Traffic Building - Using RSS

RSS. What is that? Well, it is just an acronym for "Really Simple Syndication", or a method for syndicating the content of a web site. A few years back, nobody heard of RSS. But now, numerous blogs and other sites are offering RSS feed and the term RSS is becoming more and more common. the question then is, will an RSS feed do anything to improve your web site traffic? This chapter will bring you up to speed about RSS and help you decide if it might be a good addition to your traffic building strategy.

You might ask, what is an RSS file? An RSS file is just another version of a web page, written in a code meant to be read by a program called a "parser". Although a RSS file can be written by hand, just like an HTML page, most RSS files are built or written by a website's content management system. Why is this so? This is because the purpose of an RSS file is to provide quick and up-to-date information from a website.

The real benefit of having an RSS feed is that some site visitors are more likely to regularly read your posts (in the case of a blog) if they can read them in an RSS reader. Here are also a few ideas of what you can do with your RSS feed. First, you can offer blog updates by email if a person subscribes to your feed through a service like FeedBlitz (http://www.feedblitz.com) or FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com). Second, you can send broadcast emails to your mailing list by attaching an RSS feed to your autoresponder. Using this method you can actually publish a newsletter based solely on your blog posts, scheduling a broadcast each time you have a certain number of new entries.

All said and done, the key benefit of RSS feeds is convenience. If you make it easy for your site visitors to keep reading your content, and the content is of a certain quality, you're more likely to keep visitors coming for more. Word of mouth about your fabulous content may also spread like wild fire bringing more visitors to your site. We all know it is cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one, and an RSS feed provides an easy way to keep those visitors reading your site.