Very simply… If you want to reach the largest audience possible for your online content, you need to be using RSS feeds and taking full advantage of all they have to offer. Through a series of articles I want to walk you through the basics of RSS, how to start using it, and how to make sure the largest audience possible is able to access it.

• Do you want your content published as widely as possible?
• Do you want credit for your content?
• Do you want traffic driven back to your site?

One of the easiest ways to do all of these things is through RSS feeds.

How RSS Works

Before getting into how to publish with RSS, or even what it is, let’s talk about why we want to use RSS and how it will benefit you.

RSS allows people to subscribe to your content.

When a visitor likes a site, they can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed and get updates the minute new content is added. The publisher of the content doesn’t have to do anything.

The subscribers to an RSS feed can easily read dozens of sites in a short amount of time using RSS Feed Readers, like google reader, newsgator, bloglines, etc. How these service work is a whole other topic, but if you are unfamiliar with the concept, just know that RSS readers allow the subscriber to your site to be updated automatically and instantly. Your audience not only receives your newest content, they get it hand delivered without having to remember to go to your site. As long as they are subscribed to your feed, they will receive your updates.

How do I publish my site with RSS?

The good news is that you probably already are, whether you even know what RSS is or not. Any of the major blogging or social networking platforms have this built in on some level:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Typepad
• Moveable Type
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Myspace

If you signed up for it and started a free account, post any type of content to it and it allows you to share things with other people, it very likely has an RSS feed somewhere.

If you have a strictly HTML site, there are ways to create your own RSS feeds. There is software out there that will do it. Although, the point of RSS is to make your new content available. An unchanging website won’t have a need for RSS anyway. The easiest way to start would be to go go join one of those sites. Start a blog and start writing. It takes all of five minutes to set-up and most of them are free.

How Will People Know to Use the RSS Feed?

Many visitors to your site will already know about RSS and will be looking for it. To allow people to subscribe, you just need to provide a link to your feed. If you see this image in your address bar,

then you can simply click on that and it should give you options for subscribing to the RSS feed. People who know about this will already know how to look for that link.

But most visitors will not know that they can do this. I suggest adding your own link because it makes your feed easier to find and easier to use. Plus, you might just make someone ask, “What is this ‘Subscribe to RSS’ link mean? I should check that out.”

Each setup will be slightly different. WordPress sites generally have feeds for any section of a site by typing “/feed” after the URL. For example the feed for “http://mywordpressblog.com” would be “http://mywordpressblog.com/feed”. If there are categories, you can add “http://mywordpressblog.com/mycategory/feed” and get a feed for that category.

Some sites are a little more complex. I have chosen to pass the Jules Cafe feed through the Feedburner service. It turned the Jules Cafe feed address into “http://feeds2.feedburner.com/julescafe”. My own personal site became “http://feeds2.feedburner.com/martythornley”.

Whatever service you use, there should be a way to find out what your RSS feed’s address is. Once we know that, we just make a link to that URL, just like any other link.

You can use just plain text:

<a href="http://mywebsite.com/feed">Subscribe to My RSS Feed</a></pre>

or give it a catchy background image:

<a href="http://mywebsite.com/feed"><img src="http://mywebsite.com/images/myicon.jpg"/></a>

but make it easy to find.

As an example of simple text links,  you can:

• Use This Link to Subscribe to JulesCafe’s RSS Feed.
• Or Use This Link to Subscribe to Marty’s RSS Feed.

The benefits of sharing your content are huge. An expanded audience, increased traffic back to your site, link building that can benefit SEO and an increased brand awareness.

Some resources for further reading:

• What is RSS?
• Much longer, much more technical RSS Tutorial
  
• Using RSS to increase your traffic

In the next article, “Publish Your Content with RSS PArt 2” I will talk about what happens to your content now that you have published an RSS feed: Where it might go, who might read it and the possibility that you might see it again on someone else’s site… That’s right RSS can be republished and reused. But before you get worried about content theft, let me just tell you that having your content republished is always a good thing and possibly even a great thing.