Blog

Reach potential clients through RSS - Part 1
02/17/09

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In the web design world, it’s a very useful way to take information (your news or your blog posts) and syndicate them throughout the internet. Publishers can create an RSS feed that can be read through by other websites, desktop applications or even mobile devices.

This is a great way for you to expose your content to your audience without them having to always come back to your website. If you’ve used a customized Google or Yahoo page, you’ve probably seen that there are a lot of news apps that can be added--most of which utilize RSS technology behind the scenes. The same technology can be used to easily distribute your news to your audience.

For example, at Caring Medical (one of our clients in the Chicago area), they offer several RSS feeds depending on your diet type. By offering these feeds, any visitor to their site can subscribe to the RSS feed and add it to a customized Google or Yahoo page.

Once the Google or Yahoo page has been customized, your latest news will automatically be pulled over to the visitor’s customized page whenever accessed. From this page, you can entice your audience to come back to your site to read the rest of the news.

When your RSS feed is available, you can submit it to several RSS directories such as Syndic8 or RssFeeds so that people visiting those websites, but haven’t heard of you, can find your news feed and subscribe to it.

There are other ways to take advantage of RSS . . . which we will address tomorrow.

- Dave Gruen
Senior Vice-President, Consulting Division

Tags: RSS