Digital Marketing Series: Tip #5

Tactic

Use RSS to aggregate your content across multiple sites and allow users to subscribe to your content feed.

Why It Works

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is another way to quickly and easily distribute your content across multiple sites and directly to users via web, mobile and desktop-based software, typically called aggregators or readers. RSS works on the premise of converting your content to a standardized XML-based feed that can then be consumed by sites and software that support the format. RSS feeds typically include full or summarized text plus metadata that includes publishing dates, authorship or links to image, audio or video content. Users who subscribe to your feed are automatically updated every time you add new content.

Feed readers include desktop applications such as Feedreader and Akgregator, email programs like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook, and browsers like Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (version 7 or higher). There are also many web-based applications that support RSS, like Netvibes, Bloglines, and Pageflakes. Google and other companies such as Mippin and Litefeeds have created RSS readers for mobile devices as well. iTunes and other media aggregators use RSS as the foundation upon which podcasts and other audio/video content are distributed and updated. Blog software auto-generates RSS feeds as well, so if you have a blog set up on your site users can subscribe to your feed. Most social and media sharing sites also have the ability to generate RSS feeds that can be aggregated to other sites, allowing you to subscribe to RSS feeds and populate your site, profile, or page with content from other sources, including your blog, YouTube account, and so on.

Resources

There are scores of online RSS resources. A Google search of RSS, for instance, brings back ‘about 3,500,000,000’ results. Here are just a few to get you started from the top of the list.

Wikipedia list of RSS readers 

RSS Toolbox from mashable.com

Here’s a video from the Plain English folks at Common Craft on RSS. The content is great, but they sure could have benefitted from a lavalier microphone, as the sound quality is a bit iffy. But the content gets the point across.

How We Have Embraced It

Mightybytes’ news feed automatically gets ported over to the company’s Facebook page and Friendfeed via RSS. Users can also subscribe to our company blog feed. The company blog content gets ported to Friendfeed and Plaxo as well.

Additionally, I use a Twitter plug-in for my feed at timfrick.com, so anytime a new blog entry is added an auto-tweet is generated on my Twitter account. The same goes for my Flickr account, which I can easily use to send photos to my blog with a single click.