By Soni Pitts

RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication, among other things) is a relatively new technology that allows anyone who creates frequently changing web content - news, blogs, current events, etc. - to deliver their messages to interested readers with no fuss, no muss and best of all - no spam!

Currently, RSS is being used by content-rich sites (mainly blogs and news centers) to keep readers up-to-date on newly published posts or breaking stories. But RSS can do so much more. Many businesses and organizations are failing to truly exploit the amazing properties of this technology - and in doing so are leaving on the table innumerable opportunities to create even greater value, sales and traffic for their company, product or service and the market share it represents. Below are just a few of the creative ways that businesses and other groups can tap into the power of RSS and create new streams of revenue and interest for their organizations.

1. Create An “Announcements And Special Offers” Feed

If your business offers classes, seminars, products, services, specials, sales - essentially anything that changes, updates or rotates throughout a cycle - then creating a dedicated RSS feed could save you (and your clients) time and money. By creating an “Announcements and Special Offers” feed and offering access to your clients as an alternative to emails and print mailers, you can keep your client base up to speed, plus send out limited-time and exclusive “feed only” special offers and discounts, thereby offering an incentive to “get on board.” This not only saves you time by reducing the advertising cycle to the time it takes to update your web page/feed, it saves your clients money by enabling them to quickly scan through the offering headings and pick out just the one’s they’re interested in - while your savings on the cost and time of paper and digital mailings (with their appallingly low conversion rates and sporadic delivery) progressively increase as the feed readership segment of your client base grows.

2. Create A “Client of the Week” Feed

If you’re in a business where this sort of recognition is appropriate, then this could be a big hit! Creating a feed that regularly highlights a different client, their business and any special offers that they might like to make available - exclusively to other feed members, of course - can be a great value-add for your clients, one that costs you little more than the few minutes it takes to create the “spot” and publish it on your site/feed. Include a photo and a business link and your clients will be singing your praises far and wide!

3. Create A Training Or Team Feed

If you are part of a network marketing venture or are in charge of a large sales force or other team and need a way to consistently and continually get training aids, updates, incentives, sales copy, goals, meeting agendas and other items to your downline or members, consider setting up a feed just to serve this function. Since the actual content is hosted at one central site (subscribers only receive a “teaser” that they have to click through to get the full message), you can upload any digital file of any size that you need at the site itself and be assured that everyone who gets the message will be able to retrieve the files - not always a sure thing when dealing with email attachments and text messaging.

4. Create an inter-office feed

Memos, presentation materials, files, announcements, new policies, schedules - all this can be gathered up in one central feed (or broken down into departmental feeds) that are then easily maintained in one central archive and easily accessible by anyone who needs them. Nobody is left behind or out of the loop because they didn’t check their email (or because the message got filtered or bounced) and everyone gets just the information they need without dealing with a lot of cross-over communication from people replying and clarifying.

5. Schools, non-profits and other organizations - RSS works for you too!

Schools - Consider the possibilities of a student feed, updated with activities, exam dates, school closings, special “student only” offers from local businesses and so on. Or how about a special assignment feed in which class materials are uploaded by each instructor for students who are ill, away from home or otherwise unable to be in class?

Churches - A congregational feed can supply daily meditations, worship service schedules, prayer requests, special events and other such messages right to your congregant’s desktop - a sort of ongoing, rolling newsletter that never has to wait for a full page or go out off-schedule due to mised deadlines (items go out as they come in - it’s that simple). This could also be accessed by members who are doing missionary work overseas, to help them feel more connected with home and to allow them to contribute by sending in updates of their work to be added to the general feed.

Non-profits - Volunteer feeds could provide a running update of available positions and work needed, as well as featuring profiles of special volunteers and organizational wish lists; fundraising feeds might keep donors abreast of giving events and how their donations are being used; and inter-organizational feeds can keep board members and other involved parties up to date on meeting times, agendas and projects. All great ways of utilizing the powers of RSS for the common good!

Consider these options the next time you need to get information out to a scattered and diverse readership, or need to publish material that never seems to come in when you need it to. RSS is a new technology, surely. But that just means that it’s true power to serve your needs is only now being discovered. One of the best ways to keep ahead of the crowd is to forge a path through new territories. Where will RSS lead you?

(c) 2000-2004 Soni Pitts

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Soni Pitts is the Chief Visionary Butt-Kicker of Soni Pitts Visionary Life Coaching/Restless Spirits, www.sonipitts.com. She specializes in creating global change through personal evolution - helping others create the lives God always intended them to live, so that they in turn can pass that change on to the world around them.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

By David Congreave

Welcome to part 2 of the article that aims to give you just enough information to help you understand RSS and start using it.

Part 1 gave you simple instructions on how to read and subscribe to an RSS site feed, part 2 will give you simple instructions on how to publish your own.

Firstly, which websites can benefit from a site feed? Well, pretty much all of them.

If you provide a service, you could use a site feed to announce amendments and upgrades.

If you sell stuff, you could use a site feed to announce new products and special offers.

And if you own a website or web log that is regularly updated with news of any description, a site feed is virtually a necessity.

Site feeds may not be exactly commonplace at present but don’t doubt for a moment that their popularity is growing. If you get a site feed up and running now, you’ll be ahead of the game for some time to come and offer a friendly alternative to email communication.

Site feeds are usually written in a code called XML. If you view the code for a site feed it will look a little like HTML.

You could:

– Learn the language and write your own site feed. Each time you want to add an update, just update your site feed page.

– Buy some fancy software that writes and updates the site feed for you.

– Or… setup a site feed online that automatically updates, for free in about 20 minutes.

Third option sound good? Ok, start by setting up your own blog at Blogger.

This is free to do and, if you want, they will even host it for you in exchange for a couple of banners at the top of the blog. The great thing about Blogger is that it works in tandem with the Google Toolbar.

Found a website you want to note in your blog? Click the icon in your Google Toolbar and it’s taken care of.

Everytime you add or change something on your website, record it in your blog so individuals and search engines viewing your blog can be made aware of it.

The other great thing about Blogger is that it automatically creates and updates a site feed for you. Everytime you post a message to your blog, this is added to your site feed as well.

You can get the address of your site feed from the Blogger control panel by visiting the section marked “Settings” and selecting “Site Feed”.

Now you know the web address of your site feed, you are free to add it to your homepage, submit it to RSS directories, anything you want.

But wait, before you rush off, you’ll want to know how to track visits to your site feed.

This bit is even easier. Just convert your site feed address into a FeedBurner address.

Go to: www.feedburner.com and enter the address of your site feed into the box marked “Feed URL:”, then click “Next >>”.

Play around with some of the options and at the end of it you will have a new site feed address that looks something like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourwebsitename Now advertise this site feed address instead of the site feed address Blogger gave you. It will do exactly the same thing, except now you can login to FeedBurner and view statistics on how often your site feed page is visited.

Among other things, FeedBurner will also:

– Dress your site feed up so when someone views it in their normal internet browser it will explain what it is instead of just showing the source code.

– Tweak the code of your site so it can be read by all RSS readers, even those that only support ATOM.

All done? Let’s recap:

You now know how to identify, view and subscribe to an RSS feed.

You now have a blog you can submit to blog directories that allows people and search engines to see updates to your website.

And you have a site feed address you can submit to RSS directories and advertise on your website. Visitors to your website can subscribe to your feed and never miss anything new you have to offer.

And you thought this would be hard? Next week, understanding quantum theory and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in five easy steps.

David Congreave is owner of The Nettle Ezine, the newsletter for the home business — online.

David lives in Leeds, in the United Kingdom with his wife Leanne.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Have you ever read an article, intended to explain RSS in simple terms that, begins well, but soon descends into confusing jargon or information overload?

If so, take heart, I was in the same place a few months ago.

Often the best way to understand something, is to use it. RSS is no exception.

So rather than try and create a definitive explanation of RSS, this article will tell you how to use it. I guarantee once you’ve done so, everything will that much clearer.

If a website you visit utilizes RSS, there are a number of ways it will communicate this.

The most common way is to show a little orange button with the letters XML.

Alternatively, you may see words such as “ATOM”, “RSS”, “Site Feed” or variations on these.

What they have in common is that they will link to a webpage that, in most browsers, looks like gibberish.

It doesn’t matter one way or another, what is important is the address of the web page they link to.

To demonstrate, I will relate how to read a site feed for my website, The Nettle Blog. Don’t confuse RSS with blogs (web logs). They are two separate concepts. The only reason you see them together so often, is that blogs are the perfect website to take advantage of site feeds. More on that later. Here we go…

Click on this link to go the site feed for The Nettle Blog. Ignore the content in the window, just make a note of the URL in the web address bar. It should read: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thenettle

Now you’ve got the web address for the site feed, keep it safe somewhere. You’ll need it again in a moment.

The next step is to use an RSS reader to make sense of the site feed. There are lots of these available and if you are a heavy user you would probably want to purchase a nice piece of software.

But to begin with, start with something simple and free. Start with Bloglines.

Go to www.bloglines.com/register/ and create a new account.

From the “My Feeds” section of your account you can add new site feeds you want to keep track of.

Select “ADD”, enter the URL you copied and hit “Subscribe”. You can preview the results, but skip that stage for now. Select “Subscribe” again and the title of the site feed will be transferred to the left-hand window.

Well done. You have now subscribed to your first RSS feed.

To read it just click on the title and you can view all the messages in that feed within a selected time period. The feed will most likely record news related to the website the feed belongs to.

In this instance, the site feed to The Nettle Blog records each new entry to my blog. If you find something of interest, most entries have a clickable link you can follow.

Anytime you find a website you like with a site feed, make a note of the URL for that site feed and add it to your Bloglines folder.

Now comes the clever bit.

In the left-hand column of your account is an “Extras” list. Select Download Notifier and choose the correct file to download the Bloglines Notifier This file is only 100k so any half-decent connection should complete the download in just a few seconds.

If the download is successful, you should see a small, blue icon with the letter “B”. Double-clicking it will short-cut you to Bloglines.

Right-click on the icon and you can adjust the settings. Specify how often you want Bloglines to check messages for you.

When Bloglines checks your site feeds and finds that one or more have been updated, a little chime will play and the Bloglines icon will show a little red marker. This means one of the feeds you have subscribed to has something new to say.

So there you have it. A spam-free, hassle-free way to keep track of websites you have an interest in. Providing of course, that they have a site feed. If they don’t, ask them why not.

Part two of this article will show webmaster and ezine publishers how they can easily publish a site feed for their website and track the visitors, free of charge.

David Congreave is owner of The Nettle Ezine, the newsletter for the home business — online.

David lives in Leeds, in the United Kingdom with his wife Leanne.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/