Use RSS to your Maximum Advantage

I am sure, you must have heard about RSS and must also be using it for various tasks in your website. Here are some simple tips to use RSS to your maximum advantage.

Use it for appropriate content

If your website is updated with content on various topics, updating your RSS with the latest changes is very important. But in the process make sure that you provide RSS for the content which would add value to your subscribers and will keep them subscribed. Updating your RSS with junk will result in people un-subscribing from your feeds. It’s really important to provide latest content via your RSS feeds.

Don’t limit it to just RSS

Don’t forget those millions of people, who do not yet know what RSS is all about. Decade old emails and newsletters are still widely preferred mediums of delivering updates. Use RSS as an additional value added service with option of receiving updates through emails and newsletters also. Use free services such as Feedburner’s Email Subscription Service to deliver updates using emails. Let your visitors see a form on your website to subscribe to receive updates through email.

Automate feed creation

Don’t spend time in generating and updating your feeds every time you update the content. Use one of those freely available tools and services to automate RSS feed creation for your web site. Almost every blogging software, content management system has RSS generator built-in, but for non-blogging, corporate, business and static sites, prefer to use an automation service and provide fresh feeds on your site.

Stay with the latest

With different versions of RSS to choose from, stay with the latest and most widely used version, if possible. Most of us use freely available online readers and tools to subscribe and these tools always follow the latest specification of RSS. So you must stay updated too.

Follow the buzz

Watch out for latest on RSS feeds and what different companies are doing with their RSS feeds to the maximum advantage. Some use it for posting updates on latest content, job posting, product updates, inventory updates etc..

Subscribe and learn

Don’t always expect others subscribing to your feeds, subscribe yourself to important feeds on your areas of interest and keep yourself updated too. RSS feeds are not only for your visitors but for you too!