Simple Ways to Add RSS to Your Site
by Paul Galloway
http://www.paulgalloway.com

I've never been an "early adopter" of technology, generally preferring to use "time-tested" solutions. So while I've been hearing about RSS (really simple syndication) for awhile, I never took the time to explore it.

However, after hearing someone crediting that technology with tripling their traffic and "opt-ins", I decided it was time to give it a serious look.

RSS is a "news feed" technology -- if you point your "RSS Reader" at a specific "RSS Feed" URL, you'll get back a list of available "news items" and possibly a summary of the content of each item.

If you have an "RSS Feed" file on your site (don't worry, it's not complicated!), the "News Aggregators" will come back to your site regularly looking for new items in the feed.

For example, I have a site where authors can submit their articles about home/small business. I've now made it so anytime a new article is submitted (and approved by myself), the title and description of that article is added to the news feed on my site.

The news feed file is very similar to an HTML file, but more strictly structured. It's an "XML" document. You can see an example (from my article site) here:

http://www.businesstoolchest.com/rss/articles.xml

If you skip past th "channel" information, you'll see that each "item" has a "link", a "title", and a "description".

Anyone who points their RSS reader to this URL will get a list of articles, their description (summary), and the link to visit for the full article text!

But you don't need an "article" site to use RSS -- anytime you add a page to your site, you can add an "item" to your RSS feed to be picked up by RSS readers.

And you don't have to code the RSS Feed by hand! Here's a very cool little RSS Feed generator program. It's free:

http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/listgarden/

With this software you just fill in the blanks (URL, Title, Description) and it will create the XML file for you. You then upload the file to your site and VOILA! you have an RSS feed!

Now, just because you HAVE an RSS feed doesn't mean anyone will know -- you're going to have to announce it to some of the RSS directories . . .

A couple of the big ones are:

http://www.syndic8.com

http://www.bloglines.com

If you really want some good information, check out Joe Vitale and Laura Childs new book here:

http://www.stampedesecret.com

(This is NOT an affiliate link, by the way!)

This is NOT a cheap book, and I'm sure there's LOTS of free information available on the 'net -- but for me it was worth the time saved to get the book.

Now, here's something that wasn't in the book (I don't think) -- if you're using the Aweber autoresponder service, you can have any "broadcast" email added to an RSS feed hosted by Aweber!

For instance, the RSS feed URL for BizTools Brief is:

http://www.aweber.com/z/rss/?botce

And all "archived" issues are here:

http://www.aweber.com/z/article/?botce

So you can have your own RSS feed by just sending broadcast emails through the Aweber service -- it just doesn't get any easier than that!

Paul

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Paul Galloway is an Internet Marketing Technology
consultant and a sofware developer. He can be
reached via phone at 352-307-8530 or via the contact form on his website: http://www.paulgalloway.com
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