RSS FEEDS

From a Marketer's perspective the benefit of an RSS feed is the ability to communicate with your users/readers/list without them having to actually navigate to your website.

When properly coded, an RSS feed supplies your readers a short "teaser" of your content and a link to the location on your site where the reader can view the item teased in its entirety.

An example of the beneficial use of a RSS feed would be if you are a content supplier. Let's say you offer packages of PLR articles 3 or 4 times a month. Now let's say that there are 3 or 4 subjects available each time you release your packages. In order for your users to see what new packages and subjects are available they would have to remember to navigate to your website. Find the new product. And then look over the subjects you're offering for that release.

You could, of course. add all your users to an auto-responder list and email them each time you've new packages available. But many of us receive hundreds of emails a day, and many of us have a huge pile of unopened emails in our in-boxes. So sooner or later your emails will end up in that unopened pile.

But if you offer a RSS feed of your offers your users do not have to open an email. The users do not even have to go to your site to see what's new. They can open their RSS feed aggregater right from their desktop and see what new packages you're offering this week.

In essence a RSS feed is another way for you to communicate with your users. And unlike email, your feed does not get thrown into a huge pile of offers that each of us receive and have to sort through daily. So having a well maintained and coded RSS feed is another tool for an Internet Marketer to offer their products to users.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are documents written in XML (Extensible Markup Language). There are 2 popular markup languages used for RSS feeds. RSS and Atom. RSS has 2 popular version RSS1 and RSS2.

Which language you choose, Atom or RSS, and if you use RSS choosing RSS1 or RSS2 is more a decision of taste than which one is better. All have benefits. All are properly parsed by the most popular aggregaters. Google XML site maps are usually written in RSS2. Wordpress auto-writes feeds in RSS.92, RSS1, RSS2, and Atom.

Most people prefer the RSS2 version. But my personal opinion is that the RSS2 choice is frequently made because RSS2 is perceived to be better because it has a higher version number than RSS1.

Additionally, generating a RSS feed for whatever purposes you want one is very easy. Even if you choose not to take advantage of the number of auto-generating scripts available. While RSS is really simply syndication, it is also really simple coding. Learning to properly code one is a piece of cake.

I hope that this Really Simple Synopsis of RSS feeds helps you. If you're interested in learning more the link below is a good place to start:

XML Files - XML Basics - Introduction to XML Use, Syntax and Validation

Take Care,
Gene