Okay, you have a website setup to promote your
books, music, and other products you wish to sell. With a bit of
Internet savvy, you have created an attractive design to catch the
Internet user's eyes, and with your expertise on the subject at hand
you are able to provide thoughtful, provoking content. You are
confident your site is optimized for good search results, with a good
saturation of keywords in your content. Your site is simple to
navigate, fun to read, and yet informative enough to be highly regarded
by engines. You are ready for the world!
Yet, you feel as though what you are doing is not enough. Perhaps you
enjoy a steady increase in traffic through traditional online marketing
means, occasional tweaking of metadata and e-mail advertising. Offline
advertising is not in the budget right now, and you want to try other,
cheaper alternative before delving into pay-per-click advertising. What
else is there to do?
Have you considered creating an RSS feed for your website? If you are
in the business of promoting and selling many products and services,
having an RSS feed attached to your website may be beneficial in
attracting new visitors to your website. RSS stands for Real Simple
Syndication, and it is a specific format for aggregating news and
information to other websites and Internet users who read news through
special aggregators, or readers.
Think of RSS as a distant cousin of the news tickers you see on your
favorite 24-hour news or sports network. As new information is made
public, the wires pick up the story and syndicate the content to
interested third parties seeking information to distribute. An
all-sports network, for example, would select only the most recent
sports news from various syndicates to put on television. RSS works in
a similar way.
Not sure how? Next time you log onto the Internet, take a look at your
start up page, if you use My Yahoo or My MSN or anything similar. What
do you see? Maybe you have updated news bytes from Associated Press or
Reuters, daily comic strips, weather and horoscope, and so on. You
know, of course, that such pages can be customized to show only what
you want to see. If you're interested only in entertainment news, you
would adjust your page so you only receive movie gossip and reviews,
and news from the top entertainment magazines, right? All of this
information is syndicated, and your start up page acts as an
aggregator, collecting only the relevant information you want it to
collect and display.
Now, stay with me, because here's the fun part: by creating an RSS
feed, you can become a syndicate! Say you are a romance author and
offer a series of passionate stories you know romance fans will love.
You can create an RSS feed using news about your books and information
related to writing, the romance genre, and the publishing industry to
create usable content for aggregators. With proper promotion and
distribution, users interested in romance novels can either add your
feed to their private readers, or even their websites, thereby
increasing your exposure. This in turn can increase traffic to your
site, and account for more sales!
Sounds like something you want to do to further promote yourself on the
Internet? If so, great! But if you are new to the concept of RSS and
are not sure how to start, don't fret. Once you learn the basic of
creating and promoting an RSS feed, you will find it is as simple as
creating a website. Here follows a basic step by step for creating a
simple feed. Once you get the hang of RSS content and wish to work with
something more advanced, a good instruction manual on Real Simple
Syndication can help you achieve much more for your books, music, and
products.
For now, though, let's get the basics down pat.
1) Content
Before you even think about messing with RSS software or hand coding
the proper markup language, you need to consider carefully the type of
content you plan to use for your feed. Syndicated content in this
context will differ from standard website content in that it needs to
entice readers to click through to your website and buy your books or
take advantage of your services. If you give too little, readers may
not be interested enough to visit your site. Give too much, and readers
may be overwhelmed, or think they don't have to click your links.
Study RSS feeds that typify what you plan to distribute. Especially if
you are trying to promote a book, a CD, or other items, you want to
look at shopping RSS feeds in particular to see how they are executed.
Think of your content as a 30-second commercial: depending upon the
types of aggregators used to collect your feed data, users may see only
a headline first, so think of one that grab attention. Use easy to
understand language in your content: sharp, peppy and to the point.
Emphasize the purchase links and any sales or discount incentives.
Some RSS aggregators accept code for images, so take advantage of that.
Display your book or CD cover, a picture of your product, or your logo.
For readers that don't aggregate images, be sure to use the ALT option
and describe the item.
Plan ahead for your feed. An RSS feed should be treated as a regular
newswire. So if you feel you do not have enough content to necessitate
a regular feed, consider supplemental information related to your site
and map out when you plan to add new items to your feed. Once you have
a working schedule, now you can into the work of creating your feed and
having some real fun!
2) Creation
If you are completely new to the idea of RSS and have only moderate
skills where website development is concerned, you can still build an
attractive, effective feed for your site. Before you do, bear this one
thing in mind:
An RSS feed is a file hosted on your server, identified by either a
.rss or .xml suffix rather than the .html extension. Most updates to
browsers will allow visitors to see the feed as it is supposed to look
should a link to your feed be clicked. Don't panic, however, if
somebody clicks on your feed link and claims to see "gibberish." They
are likely seeing only the raw code.
Now that you are ready to create a feed, it is highly recommended to
use software designed for this purpose. An Internet search for "RSS
freeware" or "RSS software" will point you in the right direction. I
personally use RSS Builder to create my feeds. It is user friendly and
simple to install. As you learn more about RSS, you may want to test a
few programs before deciding on one to use regularly.
Choose a name for your feed that is indicative of your products or
site. The romance author may want to use romancenovels.rss or
romancebooks.rss, while a freelance consultant may want to try
consultingnews.rss. There's no guarantee having such a name will boost
search referrals, but to have a relevant keyword in the filename may
help readers in their search for content to aggregate.
Check your RSS program to see if there are options to input metadata,
or your feed's description. This is important, as the metadata in a
published feed helps RSS spiders determine the relevancy of your feed
against various searches. As the Internet grows, so does the ability
for search engines to mine things like blogs and feeds for data, so you
want to be thorough in this respect. If the metadata options ask for a
URL and an image logo, provide them.
Now, depending upon your program, you have the options to add and
delete topics, set times for their publication, and to order them by
appearance. This is the heart of the feed, where the information goes.
If you approach this part of RSS creation as would with a weblog, you
will find it remarkably simple.
Each topic is a new post. Depending upon the volume of news you wish to
distribute, you can create new topics daily or several in a day. Don't
give away too much information in your posts. Enticing text should
prompt readers to click through to your main site, where the action
(and point of sale) is. Use keyword rich text to attract those spiders
that mine data from RSS. As your catalog grows, as you write more books
or take on new projects, you will have more material for your feed.
3) Distribution
Once you have a few entries in your feed, now you can upload your RSS
file for readership and distribution. Depending upon the RSS building
software you are using, you may be able to upload directly to your site
using the software. Otherwise you may need to use an FTP program to do
this.
Make sure you know your ID and password for your website, and make sure
the file for the feed is correctly named with the .rss or .xml
extension. Once it's live on your site, check the file in an RSS
aggregator or in a web browser that reads RSS to make sure it is
working to your satisfaction. If so, congratulations! You have just
published an RSS feed.
But, you are not finished yet. In order to help site visitors know that
you have a feed you need to do things. First, you need to place links
on your website indicating that you have a feed. You would do this the
same way you would create a hyperlink to another URL. In the HREF
anchor tag, indicate the full URL of your feed with a note saying
"Subscribe to our RSS feed." You may also want to use a small graphic
to bring attention to your feed. Many sites use a small, orange
rectangle with RSS or XML in white letters, to direct visitors to feeds.
To direct RSS aggregators and spiders to your feed, you will need to
place a LINK REL tag in the HEAD section of your HTML code. It will
look like this (just places carats before and after the tag):
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="Your
RSS URL goes here"
This lets the spider know there is RSS content available.
4) Promote
Once your feed is active, you can actively promote it. A quick Internet
search for "RSS Search Engines" will led you to many resources where
you can submit your feed information. You would submit your feed the
same way you would submit a website, just make sure to provide all
necessary information.
In addition, you may want to consider some viral marketing of your
feed. Include the feed URL in your e-mail signature, or contact other
websites of relevant topics and let them know you have content for
distribution in RSS. Websites similar to yours looking for material may
wish to aggregate your feed and place the content on their sites. You,
in turn, get free exposure and increase your chance for sales.
5) Ping
If you know where to look, there are websites and software available
designed to notify, or "ping," RSS directories and search engines when
a feed is updated. This is believed to expedite the updating process on
their end. The sooner they know new information is available, the
sooner they will mine your feed for data. A quick Internet search for
"RSS pinger" will lead you information on how to regularly notify users
of updates to your feed. Some sources will let you notify several
engines at once, and it can be a helpful tool in your promotion.
From writing content to publicizing your products, using RSS feeds to
enhance your website can be very helpful in increasing exposure to your
books and music, services and products. Syndicate your content and
watch your site traffic, and sales, grow.
Article Source:
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/
step-by-step-rss-feeds-for-new-users-82978.html
About the Author
Kathryn
Lively writes for CINIVA Systems Virginia Beach Website Design.
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