Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Simplified

Simply put, RSS is a standardized, un-styled web page format used to publish frequently updated web content—such as blogs, news, job postings, etc. These standardized web pages (or ‘Feeds’) can be displayed (sometimes referred to as ‘consumed’) in RSS readers (like a web browser) or “aggregators” like Outlook or Feedburner.

Here’s the point of RSS for the user. Rather than having to actively search out the latest news and information for a given topic, they can simply subscribe to the RSS feed and, presto pango, fresh up-to-the-minute content arrives on an ongoing basis.

See also:

• “Marketers Not Using RSS Should be Fired”
• Marketing Automation on a Shoestring Budget
• Automating Newsletters with RSS-to-Email

How does RSS fit into the Marketing Mix?

If your marketing strategy already contains a lot of content-based inbound marketing, RSS is as critical as it is easy.

RSS Improves Search Engine Rankings

RSS will increase your search engine rankings for the most important search engines and at the same time, create additional traffic channels to your website through RSS-specific search engines and directories.

100% Content Delivery

Forget about building an opt-in marketing list and finding only a percentage of the list actually receive the email. RSS gets 100% of content delivered to subscribers.

Timely Content

With RSS, content can be delivered quickly and often (some feeds are daily or hourly). Don’t spam your subscribers, but quick or important product announcements, job openings, or exclusive offers work great via RSS.

Get Your Content Published on Other Web Sites

RSS can be easily syndicated and consumed by other websites. Other, content-heavy, sites may choose to consume your feed and display your content on their website. Every time the RSS feed is updated the new content is displayed instantly on every site consuming it.

How do I generate my RSS Feed?

Let’s start by learning how to generate an RSS feed. Then, we’ll get into the hard part—promotion.

RSS feeds can we hand written, or you can use a service to generate them for you based on the web page you want to syndicate. Both are pretty easy, but keep in mind that not every page on your website needs to be syndicated. Think about which pages are updated the most and, of those, which would benefit the reader by receiving that updated content in a timely fashion.

Once you’ve got the page in mind, follow our syntax and example RSS feed in the next section.

RSS/XML Syntax & Examples

Here’s the basic syntax of an XML RSS feed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>

<title>Enter the Feed's Title Here</title>
<link>http://www.link-2-your-page.com</link>
<description>A short description of the feed and its benefit here.</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:09 GMT</pubDate>
<atom:link href="http://www.link-2-your-page.com/feeds/RSS-Filename.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

<item>
<title>Title of Article 1 in Feed</title>
<description>Description of Article 1 in Feed</description>
<link>http://www.link-2-your-page.com/article1.html</link>
<guid>http://www.link-2-your-page.com/article1.html</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:09 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

<item>
<title>Title of Article 2 in Feed</title>
<description>Description of Article 2 in Feed</description>
<link>http://www.link-2-your-page.com/article2.html</link>
<guid>http://www.link-2-your-page.com/article2.html</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:09 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

As you can see, you could basically write and update and RSS feed by hand using nothing more than a word processor and a free FTP client. If you want to make sure your syntax is correct, check out: http://www.feedvalidator.org/. But, who wants to write and update a feed manually?

Services like Google’s Feedburner and Feedblitz allow users to create, publish and syndicate their RSS feeds will little or no coding experience needed.