When it come to internet marketing I tend to look for easy to understand solutions. One thing is clear from my December downloads, RSS is becoming more and more important and easier to understand and use - though I think the real explosion will happen when Internet Explorer arrives with a built in RSS reader. Of course for those of us sensible enough to switch to Firefox that has been a reality for a while now.
RSS if you are new to the term apparently means Really Simple Syndication - which means an easy way to publish news feeds and blogs on other sites. You will have seen that many portals like Yahoo, MSN and Google publish news feeds from a variety of sources - RSS is the protocol that enables them to take that news feed or blog and publish it on their web site - and now you can do exactly the same without having to lean any complex programming languages.
If this is beginning to lose you - can I suggest that you go to my web site where I am building pages now to explain and demonstrate the importance of RSS and Blogging and how all businesses should be taking advantage of this new technology. If you already are ahead - you will know that the real shortcoming of a Blog like this is getting people to read it. Well I discovered that there are some free services around that make it a five minute task to publish your Blog on your web site.
Some of the services are simpler that others but these are the three I recommend you have a look at.
RapidFeeds - This is a real all round site which provides a wide range of RSS solutions all free. You can set up your own feeds - So for example you could create a feed notifying readers when ever you change a page on your your web site.
You can creade the code to publish any RSS or Atom feed on your web site. This site offers a choice of different codes - PHP, ASP, Javascript of iFrames. Personally I found the Javascript from here a bit unweildly compared to other sites, but I really like the iFrames. Click here to see this blog published in iFrames on my site which you can see allws me to diaplay items in a small scrollable box.
RSS-to-Javascript.com provides a simple script building service. Just complete a couple of fields and copy the script to your web page in the body of the html - no need to put anything into the header. I had a a few problems getting the beta services that provide scrolling and boxes - but I am sure the bugs will be gone pretty soon. Again Click here to see this blog displayed using this java script - you will need to scroll down the page a bit.
Feed2JS.com is an academic site which provides a similar service - though I found it a little less user friendly - then thats the nature of academic sites - and it seemd to have a problem with my feed however a number of site owners I know are using it with no problems.
Incidentally if you look over on the side panel of this blog - assuming you are reading it in Blogger - you will see that I have also published my web site RSS feed there - so every time I update this blog, it creates new content on my site and every time I update any page on my web site - new content is posted to this blog. Great news.
Rikki
Professional Speaker
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