What the Heck is RSS and How Will it Help Me?

What the Heck is RSS and How Will it Help Me?

by: Rosalind Gardner

RSS, RSS, RSS… you hear the constant chant, but who really knows what the heck RSS means?

Although it originated in 1997, most folks still don’t know how RSS works, and want to know กWhat is RSS?ก and กHow will it help me?ก

I had only a very cursory understanding of RSS until last week, yet when trusted colleagues start telling me that itกs an effective way to get traffic to your site, it was time to learn more.

So what is RSS?

RSS stands for ‘real Simple Sydicationก and is a way for you to publish (or กfeedก) กwhatกs newก information about your site. A single item will typically include a headline, a snippet of content and a link to your site.

Using an RSS feed reader, anyone who has subscribed to your feed, will be notified when you publish new items to your feed.

There are many RSS feed readers, also known as กaggregatorsก, to choose from. I started off with กFeedReaderก, which is a freeware application for Windows.

Get it at:

http://feedreader.com

After trying out a few other readers, Iกve now settled on กFeedDemonก which was written by Nick Bradbury, the creator of TopStyle and HomeSite.

You can get FeedDemon which comes with a 20day freetrial period at:

FeedDemon.com

Hereกs a good list of the readers available:

http://www.2rss.com/readers.php

RSS is published in XML format. All that means is that the extension used is ก.xmlก, without the quotes. So, for example, my new feed is located at:

http://www.netprofitstoday.com/blog/wprss2.php

If you go to that page, without using a reader, youกll see mostly gobbledygook. Look closer and youกll see that the coding starts to make some sense.

Hereกs an example of how a single news กitemก appears on an XML page:

How to Lose 14,000+ List Subscribers Overnight

Not only can you lose a guy in 10 days, you could lose

14,000+ of your subscribers OVERNIGHT. Learn how to avoid making this costly mistake.

http://netprofitstoday.com/_npc/20041214.html#mistake

List Building

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 09:09:07 0800

When you use a feed reader, such as those mentioned above, youกll see the feed in its proper, easytoread format.

To create the XML page, I used กFeed for Allก, an RSS feed creation tool. The กFeed for Allก software also comes with a free trial and is available at: http://feedforall.com/

Hereกs how the item above appears in an RSS reader.

How to Lose 14,000+ List Subscribers Overnight

Not only can you lose a guy in 10 days, you could lose 14,000+ of your subscribers OVERNIGHT. Learn how to avoid making this costly mistake.

The title, กHow to Lose 14,000+ List Subscribers Overnightก, is linked to http://netprofitstoday.com/_npc/20041214.html#mistake which readers can click to read the full article.

So far, so good, but how do you get your feed published so people can read it?

There are a huge number of RSS directory sites. At the top of the heap in a Google search, I found Robin Goodกs กRSSTop55 Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sitesก See it at:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

So, in a nutshell, get a reader, and an RSS creation tool. Create your feed and submit it to the directories.

Traffic to your sites will increase and so will your revenues. Real simple (syndication).

This is a cursory overview of how RSS works. I confess that I did a considerable amount of reading to come to that understanding.

Here are the 2 resources I found most useful:

Paul Shortกs ebook is a comprehensive work on everything you wanted to know about RSS and blogging, and probably more.

http://NetProfitsToday.com/rsspaulshort/

Although it won’t give you a กhowtoRSSก explanation, I also found Dr. Maniกs 41 ideas on how to profit using RSS feeds quite valuable.

http://NetProfitsToday.com/rssdrmani/

© Copyright Rosalind Gardner, All Rights Reserved.

About The Author

Article by Rosalind Gardner, author of the bestselling กSuper Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other Peopleกs Stuff Onlineก. To learn how you too can suceed in Internet and affiliate marketing, go to: http://NetProfitsToday.com.

This article was posted on March 30

by Rosalind Gardner