1 Comment Written by Andrew Bonar on November 18, 2008 – 10:23 am

Well you must have come across the term RSS, and maybe you have decided it’s some geeky technical tool and of no real interest to you or your visitors.

If that is the case then you are missing out on an extremely powerful free marketing tool. When publicized properly and combined with a blog that has good content, you are on a guaranteed route to ‘viral’ success. There is no marketing more stylish than organic marketing, and this is organic marketing at its best.

As DeWitt Clinton states “RSS, as a representation of an idea, is perhaps the single most influential cultural shift of the post-2001 technical and business community. RSS is the embodiment of the notion of sharing and syndication. Businesses will do well to heed the lessons being taught by people like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble.”

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary depending who you ask. What no one argues about is that it’s a means of providing content syndication to others. It gives you the ability to automatically republish an article, possibly just a headline or even an image, by another application such as a website, online newspaper or blog.

You can include all manner of applications including audio and video in your syndicated content. This puts you in control, and hundreds of thousands of sites are already providing headline, article summaries, sound and video clips under all sorts of licensing agreements utilising this technology.

Having an RSS feed is a means of creating publicity for your website, and its power should not be underestimated. It may simply be a headline as I stated previously or it may include a summary and photos of the latest posting. The term Rich Site Summary comes from the fact you can provide a rich multimedia experience via rss, providing not just a summary of content but include images or video too.

An RSS document, often called a “feed”  or “channel,” includes meta-data such as publishing dates and authorship. Therefore web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically with certain information. The originating publisher maintains complete control of content at all times.

The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website, and it’s normal practice for the website displaying your content to a include a link to the source website.

RSS and Internet Marketing

The RSS concept was born at Netscape. They developed the system, intending it to be used for customization of personal homepages - creating links to web pages that interested them as a kind of advanced website bookmarking tool.

The use of RSS as an Internet marketing tool was the last thing on the mind of RSS technology developers. That does not in any way denigrate their power as marketing medium.

Major Corporations intending to use RSS for marketing their products and services would consider partnering with email account providers, (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo etc); networking websites (e.g. Myspace, Multiply, Bebo, Hi5); websites of newspapers and television network websites (e.g. FT.com, CNN) and the like. That does not mean small business cannot harness the power of rss.

Small business owners and e-tailers should also consider social media and networking websites, as well as creating blogs on free networks (e.g. Blogspot, Blogger) and websites of clubs and organizations that would probably make use of their products or services. For example, a sports shop can look for the website of their local running/athletics club for possible RSS marketing.

RSS & Beyond

There is a slight deviation from the RSS standard, and that is the Atom Feed. The differences are somewhat technical, however if you are in the web publishing business for financial profit, looking to syndicate a lot of rich multimedia content then you may wish to consider the Atom standard.  Technically it offers everything already covered in this article, however there are a few small variations in the standard, that I would personally consider improvements especially for the commercial sector.

Not least of which is the ability to include copyright/licensing information with your feed. There are some other fundamental differences if you want to see a ‘feature comparison’ table then check out Noori’s blog post here: http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2006/08/feeds-rss-vs-atom.html

Getting started

Check back in the next few days for the next part of this article telling you how to get started by implementing RSS feeds on your site and then promoting them online. SO whether you are running a Blogger blog or hosted wordpress, Joomla or still have a nuke based site we will point you in the right direction for syndicating your content and getting your content the widest possible coverage.