RSS - Really Simple Syndication

By Jamie Holt | June 5, 2008 .

I had a few questions just recently about RSS…what is it?.. and how it can be used in the afffiliate marketing business…

Well first off, here is the WikiPedia answer:

What I don’t want you to do is see that dribble above and worry, or worse..believe that RSS ain’t for you or you don’t need it. Well let me tell ya….RSS is charged up and ready to rumble. I love it….

It is the holy grail of what internet marketers are looking for at all times.. fresh content. With just a little bit of work, you can have constantly updating content on your site(s) each and every day. If it isn’t your own RSS feed, you can have fresh everytime someone posts new content on their blog, you will have a live Pheed of content in snippets to your aggregator for your RSS.

Let’s say for example, you have a squidoo lens you just created in a niche, and you also have a blog in that same niche. Now I know from personal experience that squidoo lenses are something done in one big blast of working and updating them regularly can be a pain, especially if you’re like me and have 100+.. some just get neglected.

But over at squidoo you have the RSS feed module that you can add to your lense… and this is where it gets interesting.. take a look:

This above is the RSS feed module over at squidoo, …do you see that top box where it says… what URL would you like to pull RSS from?..

You would simply copy and paste your RSS feed into there.. but Jamie I hear you ask…… how do I get my feed?… read on star..

Alot of blogging platforms will provide you with a simple atom feed at the bottom of your blog, like in blogger for example you will see subscribe to posts: atom at the bottom of your page..which will allow people to subscribe.. but for super crazy, high powered RSS pheed.. you should use FeedBurner.com.. simply go there and then enter your blog URL into the red highlighted bit in the picture below:

Simply enter your blog URL in, click next and follow the instructions to create your very own RSS super feed. From there you will name your feed, choose chicklets to add to your site for people to subscribe in the reader of their choice etc.

E-mail subscription option for your site visitors and more importantly..stats for your feed as it progresses along.. you cankeep a running total of subscribers to your feed, when it drops off, when it picks up.. all manenr of info on your feed.

But the real benefit from all this for me, is the fact that when you update your main blog, like a central hub type thing, anywhere you have your RSS feed published on your own network, will get fresh content in either snippets or full. So you post on your blog and the squidoo lens that you just added your feed to gets fresh content.. which means a good reason for the search engines to crawl and give you more exposure .. never a bad thing.

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