Content Marketing Today

RSS Is Really Simple Syndication. No, It Really Is Simple!

Want to understand RSS?  Think of the Associated Press.

Like many Web 2.0 applications, RSS may seem more complicated than it really is.  It’s one of those three letter acronyms (or TLA’s for those in the know) that seem unknowable by normal people at first.  But it is both simpler and more powerful than you might think.

To put RSS in context it’s the 21st-century version of the Associated Press.  For anyone reading newspapers, especially local newspapers, you will notice that many of the articles you read come from the AP.  That’s because your local newspaper cannot afford the reporting staff to write comprehensively about the broad range of topics you would expect to find in any newspaper.  In Southwest Florida, our business sections often are 90 to 100% derived from syndicated stories from the AP.

Until recently, even on the web, if you wanted to pull in outside content to your website you were limited to syndicators such as the AP.  But that was an expensive proposition.  Moreover, major national newspapers had little interest in making it easy for other websites to provide additional outlets for their content.  Today, that has all changed as newspapers with national reputations such as the New York Times actively encourage you to pull in RSS feeds.

   T

Similarly , individual websites, including bloggers, had no easy way to distribute content across the web other than by providing an eNewsletter in the hope that lots of people would subscribe. 

Thanks to RSS, both problems are solved.  Here are the three basic functions you can fulfill using RSS software such as FeedBurner.com.

1. To consume external information: sign up for an external feed from reliable, nationally known sources such as the New York Times–or from your favorite bloggers.  The easiest way to consume is to sign up for a ‘ reader’ from Google, newsgator.com or bloglines.com. They are all free and enable you to pull in RSS feeds from any source and to organize them in a logical way.  This enables you to peruse the information that interests you quickly and to drill down to stories that are of particular interest.  In effect you are creating your own customized newspaper.
2. To aggregate external information: If you want your website to include content in addition to that which you provide, you can aggregate content by placing RSS feeds on your blog.  Feedburner.com is my favorite although there are some others. This is made very easy in applications such as WordPress through basic widgets.  These make it a no-brainer to broaden the range of information you make available to your Web visitors.  This is essentially what newspapers have been doing for years thanks to the AP.  Once again, however, it’s free.
3. To provide information to other people, blogs, and websites: By placing an RSS link prominently on your site, you enable anyone to pull information from your site–and to be notified automatically when you have posted new stories.  Your users can choose to pull your information into a newsreader or to receive updates by e-mail.  In my own case, the number of people who have signed up for an RSS feed to ContentMarketingToday.com now almost equal number of eNewsletter subscribers.  All of this has happened passively by people who choose to receive the RSS feed.

Summing up: thanks to RSS, you can now become an information consumer, aggregator or provider quickly and easily. RSS is one of the best examples of Web 2.0 because it enables all of us both to consume and to provide relevant content and will power conversations.