Simply put, RSS feeds are written in XML, a special mark up language much like html. That means that they have mechanisms included that identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and how that content will be displayed within that document. RSS is what makes big news websites possible: RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to a channel viewer application, commonly called a news reader.

These readers are subscribed to certain RSS feeds and constantly monitor them, alerting the user when every any new information has been added to the feed. So, how can you use this to your advantage as an internet marketer? Here are the most popular ways to integrate RSS feeds into your marketing effort: you can use RSS to replace any email marketing you are currently doing, take advantage of RSS feeds to drive traffic to your blog or sales site or create your own RSS feed so your messages and information show up on thousands of websites, blogs and desktops online.

Although many marketing gurus will claim that email marketing isn't dead, with the advent of increasing spam complaints and filters coupled with the threat of viruses originating from an email, more and more people are leery of even opening your email. So even if you have a large email list, the likelihood of your emails being opened is becoming increasingly slim.

With RSS, your messages won't ever get filtered and have a much higher chance of actually being read vs. a typical email. And your marketing results can only be better when people actually read your message. You can even incorporate autoresponders in conjunction with RSS.

Including RSS feeds on your content site or blog allows you to add fully dynamic theme-related content to your web pages making your site or blog very popular with the search engines. The constantly updated content is exactly what the search engines crave and helps increase your search engine ranking, driving more traffic to your page.

Probably the best way to use RSS to help your online marketing efforts is to create your own RSS feed. This way your information will be published on any website that is using the RSS feed you are supplying that information to. There's even automated software to submit your RSS feeds to the various directories that supply the feeds to marketers using them as described above.

RSS is still a relatively unknown method of driving traffic to websites, but is becoming more popular every day. As an internet marketer, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of this new technology before the rest of the online gurus jump on the bandwagon.