounts etc to targeted audience. Webmasters can submit RSS feeds to RSS feed directories for free. Such an activity brings significant benefits:

1. Content Syndication

Webmasters are always hungry for unique content. RSS feeds are useful for content management and because content delivery is instantaneous without the need to dabble with and modify their web pages, it’s the choice content source of many websites today. They essentially find their feeds at RSS feed directories, either in general or niche topics. This is one main reason why it makes perfect sense to deposit or submit RSS feeds to these directories. Envisage the kind of traffic your website would receive if your feed is published on other websites in the same theme as yours.

2. Link Popularity

Did you know that you can build RSS feeds and incorporate your links to your websites? If your feed is displayed on another website, that is an additional backlink for you. This has a positive effect on your link popularity in time to come. Download RSS Builder, a freeware to try building an RSS feed of your web page. Submit RSS feeds after that.

3. Build Credibility

Almost all successful webmasters regularly submit RSS feeds of their websites. Since RSS feeds are popular, invest more time in creating news worthy information on your website before distributing the RSS feeds. This would improve the chances of getting your feeds syndicated on popular and authority websites. You can establish yourself as an expert and build credibility in the long run. Credibility is invaluable in business as people would entrust their money to you, ie purchase your products.

4. Content Delivery and Notifications

Subscribers of RSS feed directories would get occasion notifications about the latest RSS feeds available. Submit RSS feeds from time to time, and be a regular contributor of useful feed content. You would pick up many loyal fans along the way as people start book marking your website as their regular content source.

Expert webmasters understand the power of RSS feeds and more so, the importance of distributing feeds to as many directories as possible for explosive impact. Find out what secret tools they are using to submit RSS feeds to feed directories faster and reach more targeted audience at my blog.

This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author's name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.

Davion is a successful webmaster and author and RSS feed user. Read more about RSS feeds submission and which are the best tools available to submit RSS feeds to targeted audience, gain more traffic and boost your sales at Submit-RSSFeed.blogspot.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Davion_Wong

How Marketers Can Use Yahoo! Pipes to Increase Their Online Sales

By Rok Hrastnik

While RSS end-user adoption has been relatively slow, marketers have jumped at the chance to use this new internet channel increase their online sales.

If you're new to the world of RSS --- RSS is a simple technology that allows you to deliver your online content directly to your subscribers, other websites and the search engines. It helps you improve your content delivery, as well as increase your online traffic and reach, and even conduct business intelligence more easily.

RSS content is delivered through so-called RSS feeds, which are just simple files that carry your online content. Each of these simple files containts multiple "stories" that you may want to deliver to your audiences, called "content items". A content item can be anything … an article, a blog post, a whole newsletter issue, a sales letter and so on.

But there is more to RSS than simply getting your content out.

One of the fields of RSS marketing is also NewsMastering, which allows you to:

[a] take multiple third-party RSS feeds,

[b] mix them together,

[c] filter your new mix using various keywords that you're interested in,

[d] use the mix and your filters to create a new stream of content, pulling together all the content items from dozens or hundreds of other RSS feeds … but only the content items that match your filters.

You can now take this stream of content and either subscribe to it yourself, if for example you want to find out immediately what the market is saying about you, what it's saying about your competitors, and what your competitors are doing themselves.

Or you can take this stream of content and display it on your website to:

[a] enrich the visitor experience, by giving them access to the latest and most relevant list of content from your field, such as the latest news in the field you are covering … and do so automatically;

[b] by doing so also making your website more search engine friendly, thus increasing your rankings.

But up until now doing all of this was quite complicated and really wasn't accessible to most internet marketers.

But no longer so …

YAHOO! PIPES CHANGES THE LANDSCAPE

http://pipes.yahoo.com is the latest offering from Yahoo!, finally bringing the premise of NewsMastering to the mass market, and actually putting it on steroids.

The general idea behind Yahoo! Pipes is to allow its users to "easily" connect various internet data sources, mix them together in various ways, add additional functionality to them and create a new single output, pertaining directly to your settings.

While this may sound alot like the standard RSS aggregation & filtering we mentioned above, it actually goes much further than anything on the market in enabling you to manipulate outside sources and come up with a new content output, all of this in a visual programming environment.

The "old services" simply allowed you to combine various RSS feeds, set some basic rules on how you want to get content from them, such as limiting the output to only the content items that match your keywords and removing duplicates, and get a new single RSS feed from them. You could then subscribe to this RSS feed in your RSS Reader (for business intelligence purposes) or use it to display its contents on your website.

But Yahoo! Pipes goes much further.

[BTW - in the Yahoo! Pipes glossary, a pipe is an output you create from mixing and manipulating various content sources]

[a] Aggregate and Filter any XML Feed

Aggregate any kind of XML feed, not just RSS, which means that if your application provides an XML data output, you can now aggregate that data feed with other different feeds you might be interested in, and create a single RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your RSS Reader. Just as an example, imagine having an RSS feed that brings you various data from your organization in a single output, such as the latest sales data from your webstore, latest account of company expenses, notifications of new employees, important team communications, your website visitor counts and so on. It even lets you combine other pipes into a new single pipe.

[b] Content Manipulation

Apply various filters, such as a keyword content filter to give you only the content you're interested in, sort, count, truncate, join or even create your own filters. It even lets you add your own input fields. For example, you could create a pipe that aggregates all the RSS feeds from top online retailers, and include an input field that allows you to enter the name of the product you want the latest deals on, and then creates an on-the-fly output with the latest deals for this product. Essentially, it allows you to add simple or advanced search functionalities to filter out only the content you're really interested in ... from hundreds or even thousands of content sources.

[c] Social Applications

Browse through pipes created by other users to either use them as an end-user, or use their pipes to create your own new pipes. It of course also allows you to make your own pipes public and even provide them as a service to end-users.

There are really almost countless opportunities of what you can do with Yahoo! Pipes, and various new applications will surface when the service gets some milage.

The best part is, you can either create your own application that you use when the need arises from the Web, or an RSS feed that you subscribe to in your RSS Reader, to constantly deliver to you the content that you want. Or you can use the RSS feed to display that content on your website.

All of this is done through a visual interface, which might be daunting for the average user, but shouldn't present a problem to marketers that either have the time to learn the ropes or pay a little something to a person that already has.

HOW MARKETERS WILL PROFIT

If you're thinking of how you can profit from Yahoo! Pipes as a marketer, there really are countless opportunities.

[a] Provide highly relevant streams of content on your website to enrich the visitor experience.

[b] Become a preferred access point to relevant and latest content in your industry.

[c] Build applications that allow your visitors to easily access the content they're interested in.

[d] Take your business intelligence activities to the next level.

And much much more ...

With all the capabilities available through Yahoo! Pipes, countless new opportunities will certainly arise quickly.

The best part is, you can now more easily take advantage of them.

Get the easy way to mastering RSS marketing today. Click here now to get all the details on how to make RSS marketing work for you and help you increase your online profits: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/?src=s32

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rok_Hrastnik

RSS Specifications The Full Story Background Is Good

By Stephen Pavis

RSS is the short term for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. It is merely Web content syndication format. RSS is becoming more popular nowadays because of its ability to update a person about all the latest news and other significant data through an internet service.

This information comes from different sources such as websites, blogs and almost everywhere from the World Wide Web. It is also well-liked by the programs and web sites because it increases traffic and is easy to use.

RSS Specifications are the versions of RSS from its conception on 1997 up to this day. Updates are essential that is why RSS keeps on evolving to adapt to the changes in technology. The very first RSS-like program was the Scripting News format owned by User land. The format was not popular really accepted even though it works. The downside was that it is not that good compared to the recent updates on RSS but not that bad either.

Then the RSS .9 specifications was created by Netscape based on the format of Scripting News. This format works slow, very slow that Netscape decided to improve its status. Yet, it was really popular those days. Having the idea that the .9 version was not good enough Netscape make the second version called the RSS .91. However, Netscape settle to transfer the rights of RSS to User land, the original maker of the very first pattern of RSS.

They discard the .91 version and produce RSS .92. All the features of the .91 were included in the .92 version. It was build up by David Winner the maker of Scripting News and was released on the year 2000. Then in 2001, RSS .93 was suppose to be make public, however, it was not.

It was certainly discussed those days but due to the complaints that the original format of RSS should be maintained, it did not come into being. The RSS working group, instead, release a version of RSS which was patterned from the .9 version and it was named RSS 1.0. The new version was like but it did not become famous.

Then another RSS specification, RSS 2.0, was recently release which was widely utilized by web browsers. The design was based on the .92 model with optional elements and created by David Winner after he left User Land. It was released through the Creative Commons License on July of 2003.

From the day RSS was conceive

It evolves into different versions to accommodate the fast changing environment. The use of the RSS specification version 2.0 is getting more and more today. So it would not be a surprise if one day RSS innovation would come up with a variety that is impossible to think off nowadays.

Written by Steve Pavis In the last year Steve’s companies has generated over 1.5 million dollars worth of business using different strategies one of them been internet marketing online at http://onlinemarketingelite.com Steve is a leading expert with 25 years experience in the business sector has offices in both the United States and the UK. The most solid advice you will ever hear is "find an easy market" with little competition and research your keywords correctly, research is the key

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stephen_Pavis