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What is RSS? And how can it help market your business?

The current standing of RSS

RSS has been around for a few years now, but because of the growing problems of e-mail content delivery, and because it provides many other business advantages as well, it is quickly gaining momentum.

According to the Jupiter RSS consumption March 2005 research report, RSS is already being used by 12% of the American online population and is growing strong.

And just recently, Microsoft announced their full support for RSS in the next version of their Internet Explorer, as well as in the next version of their Windows operating system. Both of these will make sure that RSS becomes as widely adopted as e-mail.

Even though many publishers have already started publishing and marketing with RSS intensively, the market is still not crowded ... but it is growing increasingly so every day.

This is the best time ever to start publishing your own content in RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS is a content delivery channel that allows you to easily deliver internet content to your target audiences, while eliminating a large part of the external noise and shortcomings of other delivery channels, such as e-mail. In short, RSS gets your content delivered.

RSS content is delivered through RSS feeds --- simple files structured in a specific way [xml].

These files include some basic information about the RSS feed (such as RSS feed title, logo, description, URL etc.) and the actual content in the form of individual content items .

These content items are individual stories or articles (usually just descriptions of articles actually published on the internet publisher's web site), presented in a linear list .

Simplistically explained, RSS enables internet content publishers to easily deliver information about their specific content to end-users.

In a way, this can be best compared to e-mail content alert services, which send you an e-mail message every time content you are interested in is published on a specific web site, letting you know that a new article you are interested in is available on the Web.

What the RSS user needs

But in order to view your RSS content, the end-user needs to either download a special program, called an RSS aggregator, or use a web-based RSS aggregator through one of the web sites already providing this service free of charge.

An RSS aggregator is a special computer application that allows us to "subscribe" to RSS feeds, periodically reads those feeds to display their latest content, and let us view those same RSS feeds.

After installing an RSS aggregator or registering at a web-based RSS aggregator web service, the user needs to proactively add the link to your RSS feed in to his aggregator to view your content.

Every time you update your RSS feed (add new content items to the RSS file), the user is notified by that through his RSS aggregator, making the content immediately available to him, without it having to face any SPAM filters and other barricades on the way.

Bad News for Content Publishers and Marketers?

Yes, users do need to install new software or use specific web services to "use" RSS content.

That's even more reason, why you need to educate yourself about RSS as soon as possible and start marketing with it even sooner.

This is no longer a question of preference, but an essential part of running an online business. Without RSS, your content delivery and internet marketing are in huge peril.

To successfully start marketing and publishing with RSS, you need the appropriate expertise. Yes, RSS is easy to use, but you have to adhere to certain best practices, which usually aren't even explained by most people that write about RSS.

In "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS" we give you all the specifics, from planning your feed, creating it, promoting it on your web site and through other web sites, to measuring how it is performing.

For instance, do you know that there are at least 5 ways end-users can subscribe to an RSS feed? Do you know, which of them works the best? What kind of content can you publish through an RSS feed?

Putting it straight-forward: if you can break down your content in to individual and separated items or stories, you can deliver it using RSS .

MarketingSherpa.com, for instance, uses RSS to deliver their latest article summaries. Other web sites, such as the majority of news web sites, use RSS to del iver their news, just as it becomes available.

The key advantage of using RSS as an internet content publisher and marketer is that it actually gets your content del ivered to its destination, without many of the obstacles present with other content delivery channels.

Other Crucial RSS Uses

Delivering content to end-users is not everything that RSS offers.

• Syndicate your content through other web sites, thus generating more exposure, traffic and recognition. Using RSS, other web sites can easily publish your content and bring you more visitors. It's easy, once you know exactly how to do it. Most don't ...
• Promote your RSS feed through various specialized RSS search engines and directories. These will generate even more fresh and high-quality traffic, the people that are actually interested in your content and your products. But do you know where to submit your RSS feeds to get the most exposure? There are more than 55 choices available ...
• Use your RSS feed to increase your search engine rankings. For instance, RSS can easily get you in to Yahoo ...
• And there's more, much much more ...
• RSS, for instance, can be used to boost your affiliate sales. It's a secret that practically no one on the market is using yet.
• You can customize your feeds for your visitors, giving them exactly the content they want. And of course use that information to target your marketing messages to them ...
• Using RSS you can create digital catalogues that deliver latest product updates to your customers, just as they become available. This is something that Amazon.com has started doing not long ago. And it's actually quite simple and easy to do ...

Had enough yet?

And still we only lightly touched what you can do with RSS to hugely improve your internet business in a short time.

Article source: http://rss.marketingstudies.net