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When you publish your content with RSS, people can subscribe to it. This means they can read it in an RSS reader, like Google Reader. It also means they will get updates whenever you add to your site. This is important because it means you are essentially puching the new content to them, even if they don’t remember to come back to your site.

Who Exactly will be Subscribing to My Site?

It could be only friends and family. It could be some random people who wandered by your site one day. But there are also sites called directories and aggregators which exist to allow people to search for RSS feeds by topic. If your feed has been picked up by one of these sites, you could be exposed to a much wider audience than you think.

Most RSS directories and aggregators allow you to submit your site, so that they become aware of you and your content. After that you don’t have to do anything. Depending on your topic and popularity (much like search engine rankings) your site is now available for anyone searching that site.

How some aggregator sites work

• Some are fully automatic, searching for sites and posts by keyword and pulling in everything that matches.
• Some take specific sites and are automated, pulling every new post from the sites it subscribes to.
• Some allow users to add feeds or suggest feeds.
• Some moderate and choose specific feeds to include.
• Others use even more discrimination and are overseen by editors who pick and choose specific articles they find particularly helpful.

How Jules Cafe Uses RSS

At Jules Cafe, we get our shared articles using RSS. We subscribe to sites we find useful in Google Reader. We organize them and find specific articles that should be passed on, then republish new feeds through Yahoo Pipes. These new feeds are brought into our WordPress site and become all of the shared articles that you see on the site. If we were to copy and paste or in some other way grab content form all of those sites, it would not only be a LOT of work, it would not allow us to automatically include links back to the source, making sure that we give credit for the content and drive traffic back to those sites. RSS allows us to do all of those things and to do it efficiently.

The Power of Being Re-Published

Originally websites were static and lived only on your server, requiring links from the outside world which lead back to your site. The only way for your content to be seen was through direct traffic to your actual site. Now, you can write once and publish it using RSS to several places. A second site can re-publish your feed or an article.

This second site also has RSS feeds, meaning that anyone subscribing to that site can read it, and potentially republish it again. This can happen over and over.

Imagine this… One of your articles was re-published as an article on SiteX with 100 subscribers. One of those subscribers republishes on SiteY with 100 viewers, then SiteZ reuses that with an audience of 100. All you have to do is hit publish on your blog and 300 people just received your article. I kept the number simple for the math, but depending on the sites in question this could easily mean thousands of people exposed to your content. As we will see in Part 3, RSS is able to maintain information about the source of the article and link back to the original source – you. All of these thousands of viewers are being directed back to you and that is a good thing.

The most famous version of this is for a site like Digg or Technorati to get a hold of your site. The ‘Digg Effect’ is what happens when your article lands on the front page of Digg.com and your site is inundated with so much traffic that it can provide a big enough surge in traffic to shut down a site. While shutting down your site is not exactly a desired effect, that is a rare and and unlikely situation. The idea of that much exposure though is a good thing.

Definitions

There is a lot of confusion and misuse of some terms when it comes to shared RSS feeds being re-used. Below are some definitions to clear up some of the differences between who is using RSS and how. Scrapers, Aggregators, Content Thiefs, and individuals who honestly and ethically re-publish content via RSS are not the same things.

• SCRAPING Refers to a technique of very literally scraping the code of a purely html site and creating an RSS feed that was not there or stealing that content and re-using it, without credit or links back to the original site. Most sites do not do this. Most sites use already existing RSS feeds. While still debatable, there is at least the implied idea that people publishing with RSS do WANT their content published. Non RSS sites do not and anyone scraping and creating an RSS feed from that site is very blatantly stealing.
• SPLOGS (Spam Blogs) There are some sites that pull automated feeds, combine them into search engine friendly sites and stick a bunch of ads on there. Most likely illegal, definitely against adsense TOS and very much unethical. They contain no original content and sometimes even have an unintelligible mashup of keywords, filtered and displayed randomly to target search engines.
• AGGREGATORS There are a few different types. Automatic feeds. Submissions sites. Topic specific. Some where you can suggest a feed of your own, etc. Some show full content, some show partial, and some show titles only. Some authors publish sites with RSS but do not like the idea of their content being re-used at all. Others seem okay with the idea that titles only or partial articles are used while the idea of a full article seems more like content theft.

Recap

Publishing your content with RSS allows your content to reach a much larger audience and drives traffic back to your site. It can expose your content to a much wider audience without you having to do a thing besides add it to your site.

Coming up in Part 3

In Part 3 of this “Publsih Your Content with RSS” series, I will look at how RSS protects credit for the author and original source of the content, why it is great for SEO and driving traffic back to the orignal content, and why there is no reason to worry about the fact that there is a duplicate version of your content (and most likely many duplicate versions of your content).

I will also explain how having only part of your content shown can actually be worse for you for several reasons:

• It can eliminate links back to your site, trapping traffic in the site that shared your content.
• It would remove any ads that you might run at the bottom of your feed.
• It would eliminate any sharing links that you might run at the bottom of your feed, making it much harder for someone to add your content to Facebook or Twitter.

• 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.