Internet and Web Marketing Tools

Here is an introduction to building rss feeds. By creating an rss feed from your website you can communicate with subscribers regularly without waiting for them to visit your website.

How To Build RSS Feeds

You can easily build RSS feeds if you know how. RSS is a method that you can use to syndicate or distribute your content. So for example if you have a web site with useful content it is a way of distributing those links to your content that will allow others access to it. People with RSS readers can easily read your content without actually visiting your web site. The way this works is that they subscribe to your RSS feed using the RSS reader and they view the content directly from the RSS reader.

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The Internet is a race ? a race to see who can acquire the most content on their website or blog in the shortest period of time. Whether it?s text, images, data or video; the sites who obtain the most content are the ones who will generate the most traffic and ultimately sell for millions of dollars to larger corporation like Yahoo, Google, Fox or Microsoft.

Let?s look at MySpace, which sold to Fox a few months ago for 580 million and YouTube, which recently sold to Google for $1.65 billion. How was it possible that these sites were so valuable and sold for that much money? Well, it comes down to many factors but one of the primary reasons is the breadth of content that both of these sites contain. MySpace, an online social networking community, has generated well over 120 million members and YouTube has already grown to serve more than 100 million video views per day and receiving more than 65,000 new video uploads daily ? this is why!

Looking at what these two sites have done in such a short period of time is simply amazing and it?s going to be very difficult for any of us to produce the same results in 20 years that both MySpace and YouTube have done in only a few short ones. Now don?t get discouraged because there are still many websites and blogs that are popular, receiving great exposure and valued at well over a million dollars.

As I state in many of my articles, it all comes down to content. These larger companies look for websites or blogs that will generate more exposure for their company. The more content you have on your website or blog the more traffic you?re going to receive and the more your website or blog is going to be desired and valued.

Ok, so how do you get to that point?

It truly depends on your business model and how your website or blog is structured but a great way is through RSS. RSS, Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is an XML-based format that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content through the use of data feeds.

RSS makes it easy to take another site?s content and feed it directly to yours. As an example, let?s say I took Yahoo!?s Sports RSS feed and added it to my website. Every time they posted a new sports article or story it would be updated on my site as well, a concept that was a revolutionary breakthrough for the Internet a few short years ago. Now websites can grow their content, at an increasing rate, without having to write the information on their own.

In my opinion, this idea will continue to drive the Internet and will thrive for many years to come. If you want to increase your exposure on the Internet, then you must focus to increase the amount of content that?s on your site. If you setup and automated RSS feed to pull data from other sites into yours then you will be increasing your chances on the Internet. By doing this, you can potentially generate thousands or millions of pages in a few short years.

But like I said, it really depends on your business model and how your website or blog is structured. For example, maybe it doesn?t make sense to pull other site?s data into your site. Maybe it makes more sense to push your data to other sites and increase your exposure that way. If this is the case, then you should be the one setting up RSS feeds so other website owners can pull your data to theirs. There are many ways to organize the type and amount of data you?d like to provide as to organize it in a way that will meet your needs for how you?d like to distribute the information.

So as you can see the possibilities of RSS are endless. RSS can be used to feed data to or from your website or blog and if setup correctly can increase your exposure on the Internet in a short period of time. If you want to win the race, then you should consider setting up or accepting RSS feeds for your website or blog today.

At Hudson Horizons, we provide website design, development, content management, e-commerce integration, RSS content distribution, search engine optimization, e-marketing services and the development of custom applications such as blogs, newsletter systems, online payment solutions and any other Web application that may be needed to help simplify your business.

Hudson Horizons is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing and SEO services for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be “The New Light for e-Business.” By offering new, innovative and extremely competitive products and solutions to our clients, we provide better ways to run and operate a business online.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Daryl_H._Bryant

Bloggers and online marketers are forever trumpeting the wonders of blogs as a business and marketing tool. But blogs will only be able to live up to the dreams of its disciples if they start being read by average Joe from the mass market. Some work still needs to be done if RSS and blogs are to be pushed over the tipping point and become the widely used marketing machine that everybody believes/hopes they will be.

RSS is going to need a charm offensive before people in the street even know what it is, let alone start using it. You only have to look at the makeup of the top 50 most popular blogs (mainly about gadgets, politics and marketing) to know that the mass market have yet to start reading blogs in their great numbers. Or maybe there is just a huge gap for blogs on paying your mortgage and cutting your credit card bills that nobody has spotted?

At a recent ?Beers and Innovation? event in London the future of RSS and blogging was discussed and it was universally declared, as per usual, how fantastic they are. The speakers also all agreed that their growth amongst the non-web savvy would continue to stall until RSS becomes more accessible and easier to use. Hopefully, when Internet Explorer 7 launches later this year it will go some way to correcting this problem.

Even when the hurdle of accessibility is cleared there are still other problems preventing RSS from becoming a business tool that can be effectively managed.

As any marketer will tell you, ?You can?t monetise what you can?t measure,? and this is an issue faced by RSS/web feeds. It?s virtually impossible to know exactly how many people are subscribed to your feed, let alone how many are actually reading your posts.

There are so many different aggregators and methods of capturing RSS content that there is currently no way of compiling all your data into a central reporting function, as with email. This makes it tricky for marketers arguing their case for the extra funding needed for this radical new marketing tactic. There is simply currently no way of measuring the ROI of blogging in traditional quantifiable terms (other than organic SEO and increased traffic of course).

RSS will soon be far easier to use, which will help it to start reaching out to the non-web savvy. If you can bookmark a site then you will be able to click on a button to save its feed in your browser. But developing a universal standard of tracking your blog?s subscription and readership - with the level of reporting offered by email - might still hold back its tipping point amongst businesses for a while yet.

Please visit http://www.thewritewords.me.uk for more information about my business blogging services and the answer to all your web content needs.

Thanks for reading,

Matt.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matt_Ambrose