Bringing RSS to the masses

Lately we’ve noticed many RSS-themed posts popping up on blogs of all shapes and sizes. What’s caused this little surge in interest on the topic of RSS? That would be the up-and-coming ‘RSS Day’ on 1st May.

What’s the purpose of RSS Awareness Day?

All blog writers want more readers. We all know there’s a thirst for knowledge around the world and many of us have something worth sharing, so this awareness day is simply about making the knowledge-sharing process much easier (and less time consuming). As the old proverb goes, ‘Time is money’.

Gather, read, understand, learn and provide your own insights. It’s a wonderful system and yet, so simple! Here’s a great introductory video provided by the team over at CommonCraft, that explains RSS in the simplest way possible.

More and more people are turning to the web for information. As this trend continues an increasing number of web citizens will use RSS to make their lives easier.

If you’ve watched the short video you should have a better understanding of how RSS works and how it’s commonly utlised. However, gathering and reading information is just one side of the coin. What’s on the flip side for content publishers and website owners?

Using RSS on your own web site

The business case for RSS is a strong one. Making your news content available as an RSS feed is considered a form of ‘permission marketing’ similar to sending out email newsletters to visitors who have given you their contact details and permission to use them. With the ever burgeoning amount of SPAM cluttering in-boxes around the world, and the backlash of email users against it, RSS news is seen by some as a more reliable way of getting quality information to potential customers.

By subscribing to a newsfeed a user is effectively saying “I am interested in your company. Please keep me up to date with what’s going on”. And those users are the core audience you should be communicating your message to - as often as possible.

As the nature of RSS is to ‘push’ information outwards to subscribers it ensures your content is delivered to your audience, rather than it sitting on your pages waiting for them to pay you a visit.

With the latest versions of all major web browsers supporting RSS as standard it will become familiar to many, perhaps even to the point where it will be common for users to land on a new site they are interested in and grab the RSS feed instead of bookmarking the page.

Making your content available in a RSS feed will also widen your search engine presence. More people are using specific blog search engines such as Technorati and Google Blogsearch to find regular information. Getting your content listed in those places will increase your site’s findability.

Supporting the day

Put simply, increasing RSS awareness will make life easier for web users and web marketers. If you don’t use RSS already help support the RSS Awareness Day on 1st May by giving it a go - you can start right here with the Tactical Thinking RSS feed.

This entry was posted by Posted by Keith on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 5:31 am, and is filed under Blogging, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.