RSS Don't make me laugh - Why Oh Why Oh Why would I RSS

[kenj]

After all the time I have spent here you would think that I knew all about RSS

I do not have a clue!!!

I have Peter Drew's Report
The Rhodes Brothers training
The Plrpro training video
Justin Mitchie's ebook
Michael dominics ebook

And the penny still has not dropped!

As Soon As I "get it" I am going to make £1,000,000's selling the beginners guide to RSS.

Is there anyone here who can in simple language explain why I would want to use RSS.

Where do I put it?

Will it Hurt?

Who gets my RSS feed?

What do they do with it?

Have I missed the point? Probably.

Tell me about RSS. I am sitting here in Berkshire, England making a respectable online income without RSS.

Please do not assume any previous knowledge.

Imagine that I am my 80 year old beloved white haired old mother. Why would I use RSS & How.

[grumpyjacksa]

submit to rss directories....get rss subscribers....to your headlines and summaries.......have some more visitors, and monetize your rss feed with adsense for rss

and have your posts indexed superfast

FYI....how do you think technorati picks up the info from your blog ? sure, it gets a ping.....but how does it get the info ?

[dmderoeck]

I'm not sure I can answer all you questions and everything you wanted to know about RSS feeds but...

RSS Feeds are a great back-linking strategy. I like the concept of combining your RSS feeds from different sites into one feed and then submit to a number of RSS directories. I use Yahoo Pipes to combine the feeds, then I use Feedburner FeedSmith with Wordpress (big fan of WP).

I then submit the feeds to the following directories (certainly not an exhaustive list). I have also submitted my EZA feed to these directories:

55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your RSS Feeds!

[TimPhelan]

Maybe these videos will help make the penny drop:

YouTube - Video: RSS in Plain English

YouTube - What is RSS and how is it useful? RSS...

[Kurt]

Hey Ken,

Let's start over...RSS is a very simple prrogramming language used to display content, just like email and html display content.

And it's power is in how simple it is...This makes it easy for other non-related resources to take what is in the RSS and display it in other places. Since it is so simple, there isn't much "translation" needed.

You use blogs to take your content and easily convert it to html automatically for you. Blogs do all the basic html for you. In addition, most blogs will also take your content and convert it to RSS automatically.

You will have two URLs, one for html (your "regular" URL) and your blog will also generate another URL for the RSS version. The content of each will be the same/similar, but use different "programming".

Here's an example using my Duelz forum:
HTML URL: http://duelz.com/duelz-debate-forum/
RSS URL: http://duelz.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=2&lastpost=1&nohtm l=0&fulldesc=0

If you go to the html version, your browser will convert the html code into a "webpage" and you don't see the code.

However, depending on how new your browser is, when you visit the RSS version, you may see the code or you may see the content/output.

RSS is mainly used for content that is updated often, like blogs and forum.
As somone posts on the forum, the forum updates the RSS pheed, just like blog software.

You can get an RSS "aggregator", which lets you add multiple RSS sources. It will then check for updates so you don't have to visit each of 50 blogs and fourms to see if they've been updated with something that interests you, and the aggregator usually displays a short summary of of the content of the RSS.

However, the publisher of RSS can often, depending on the blog software, can control how much content is in the summary. On the Duelz forum, I have it set to allow the full content of each post, no matter how long. Most RSS feeds are shorter summaries, but it's a personal choice how much you want to include in your RSS.

Since people can add many different RSS "pheeds" into aggregators, you can promote your RSS pheeds in many various "RSS directories", hoping folks will add your pheed to their aggregators.

Also, many webmasters and bloggers pick up pheeds from these RSS directories and use the content on their sites and blogs. This is an excellent strategy for link building, maybe the best. The key is to submit your RSS pheeds to as many places as possible and to use keywords in your Rss pheeds you think will likely be used on blogs and sites in your niches.

There's two parts to this:

1) Submit your RSS pheeds to all the RSS directories. Use "Rss submit" software for this. See Big Mike.

2) "Ping" your RSS pheeds as the update to all the directories that accept "pinging". A ping is a quick message sent to a site telling them that your RSS pheed has been updated. That site then sends a spider and picks up your updates and adds them to their directory for others to pick up.

Most blogs will ping automatically, you just need to add a list of ping services. Search this forum for "ping list". Copy/paste it into your blog software. Then each time you update, each site on your ping list is notified you have updates, then visit your site and adds your updates to their directory.

For a great linking strategy, think about creating RSS pheeds just like you would pages or blogs. The more you can make, the more you can submit and ping.

It's easy to use RSS for many things, because it is so "simple" it makes it easy to exploit in many ways:

- Submit/ping directories for promotion, to expand your "reach" and link building

-You can use the RSS from others to add content to your blogs, sites and emails.

- If you have a network of sites and blogs, it's a great way to automate "cross linking". Create a "central" RSS pheed that contains links too all your blogs, and as you add new resources, just update this single RSS file and all your other resources will update automatically. A big time saver!

- Repurpose you own content. Have a blog or forum that gives you an RSS pheed? Add this pheed, plus a RSS pheed that has news in your niche, make a quick JV with a good blogger in your niche to use their RSS pheed, plug it into an RSS friendly email program, and you have a self-publishing, no writing needed, on auto-pilot email newsletter.

Here's a real life example, if I ever get around to it. I'll use the following RSS to create a semi-automtic newsletter:

1. Best posts from the Duelz forum debating and discussing today's current even topics.

2. Yahoo "most popular" news RSS pheed that gives the latest news topics.

3. A "today in history" RSS pheed that posts historical events that happend on this date every day...These are from wikipedia and converted to RSS.

4. An RSS pheed from Amazon.com to add a book review or two for books related to news, politics, etc.

This can be 100% fully automated and totally hands free (after set up) or semi-automated where the content is approved before publishing.

Simply, RSS makes sharing content fast and easy. And there's many benefits to being able to easily share info between people and resources.

[Mark Singletary]

Listen to Kurt. He was one of - if not the - original teachers in this forum and elsewhere about all things RSS.

Mark

[Eric Reimers]

Originally Posted by TimPhelan

Maybe these videos will help make the penny drop:

Tim,

I was almost afraid to click on that second video

Glad I did. Helped to put a couple of the pieces together, that video really helped.

Thanks

[Talltom1]

Hey Kurt,

That was hugely helpful. Even with my heavy technical background, I didn't understand RSS either, nor the implications of using it. Thanks a lot for explanation!

Talltom

[John S. Rhodes]

We use RSS like crazy. We provide customers with easy access to
our content. We get ranked more quickly in Google. We are able to
reuse our content in multiple places, like Squidoo. We submit our
RSS feeds to RSS directories.

My point is that you don't have to fully grasp the technology behind
RSS. Instead, you have to just use it. It doesn't provide much cash
directly -- it's a mistake to think it *directly* drives profit. Instead,
it drives awareness, traffic, and reuse of content. It's a tool with a
special use...

~ John

[Harvey Segal]

Originally Posted by kenj

Imagine that I am my 80 year old beloved white haired old mother. Why would I use RSS & How.

So that she could teach her son.

------
Harvey

[kenj]

Kurt

Many thanks for your magnificent post. Maybe today is the day when the penny will drop

I am going to make it my mission to crack this today

ThanKyou

[Kurt]

Originally Posted by Mark Singletary

Listen to Kurt. He was one of - if not the - original teachers in this forum and elsewhere about all things RSS.

Mark

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the comments. It's good to hear from you, hope this means you're feeling better?

I think Mark was the #1 poster here for a while...Before health became a problem.

Originally Posted by kenj

Kurt

Many thanks for your magnificent post. Maybe today is the day when the penny will drop

I am going to make it my mission to crack this today

ThanKyou

Hi Ken,

Good luck with RSS...For many of us, it's a necessity.

Another example of it's use: There's a program that allows you to post on Twitter and have it automatically update your WordPress blog, and if you pst to your WP blog, it will update Twitter, using RSS.

It's a great way of killing two birds with one stone...Sometimes you can even kill a flock of birds with one stone.

[DavidO]

Continuing the discussion from the other RSS thread I started, thanks again for trying to help, Kurt!

I've reread your post and I think one of the problems I'm having is that I'm trying to apply this to a static website, not a blog, so I don't have automated RSS generation.

My site only gets updated less than once a week on average. However, I understand that RSS can also be useful to a static site. That's where I read the advice about creating an RSS file that looks identical to an xml sitemap. I can't see the point of this.

I may start a Wordpress blog in the near future to complement my website. Maybe RSS would be more useful here and I should forget about it for my static site? Still, if it's useful it should be useful for all sites.

Since I don't have automated RSS files I'm totally confused about what content it needs. It can't just be a copy of my sitemap, can it? If I knew what to create I'm sure I could follow up and start feeding it to aggregators and whatnot and the missing pieces would start to fill in.

But without a lot of dynamic content what's the point?

[Kurt]

Originally Posted by DavidO

Continuing the discussion from the other RSS thread I started, thanks again for trying to help, Kurt!

I've reread your post and I think one of the problems I'm having is that I'm trying to apply this to a static website, not a blog, so I don't have automated RSS generation.

My site only gets updated less than once a week on average. However, I understand that RSS can also be useful to a static site. That's where I read the advice about creating an RSS file that looks identical to an xml sitemap. I can't see the point of this.

I may start a Wordpress blog in the near future to complement my website. Maybe RSS would be more useful here and I should forget about it for my static site? Still, if it's useful it should be useful for all sites.

Since I don't have automated RSS files I'm totally confused about what content it needs. It can't just be a copy of my sitemap, can it? If I knew what to create I'm sure I could follow up and start feeding it to aggregators and whatnot and the missing pieces would start to fill in.

But without a lot of dynamic content what's the point?

Hi David....

Now we're getting some where...

You're right, there really isn't much point in RSS for static, html pages. Although you can apply some blackhat stuff, but that's not the point here.

And you can create RSS from static pages, but it's fairly tough and probably not your best option at this point in time.

You can also write your own RSS, which would include a summary of your updates, a title and a link to the page, which you could the ping/submit, etc. RSS is a basic programming language, much simpler than html.

In your case, you're probably best off updating just like you are, installing a WP blog, then "blog" about your updates to your static site. WP will create the RSS pheed automatically, based on the content from your blog post, then you can submit and ping the blog's RSS pheed.

Again, the content of the RSS pheed will be the content of your blog posts (or a summary of your blog posts). It's the same content displayed in html, only this time, it uses RSS as the programming language, in essence creating dupe content, but using different programming languages.

Let's take the next step: You have a blog set up solely to blog about your updates. On your blog, you'll see a little orange image that links to your RS pheed. Click on it and copy the URL of the RSS pheed.

Now, you can add this URL to a service such as twitterfeed.com and when you blog about your site's updates, it will read your RSS and post the updates to Twitter automatically.

Next, you can take the same RSS URL and plug it into Aweber (I think), so know people can sign up for your site updates and get them through email.

Now, if you update your WP blog, it updates your RSS, which inturn posts to your Twitter account, as well as your aWeber email. You just have to set it up, and the rest is on auto-pilot. Now you're killing three birds with one stone.

Next, you can set up a static site and install an RSS to HTML program and have your "static" pages display your blog updates. This will create links from your static site(s) back to your blog.

Also, take the URL of your blog's RSS pheed and submit them to the RSS directories, which are like "regular web directories", except for RSS. Hopefully, other webmasters will pick up your pheeds and post them on their sites, building you one way links.

Since RSS updates, you can "ping" certain directories, telling them your RSS pheed (actually your blog) has been updated...And to tell their spiders to come visit and grab the updates from your RSS. Google constantly spiders these directories, so it's usually the fastest way to get new pages spidered and indexed in Google.

WP will usually "ping" automatically, but once you get a WP blog going, research a little to enhance this.

The real, purest purpose of RSS is to take content from here and add it to there, using automation.

Simply for now, use WP to create an RSS pheed, learn what the URL to your RSS pheed is, then submit that URL and learn how to add this to other services that are RSS friendly.

[DavidO]

Let me repeat what you said in the previous post, Kurt: "Now we're getting somewhere!"

This I can follow, most of it anyway. I will proceed with my new blog, which I have a lot of great ideas for, and apply your RSS concepts to it. I can see the use of it here.

Many thanks!

[TheAngelGuy]

Originally Posted by Harvey.Segal

So that she could teach her son.

------
Harvey

Oh, that is so funny I now have to wipe off my computer screen!

[Ed Bustya]

This has been a great thread. It's giving me all kinds of ideas but I think I need to know more about the mechanics of setting up feeds.

Is there an easy way to setup an RSS feed for just one category, or one tag, in my WP blog? I'd like to do this so that only some posts are in that feed, or I can make multiple feeds from the same blog based on categories or tags. Maybe there's a plug-in that already does that? Or a code snippet?

[braver55b]

Kurt really knows his stuff, I got his social bomb and its really the bomb (in a good way) I routinely get indexed in google in less than 30 minutes in large part due to RSS, so don't knock it, just start using it.