Syndicate your site
“Information wants to be free,” or so the saying goes. Assuming that’s true,
why is it that getting through all of the information we seem to need from the
Internet costs so much of our precious time?!
Enter RSS. RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”.
(Just pick the one you prefer. No one else really seems to know for sure – or
care – which definition is correct).
All sorts of companies are getting into the RSS act. Some use RSS to deliver
articles and article previews to readers who are too busy to browse and dig up
the content they are interested in. Others use RSS to alert customers of new
products, upcoming events, or sales and promotions.
RSS makes it possible to review a large number of sites in a very short time.
This is because with RSS readers (called Aggregators) you only read the sites
that have changed since the last time you've read the feed.
RSS is also SPAM-free. Since users do not have to give out their email
address in order to receive information via RSS, e-mail inboxes do not get
cluttered with un-requested and unwanted information.
For publishers, the bottom line is that RSS permits instant distribution of
content updates to consumers. Syndicating headlines is an excellent and
cost-effective way of driving traffic to any website that publishes new content
regularly. Once a website produces an RSS feed, other sites can very easily
syndicate their headlines. Headline aggregation services like
Moreover.com power news
portals, specialist news search engines, business intelligence services and
provide news feeds to websites. This gives your content a much wider
distribution than would otherwise be possible by relying solely on visitors who
already know to come to your site.
To read RSS content, you’ll need an “Aggregator.” Aggregators are software
applications and online sites that periodically read a set of RSS feeds, find
the new content, and display a list of the headlines on a single page. Some are
programs that you download and install on your computer, and others are online
services.
Some of the most popular are:
While not overly difficult, the process of creating an RSS feed is beyond
what can be shared in this small space. Do a Google search to find out what you
need to do, and read Danny Sullivan’s excellent article, “Making
an RSS Feed” here:
Once you’ve created a feed, you’ll need to promote it. Create an information
page about syndicating your headlines. This will make existing visitors aware
that your website has an RSS file so they can add it to their news reading
applications or even include it on their own websites. This information page
will be indexed by regular search engines and can also be submitted to various
niche directories.
Some of the places you may wish to promote your RSS feed include:
Once an RSS file has been included in these sources it is likely to be found
by websites, online news portals or news reading applications seeking RSS
content.
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