The RSS Advantage

I’ve just read an impassioned blog posting from Matt Ambrose about what RSS needs to do to reach the ‘tipping point’. In it Matt brings up some valid points. I posted my comments on his blog so I will not go into them here. One of the points that he brought up is the lack of awareness by the general public about RSS. I will admit that I couldn’t see the advantages of RSS until I actually started using it earlier on this year; today it has become an indispensable tool in my everyday life.

I have been ‘aware’ of RSS since 2004 so why did I wait until this year to look into it. Well first of all the acronym put me off! Three letter acronyms are rife in the Information Technology business. Talk to any techie and immediately he’ll start spouting off his little acronyms (HTML, XML, CRM, ERM, ERP, BI….. zzzzzz …. zzzz….) See what I mean? Just the use of the acronym implied complexity (and I am a tech guy). Consider the MP3 acronym. How many people do you know walk around and say, “Hey, checkout my new MP3 player!”? Very few, but you will hear them saying, “Hey, checkout this brand new iPod!” A further enforcement of this principle is the term “Podcasting”

The tipping point for RSS will come when one newsreader becomes prevalent and so popular that RSS will become synonymous with that newsreader application. Like Kleenex is to tissue paper, Hoover is to vacuum cleaner and more recently Google is to Internet search.

I can’t wait until that day, so what can we do to move it forward?

Technorati Tags: RSS Promotion

There is no rocket science involved in this RSS promotion technique. It is extremely simple and Yahoo even tells you how to do it on their RSS submission page. You will need a My Yahoo account to do this - if you don’t have one, no problem, they provide you with a link on the submit page so you can sign up. (It’s free so everyone can afford it - and you get another email address to play around with too).

1. Sign into your My Yahoo account and then go back to the submission page.
2. Enter your RSS feed URL into the text box provided and click on the “Add” button.
3. Now subscribe to your own feed to get your RSS feed added into Yahoo’s RSS directory.

By the way Yahoo’s RSS publisher guide is worth taking a look at and they provide some good guidelines.

Technorati Tags: RSS Promotion

The second step to promoting your feed is to release it into the wild by submitting it to RSS directories. This is identical to the process of submitting your web site to the search engine directories.

1. Get onto your favorite search engine and search for “RSS Directory”
2. Select some of the top results and go to the directory website.
3. Find the submit link, click on it and submit your site’s feed URL.

Many of the more popular directories require some form of manual validation that you are a real person before you can submit your feed URL to prevent people from using automated submission tools.

I will keep you posted as and when I find reliable RSS directories and/or RSS feed submission tools.

So you have gone ahead and implemented RSS on your website. Now what? Just creating your feed will not increase traffic to your site. You need to make people aware of your feed, how else are they going to subscribe?

The first step in RSS promotion is to advertise your RSS feed on your own site. To do this place the some sites place a small link on every page that takes the visitor to a main RSS page that lists all of their feeds and the formats they are available in. Other sites place the RSS logo or buttons on the side of the page and also add “chicklet” graphics for people using web based portal readers like My Yahoo. If you have the space available it is advisable to add these “chicklets” because most of web portal based users are not even aware of what RSS is even though they use it.

This is a list of popular icons used to promote an RSS feed on a site:

1. the older and uglier way
   
   
2. the new way of identifying an RSS feed. The latest generation of web browsers also display this icon in their address bar like this:
   
3. Chicklets are used to by web portal readers to subscribe your feed
   
   

Select an area of your web page where you can place a small list of the most popular icons or images so that people can identify that you have an RSS feed available.

Technorati Tags: RSS Promotion; Publishing RSS feeds