When you send an email (and the key word here is "send") you are "pushing" that email from your email software into someone's inbox. That 'someone' didn't necessarily ask for the email or go searching for the email -- it was, in a sense, "pushed" on them. Put yourself on the receiving end of that scenario for a second. You may receive well over 100 emails every day; some of them are from friends, family, business associates, etc. and are welcomed and the senders understand that you welcome their email, but the vast majority of those daily emails are probably not only not requested or welcomed, the majority of them are, no doubt, junk mail or spam: someone trying to sell you something you have no interest in buying.
An RSS feed works just the opposite of that "pushy" email. As an example lets say you write a brilliant post in your blog, if you have the capability of RSS syndication (syndication simply means that you are publishing the article, i.e., making it available) you can make that post available to anyone who wants it.
Those people who, on a regular basis, want to read your blog posts will either have already 'subscribed' to your RSS feed or they will have that option. For those who have subscribed to your RSS feed, the blog post will automatically appear (it will be 'pulled' rather than 'pushed') on a special reader (called an aggregator) that they use to read your RSS feed, and all of the other RSS feeds they subscribe to.
What Makes RSS Really Something Special
The previous example was of a blog post. Mainly because the majority of blog sites offer RSS as a standard feature but, in reality, any kind of information can be syndicated through RSS; that includes, of course, any information relating to your business web site as well. You can send notifications of upcoming sales, articles that promote your product or service, your weekly newsletter, chapters from an e-book . . . well, you get the picture, anything that will help you keep your customers (those who subscribe to your RSS feed) coming back and promote new ones.
How to Get RSS Capability
There are two sides to this story, receiving RSS Feeds and making your 'information' available to RSS readers (aggregators).
Receiving RSS feeds is simply a matter of downloading an RSS reader and subscribing to the RSS feeds you want to see. Many RSS readers are available for free -- just 'Google' "RSS reader" and you'll find a large selection of RSS readers. Search again for "RSS directories" and you'll find a virtual world of offerings.
Making your information available to RSS is also, in most cases, a freebie through your website's host software. If your site's host does not offer RSS or if you host your own website there is a good supply of RSS Publishing software available -- much of it for free -- just 'Google' "RSS Publishing"
Now that you have the capability of syndicating your information -- whatever information you choose -- there is one more step to get your RSS feed visible to those people with RSS readers, publicize it!
Either manually list your RSS feeds on several RSS directories or list your RSS feed with services that do that job for you. There are many of these RSS listing services but here are three that you can start with:
Each of these will list your RSS feed with multiple directories. An RSS feed, listed in a directory, will lead people who are searching for the types of products or services you offer right to you; that's called targeted traffic and for a business website there is nothing better.
Turning Your Website Into a Dynamic Website
Now that you have targeted traffic and the increased sales that brings, lets get a little more income potential:
Step 1 is adding Google Adsense (and/or one of its competitors) code on your site. You'll earn cash every time a visitor clicks one of their ad links.
Step 2 is adding RSS feeds of targeted information to your website.
Think about this: a visitor comes to your page once, reads what you have there, buys or doesn't and goes away. If that visitor comes back and you have the same information there, that's probably the last time you'll see him or her. If, however, your website has constantly changing content, you're likely to see visitors coming back (and perhaps buying) again and again.
With some of the RSS publishing software you will have the capability of adding several RSS feeds to your website turning it into a truly dynamic website, One such free service is called "Carp." Carp can be downloaded (as a zip file) from geckotribe.com
After downloading Carp (or one of the other programs that enable you to add RSS feeds to your website) and following their instructions you'll be able to add on-topic RSS feeds to your website and, as a result, keep the visitors coming back and the sales coming in.
It is also true that by simply combining customer reviews with RSS feeds, you too can ride a new wave of shopping (or social) traffic.
Traffic! It is the one problem that webmasters continually face, and which can NEVER be fully solved. How to find visitors in a reliable, repeatable, and cost-effective way. Because without visitors all your beautiful content might as well be locked away in a vault--no one is ever going to see it. If the purpose of your site is to sell, you will sell nothing. If the purpose of your site is to build a social network, you might remain its only member. You need traffic to succeed. Lots of it.
In this article I am going to consider just one traffic building initiative--one that happens to be enjoying a growing wave of popularity. It involves harnessing the power of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to build traffic. You are probably aware of RSS as a means of syndicating news content. Websites that produce news have been building XML-formatted news stories for years. These files are retrieved by other websites, the new stories are extracted, and the content is placed (on these publisher sites) before a public ever-hungry for new information. The arrangement has worked well for everyone. Those who have displayed the RSS feeds have gained content to feed their visitors. Those who have produced the RSS feeds have obtained backlinks to their websites, which has helped to bring in new traffic. In fact the arrangement has worked so well that webmasters have been encouraged to move beyond simple news syndication.
This makes a lot of sense. News articles hardly represent the only content that surfers are looking for. Recipes, shopping coupons, MP3s, schedules for local events... The list of possible things that people search for is endless, and if you can provide "new" instances of such information, then RSS represents an ideal means of getting that information in front of the people searching for it. Sure, it used to be the case that everything you wrapped up in an RSS feed had to take a very simple form. Every item in your news feed was reduced to a title, a url (to the source of the information), and a short snippet, or description, to hook the reader. But RSS has sprouted wings over the years and now you can package practically any data structure into a feed that you like. Because of this there is no reason why we cannot suitably package customer reviews into a feed.
But what exactly would we put into an RSS-formatted customer review feed? And is this a good idea? Let me answer the second question first. Yes! It is a very good idea to package customer reviews as RSS feeds. Why? Because if you think about it, a customer review is very much like a news item. It is a packaged opinion that has been released for the express purpose of swaying the mindset of someone who is looking for information on the very topic it addresses, whatever that topic might be. To the person searching for the information, this review is news indeed, and more often than not it is welcome news.
So what should go into the feed? Well, a summary of the review, seems obvious. That can be used as the title element, and a snippet of the review can be used as the description. But there are other elements to a review that we have grown accustomed to over the years, and they can go into the feed too. Pros and cons of the reviewed item can be listed and highlighted. We can put in a numeric rating for several different attributes of the item being reviewed (for example, quality and robustness of the item, its ease of use, value for money, and so on). We can put in images too. Stars to represent the numeric ratings, maybe. A picture of the item. We could even put in a link to the profile of the reviewer if we wanted. When we do these things, the final formatted customer review feed can look very enticing indeed.
Of course, the prospect of collecting reviews, let alone formatting them into RSS feeds might very well seem daunting to the average webmaster. But there are low-cost commercial applications available which will do all of this work for you--for example, the review engine known as Red Queen (see the resource box below). Furthermore, you can now upload customer reviews (in RSS format) to Google Base and make them available to the various Google outlets. Admittedly these are early days for webmasters hoping to profitably hook into Google Base traffic sources, but the prospects are exciting nonetheless.
One thing that seems certain is that customer reviews as RSS feeds represent an as yet untapped opportunity for webmasters. Customer reviews have long been profitably used by big players on the web (Amazon.com being an obvious example) but have not been fully exploited. By coupling this popular opinion-based source of information with the technology of RSS syndication, savvy webmasters who take the reins today are sure to get first mover advantage on this new means of marketing, and build the traffic they need to assure the success of their online businesses. And, of course, there is really no reason why you should not be one of them!
Both Mike Claggett & Stephen Carter are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Mike Claggett has sinced written about articles on various topics from Network Marketing, Prospects and web development. Mike Claggett is the Copy Writer, Content Manager and Editor for . Mike Claggett's top article generates over 2900 views. to your Favourites.
Stephen Carter has sinced written about articles on various topics from The Internet, Web Development and RSS. Stephen Carter is the developer of that allows webmasters to take advantage of the traffic building potential of customer re. Stephen Carter's top article generates over 1900 views. to your Favourites.