RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is one of the many ways you can promote your website. It allows you to get your content out there for users who might be interested in your industry, services or products. Even though the implementation and use of RSS feeds might look complicated and hard to many people, it actually is a very easy and straight forward approach to syndicating content.

There are a few but very important elements in using and benefiting from RSS feeds. We have tried to make it as easy-to-understand as possible here:

1- Create an RSS Feed

Before you can begin the syndication process, you will need an RSS feed. There are many ways to do this. If you type, “Create an RSS Feed” on Google, you will get many results. However, we have come to the conclusion that this does not address ordinary people who might not be familiar with RSS or XML. We have 3 recommendations;

  • Easy: This is the easiest way to do this for someone who might be a beginner. Simply, go here and create an account. It has a free trial for 3 weeks and then if you’d like to continue using it, it’s a low yearly fee. You just type your address in this web-based solution, and after a couple of options, it provides the feed for you. The only negative here is that you cannot edit the RSS feed created. However, it’s a good start.
  • Moderate: Use one of the PC or Mac-based software to create the RSS feed manually. You can try many shareware and freeware software at download.com. This will enable you to make edits and perfect your RSS feed. The more you get into it, the more you will understand.
  • Hard: You can use a web-based php application, which can easily be installed on your server or through your hosting server. The php application would crawl your site and create the RSS feed for you. The best part about this is that you do not have to manually create the feed; it will be automatically created by the script. Also, keep in mind that many content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla already have this functionality.

2- Submit Your RSS Feed
The next step would be to submit your RSS Feed to content and RSS sites so they can grab your content and display them on their servers. This will enable you to;

  1. Get backlinks from these sites which are very important for organic search results
  2. Get traffic from these sites
  3. Increase your visibility on the web

There are 2 ways you can submit your RSS feed online;

  1. Web Based: You can go to here and fill in all the relevant information regarding your feed and submit. This is a free service and it’s pretty effective. Also, if you do a little research on Google, you will find many sites like this one. You can also submit manually to the top 100 RSS Site list here.
  2. Software: You can use PC-based software such as “RSS Submitter” to submit your feed automatically to hundreds of RSS sites. This one time submission might be very helpful in terms of visibility.

Before going through these steps, we recommend that you make sure you have a content rich site. Also, you must add content to your site regularly, this way you increase the number of content or articles syndicated and get even more visibility. You might have to manually create an RSS feed each time you update your site or articles using option 1a and 1b above. It still beats not doing anything about it.

The more you get into RSS, the more you will learn and see the benefits. Of course, including RSS Syndication along with a well-planned and executed online marketing strategy will be much more effective than just creating an RSS feed. Familiarize yourself with other online marketing and promotion tools. Of course, we are here to help. You can contact us for any questions or a no obligation consultation.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]