What is RSS/ RSS Tips

There are a number of ways you can subscribe to, or get automatic updates from any site. You can do so via RSS News Feed.

What is RSS?
RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a technology used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites. RSS is best described as a “news feed” one subscribes to. These days it is rare to find a website not offering RSS feeds.

In the “old days”, the only way to keep track of updates on a website, was to visit the site regularly. You had to “bookmark” your favourite websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.

The problem with bookmarking is that it can get cumbersome when you are trying to track many websites at once, you might miss information when you don’t check regularly and you do a lot of work in vain as the site might not have any new posts when you check it.

2 Simple tips for RSS publishers

1. How do I Get My OWN RSS Feed?
First, you need to get an RSS Feed for your site. There are several ways to do this. Let’s just stick with the easiest. You can use a site like www.blogger.com and start a Blog on your site’s topic or any topic that interests you.

Creating a blog with sites like Blogger (owned by Google) or Bloglines (recently acquired by Ask Jeeves) is quick, fast, and painless. Within minutes you can have your own blog up and running.

This Blog will also supply you with an RSS Feed that you can place on your site. Get a XML or RSS orange button and place it on your site. Link it to your RSS Feed url – this is your atom.xml link if you’re using Blogger.

You can also use a MyYahoo button so visitors can add your feed to their MyYahoo. Each time a subscriber opens their MyYahoo site; your RSS Feed will be updated.

You can also add ‘MyMsn’ and ‘Bloglines’ buttons on your site. Plus others, give your visitors every opportunity to subscribe to your RSS Feed or Blog, and you will see a marked increase in visitors to your site.

2. Encourage members/ visitors to subscribe
Getting visitors to your blog is quite a hard task but making them subscribe to your blog’s feed is lot more harder because you can either use the Social Media or Implement Search Engine Optimization tricks to get visitors to your blog but how are you going to make them subscribe to the rss feed? What I did was make a subscription box (at the top right of my side bar) so that they can subscribe easily.

Another thing is that you have to give them reason to subscribe. This goes back to your blog’s content. Having great contents is what makes them subscribe to your blog. If you don’t have good content that means you will have little or no RSS subscribers.

You can also profit from your RSS when you use feedburner.com + adsense.com.This way you can display adsense ads on the RSS feed.

Do you hav a RSS feed available for your blog? If so, what method do you use to get readers to subscribe?