Today’s marketer knows that they need to have a lot of weapons in their marketing arsenal. For a lot of industries and types of information, RSS plays a critical role and offers a much-lauded additional channel of communication.
No longer do marketers have to create a separate email newsletter AND RSS feed. You can use the Dog’s set of tools to simultaneously publish your email newsletters and your RSS feeds. It’s like 2-for-the-price-of-1 and your birthday all rolled into one.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. RSS is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites. In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.
Why Marketers Should Care
It gives subscribers a choice, plus in many cases, saves subscribers time by helping them get them the information they want quickly. There are millions of RSS users who read RSS feeds in addition to their email and it’s another important channel of readership to explore!
What the Subscriber Needs
In order to view RSS content, the subscriber needs to either download a special program, called an RSS reader, or use a web-based RSS reader through one of the web sites already providing this service free of charge. They come installed on all the latest browsers (like IE and Firefox).After installing an RSS reader or registering at a web-based RSS reader web service, the user needs to proactively add the link of your RSS feed in to their reader to view your content. Every time you update your RSS feed (add new content items to the RSS file), the user is notified by that through their RSS reader, making the content immediately available to them, without it having to face any SPAM filters and other barricades on the way.
Other Cool RSS Uses
Delivering content to end-users is not everything that RSS offers. Syndicate your content through other web sites, thus generating more exposure, traffic and recognition. Promote your RSS feed through various specialized RSS search engines and directories. These will generate even more fresh and high-quality traffic, the people that are actually interested in your content and your products. Use your RSS feed to increase your search engine rankings.
How to Get Started
For clients with RSS enabled, it’s a snap to get started and maintain your Feeds. The first thing you’d need to do is create a “Feed” for your new subscription. Creating Feeds in your account is quick and easy. Once you create the feed, there will be a unique URL associated with the feed. You’d post this URL (accompanied with the recognizable RSS icon we give you) on your website. Once you’ve created a feed you can start assigning campaigns to the feed with one-click! You don’t have to create a special message for the feed (unless you want to) and you don’t have to do anything special on your website other than post the link. We do all the work for you!
