Better Business Blogging » RSS Information

Google Alerts: Great research tool now with RSS

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:14:14 +0000

I’ve long been a fan of using Google Alerts – as far as I’m concerned, alongside subscribing to relevant RSS feeds, it’s certainly the best way to make sure that I keep up to date with any new information appearing on the web on topics that I’m interested in. It’s also a great way to ensure that I can follow conversations and articles which are relevant to my clients, their own reputation management as well as the markets they work in.

Now for me, Google have recently made it even more useful through the simple act of allowing me to receive this information via RSS rather than by email. This means that I can now have all of this information coming into one place (my Google Reader) as well as any keyword searches I have running through other sites and of course all the feeds from the key blogs I follow.

All you need to do is select RSS instead of email as shown above and the system does the rest. Of course, there’s no longer a need to specify the frequency (ie. immediate, daily or weekly) because RSS will always update as soon as you have new information to read. (BTW, if you want a recap on the benefits RSS can bring in general then have another read of this.)

Anyway, if you aren’t already doing so, then set up some keyword searches on Google Alerts, get them automatically sent to your RSS Reader and keep a step ahead of your competition by getting all the latest information before they do.

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14 ways to help increase your RSS subscribers

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:59:16 +0000

We’ve seen how beneficial RSS can be to both publishers and readers alike earlier in this series so, with that in mind, it’s going to be important to encourage as many people as possible to subscribe to your feed so that they receive your latest posts automatically.

To help start this process, here are 14 ways which will give the best chance of encouraging subscribers and help you to promote all of the information that you’re providing at the same time:

1. Promote your feed prominently on your blog

It’s important to make sure that the RSS icon / feed link is displayed in a prominent position at the top of your blog – as with anything, the placement on the page is very important and, in general, the higher up the page you place it, the more attention and clicks it will attract. What some blogs do is have the feed link appearing down in the footer of the page – don’t make that mistake yourselves!

2. Offer an email option to receive RSS

While we can talk about how useful RSS is (and it is!), that will not overcome the fact that a lot of people remain much more comfortable with email and slightly hesitant in the face of technology they’re not totally familiar with. So give them what they want. Offer the option to receive your blog updates automatically via email (ssshh – it’s still using RSS really) – Feedburner, Feedblitz and Aweber all have systems to help you to do this.

3. Remind them after each post

They’ve read your post – they’ve loved what you’ve written – so what better time to remind them that they can get all your articles delivered to them automatically than by adding a link to your feed at the bottom of each post together with a (Attention: marketing term!) call to action. They need never miss a thing you write again.

4. Sign up reminder in your email

Most of us have a “signature” at the bottom of every email we send – usually it contains our contact details and perhaps a short tagline for the business. Well, what better place to get your RSS feed information out to people you’re in contact with. You can do this either as a link or, if you use Feedburner, then you can use their “headline animator” and have the titles of your last 5 posts appear to help encourage people along.

5. Tell people about it offline

In business, we are in contact with potential customers on a constant basis, whether that’s when we give presentations, run seminars, participate in exhibitions etc. Here’s a great opportunity to help them get all your latest news and really get to know what you’re all about by making sure they are clear where to find your feed and what to do with it.

6. Make people aware what RSS is and how useful it can be

As I mentioned above, there are still many people who remain unclear of what RSS is and the benefits that it can offer them. Help them to find out. Put together a page which gives details of what RSS is and how they can use it to keep up with all the information they look at on a daily basis. To make it easy, if you’d like to use the introduction to RSS page I put together then please do – and if you could mention where you found it then that would be even better.

7. Full Feeds or Partial Feeds

Not all feeds are created equal. You can send out the complete post (full feed) or just an excerpt of it (partial feed) in your RSS - the general consensus seems to indicate that you are more likely to keep the subscribers if you offer them a full feed. The downside is that it does make it easier for scrapers to reproduce your content. I still say, “Go for full feed!”.

8. Give them an incentive to subscribe

You can always give an incentive (reward, giveaway, thank you … call it what you want) for people to sign up – something like an ebook focusing on a subject of particular relevance to your readers would probably work well. The easiest way to achieve this is to create a special link within your RSS feed which appears at the bottom of each post and takes subscribers through to a page where the download can be accessed.

9. Use other online marketing methods

Don’t forget to use the other online marketing methods to promote your feed as well – email marketing, online PR, SEO, social networks even Pay Per Click all have their place to encourage new subscribers to follow you, should you decide that they are relevant.

10. Feeds to feed directories

Alongside general web directories and the blog directories, there are also RSS directories where you can submit your feed. Make the most of them and submit your feed to all the relevant ones you can find – making it visible to as many people as possible through them is only going to be of benefit and may encourage further syndication of your content.

11. Network elsewhere? Promote the feed there too

The likelihood is that you network on certain sites and also participate in forums where there are people who would be interested in the information your feed contains. Make sure that if your profile offers the chance to promote your feed that you use it and, perhaps more importantly, include it in your signature on posts or comments you make.

12. Encourage people to recommend your feed

This might be done simply through basic referral marketing by asking current subscribers to pass on details of your feed to colleagues and friends – if you want to help them to do this, then include an email a friend option or encourage social bookmarking if you feel that would be appropriate.

13. Include on key documents you distribute

Mention your feed as part of the information that you send out with ebooks, white papers etc. In my own case, there is a pdf which forms part of each section of my Business Blogging eCourse. This includes a link through to this blog’s RSS feed so that people taking the course can also keep up on new posts at the same time.

14. In your Newsletters

Newsletters and blogs work really well together – very complementary! So make sure that you promote your RSS feed in your own newsletter and readers will be able to follow your blog inbetween the newsletters. You can then return the compliment and promote your newsletter via blog posts, distributed automatically by your feed.

What about you – do you have any ways that you recommend to increase your RSS subscribers that you’d like to share?

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RSS Series:
1. RSS - An Introduction: So, what is RSS all about then?
2. RSS Benefits for businesses, bloggers and publishers
3. Business benefits of RSS to subscribers & readers
4. Ways to increase your RSS subscribers

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Business benefits of RSS to subscribers and readers

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:35:01 +0000

There are two things that I consider to be safe assumptions in life: one, we all like to know whats going on and, two, we never seem to have enough time. Now it may be that for some of us, a copy of Business Week, The Times or perhaps Cosmopolitan (according to our preferences) will be enough to keep us up to date with what’s happening in the areas that interest us. For others, and particularly in business, we need to cast our net a little wider and need to be able to sift the information more quickly.

Of course, the more subject areas we want to follow, the more we bump into the issue of not having enough time to find the information that we need, let alone read it. Once again, RSS to the rescue! This sort of problem of information overload can really be reduced (though not I fear totally eradicated) by making best use of an RSS Reader to find and deliver to us the latest news and information from wherever it’s hiding on the internet.

So let’s quickly start by looking at five of the main advantages before moving onto some of the more specific business benefits below:

1. Time saver par excellence
Time saver because you no longer need to keep revisiting sites to get the latest information, instead it is delivered to you in a neat bundle to let you decide quickly and easily what’s of interest.

2. Latest information always at your fingertips
Whether it is business information, the weather, local news, breaking industry research or a new posting from a rarely-updated site you receive up to date information in your areas of interest as soon as it is published.

3. You are in control of what you receive
Both subscribing and unsubscribing from an RSS feed is totally under your control. You can do so at any time at the click of a button in your RSS reader; so if the information stops being relevant, you can instantly remove it.

4. Spam free
When you subscribe to RSS, you don’t give any details to the content provider therefore you can rest assured that your privacy is kept safe and that are not going to be bombarded with spam.

5. Get Search Engines to constantly scour the internet for you
There are many sites and search engines, such as Google News and Technorati, which allow you to create a search and will then keep you updated with new results as they appear as an RSS feed straight to your reader.

RSS - Key for Business and in Social Media Marketing

In a business environment, information is a highly valuable commodity and knowing what is happening in your chosen area, and especially getting that information ahead of your competitors, is something that can certainly give you an edge. Hearing about an opportunity first gives you first mover advantage and lets you react before others know that it even exists.

RSS also has a central and highly important role in the effective use of social media marketing. Without try to be too dramatic about it, your RSS Reader can become your eyes and ears in the online world allowing to be present and visible in the right places at the right time.

With so much information out there and so many areas which could be of interest, as you build your RSS reader content its important that you are careful about the targeting of your searches and the feeds you decide to follow. For me, these fall into 5 main categories:

Whats going on in your industry: as a general background research tool, RSS is great because it helps sift out the information from the corners of the internet where it hides. Youll keep up to date with the landscape of your market and youll get the information as soon as is gets published.

Identify new opportunities: you also want to keep your feed looking for new opportunities, so have a search set up on events or forums where you would normally expect your customers to be.

Whos talking about you: often called ego surfing, for businesses this is less about ego and more (or should that be all) about branding and good social media marketing. You should make sure that you have a permanent search running on your company name, your name and perhaps also key products. If you know whos talking about your company or products (whether they are positive or negative), you can participate in that discussion and develop stronger links with the market.

Local ear to the ground: Key to companies interested in a local market (local could mean ‘national’ not just ‘city’ or ‘regional’) that they are aware of what is happening so that they can decide whether to participate or not. With the ease of skimming through headlines in RSS, you can sift lots of information in a short space of time, so this type of research can be done quickly and easily.

Competitor Analysis: Keeping up to date with what your competitors are doing in terms of products or marketing activity means that you have the ability to react or counter more quickly. If you are able to do this, then you put yourself into a much stronger position in your marketplace.

Building your Business reading / research list

I tend to divide RSS Feeds into two distinct types, which offer different sources of information and yet work really well together:

the first are those individual blogs and sites which offer the information that you want to follow;

the second are the search engine or news sites which can deliver to you the latest results of a specific search term in an RSS feed from all sites they cover as they are published.

With the first type, I usually start with the individual sites by starting with some key ones of interest to me and then building from there. They might be the more popular blogs in the industries Im interested in, people I have met and enjoyed reading or simply ones that Ive come across and bookmarked.

The next step is to add to these and that probably warrants a minute or two of reflection on what we want to use the RSS Reader for. Clearly, for personal use, the contents are likely to be wide ranging and diverse. On the other hand, if its for business then well probably lean towards a number of different types of blog, such as ones which:

give indepth analysis of our own industry

cover the industries or areas of interest of our target market if different

break new new stories related to these industries

cover events, conferences and seminars which might be applicable to our products or services – the ideal place to promote your own activities and make ourself more visible to potential prospects

feature local or regional events if one of your target markets is going to be focused on close to your business location – being able to attend relevant local networking or business events can be hugely beneficial but you need to know they are happening!

A good starting place is to use a blog specific search engine such as Technorati or Google Blog Search which should give you a range of blogs covering the area you are interested in. From there follow the links and references in the blogs that are relevant or check which blogs have linked to them – in both cases, you should find both which are immediately relevant or cover similar topics.

For the second type, its a case of going onto the relevant site and setting up the search terms you want to focus in on. Lets take Google News as an example. When you search on a term, such Business Blogging, on the results page on the left hand side of the screen, you will see the word RSS. If you copy that link and add it to your RSS Reader, it will send you all the news that arrives on Google News relating to Business Blogging. Good, eh?

There are many sites which offer this type of service, so check out some of the following ones and decide which report the type of information you’re looking for. You may find that the tracking facility offered at Blogpulse is useful (part of Nielsen) and the documents which you can access at Bnet come from a whole host of different sources. For blogs, Icerocket, Technorati and Google Blog Search will allow you to save your search terms to automatically search within the blogosphere. For anyone wishing to take this one stage further, then you could use something like Yahoo Pipes (an interactive feed manipulator and aggregator) or RSSMixer to bring these all together – probably only necessary for advanced users.

Of course, then remember to make sure on an ongoing basis that when you find a site which interests you, check if it has a feed (IE7 and Firefox should show you this automatically) and add it to your reader. That way you wont miss a thing. And dont forget that you can follow different things via RSS, not just text based sites. The most common are likely to be podcasts (which are really just sound files enclosed in an RSS feed) which are widely distributed but you can also find tools which will do the same to Twitter feeds and other microblogging or lifestreaming tools.

Organising and Managing your Feeds

Everyone will have their own way of organising the information and news which will be arriving in their RSS Reader, just as they do with their emails. What is key is to at least have a system whatever that might be rather than let all of the information come in and pile up.

However, don’t be too concerned that you might get overwhelmed as perhaps is the case with your emails – they are very different beasts. Unlike email, you don’t need to read all of the news that comes in from the feeds. While much of the information they deliver will be of use, there will be some that you can quickly disregard so skimming through the headlines is not only possible but recommended. At least by having the information in front of you, you can use the best filtering system around – your own eyes – to decide what is of interest and relevant to you today.

I would, however, recommend that you have a “trial area” – this way you can almost quarantine a new feed giving you time to check out the content before moving it to its correct content folder. This means you get less clutter in your established folders and know where to go to check the new information – if you don’t find yourself going back there often then perhaps it isn’t of as much use to you currently as you imagined.

For me, I prefer to work with a series of folders that represent the main subjects of interest to me and then name them appropriately. In most readers you can view only the feeds that are in each folder (as well as all your subscriptions at once, of course), so this allows me to focus in on certain areas as I need to. Others have recommended an approach where you divide them by levels ie. “Must read”, “2nd Priority”, “When there’s time” etc. and no doubt there are many of possibilities.

I guess that really, you need to use a system which works for you and with your needs but make sure you have one and try to set aside time now and again for a little “house cleaning” just to make sure that you’re not missing anything important.

Summary

RSS really does have a very central role to play in making it easier for businesses to their marketplace because of the access to relevant information that it can bring – this will become even more important as we try to work effectively with the social media that is becoming more and more prevalent today.

By using RSS as part of our business intelligence setup, we can benefit not only from the breadth of information that becomes available but also the speed at which we have access to it. Of course, what we then do with that information is what makes the real difference!

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RSS Series:
1. RSS - An Introduction: So, what is RSS all about then?
2. RSS Benefits for businesses, bloggers and publishers
3. Business benefits of RSS to subscribers & readers
4. Ways to increase your RSS subscribers
5. Marketing with RSS
6. Using Feedburner to optimise your RSS

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RSS Benefits for Businesses, Bloggers and Publishers

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:11:43 +0000

In the first part of this series “What is RSS all about then?“, I tried to give an overview of what RSS is, from a layman’s point of view if you like. Here, in the second part, it’s time to move on to looking at some of the ways in which RSS can be used by businesses, bloggers and publishers in general.

General RSS Benefits for all

For me, RSS is very much a Clark Kent figure – not particularly impressive on the outside but lots of hidden “super powers” underneath. Am I overstating that a little? Well you decide. To start, let’s have a quick run through of some of the elements that RSS can do for the information you publish in your business or blog:

i) Instant Publishing and Automatic distribution
As you publish new posts and information on your blog, RSS publishes them automatically on any additional sites that have decided to syndicate your content. This allows you to concentrate on the quality of your content and lets your RSS feed distribute it for you to all the places and people who have requested it, automatically and instantly.

ii) Direct guaranteed delivery to subscribers
You can be safe in the knowledge that your subscribers will receive the information that you are providing without worrying whether some overzealous spam filter might have intercepted and binned it.

iii) Targeted content delivery
There is no need to just offer a single RSS feed – instead you can break down your content into different areas so that people can choose to receive the targeted content they prefer. If you use Wordpress, you can do this with the categories, each of which generates its own RSS feed automatically which you can offer to your subscribers.

iv) Higher Profile and Search Engine Ranking
Syndicating your content (ie. letting others publish the content that you have written) helps to build up inbound links back to your blog which is great news for the profile of your blog and of course is highly beneficial for your search engine rankings.

v) Increased accessibility and visibility
By offering easier access to your content, you are ensuring that it reaches more people who can then follow the information you’re providing. Basically, increased visibility for you and a way to improve the accessibility of your content too which will in turn help to reinforce your brand and people’s trust in it.

vi) More subscribers and so more readers
RSS will certainly help to increase the number of subscribers and hence readers. We want subscribers to feel comfortable, that�s the whole point. They should also not feel worried that by subscribing, they might be opening the door to yet more spam. RSS provides them with the security that this will not happen and so encourages readers to subscribe.

Specific Business Opportunities and Uses

Of course, while the general benefits of RSS are all well and good, as ever on Better Business Blogging, my primary focus is on the use of blogs as business tools so perhaps more important is how RSS can be used within a business environment.

In reality, the options that it offers are wide and appropriate applications will vary according to the requirements your business has as you keep in touch with your clients and readers of your blog. However, here are a number of specific ways in which RSS can be applied within a business context and which will hopefully spark some ideas for your own situation.

Sales channels communications: sending out messages to sales teams, distribution channels or resellers via RSS means that you can keep them up to date with all of the latest product, market and competitor information instantly. By dividing up the information into distinct sections means that they can receive only the areas that they need, either in terms of product, location or type;

Promoting special events: time critical events are ideally served by RSS. If you have weekly or monthly special offers or last minute availability which you need to communicate out to your customers then this ensures they receive the information immediately and are able to act on it. Again having a number of RSS feeds set up means you can be specific about your targeting of these offers as well;

Internal Content: You can use RSS feeds to streamline and improve your internal content syndication for corporate communications and providing information to remote employees and sales teams. RSS feeds don’t have to be open to the whole world, they can also be associated with internal blogs only for your staff;

Affiliate programs: making sure that all affiliates are provided with the latest information on products, sales techniques etc through an RSS feed which allows them to receive text, links or new graphics. Making sure the information they pass on is up to date means that you have more chance of turning your prospects into clients;

Conference details: for conferences, seminars and workshops, there are always lots of pieces of information to send out ahead of the event as well as presentation details etc after the event as well. Lots of time and money can be used up in sending out via email but RSS can do the job just as well;

Franchise information: franchisors needing to send information out to their franchisees or wanting to simply publish information to all their franchisees’ sites can do so using RSS, allowing them to communicate a consistent message out to them all;

Public Relations: automatic updates can also serve as a critical public relations function for the latest news on brands, staff and external content;

Announcing New Products: the launch phase of new products or new services is a critical time, so make sure that you use all of the tools available to you. RSS can spread the word quickly and hopefully help to generate traffic back to your site to find out more;

Networking Groups: where there are geographically diverse networking groups (such as the breakfast networking groups), the individual groups often have their own websites. RSS gives the perfect solution for centrally created information to appear on the websites alongside the local content;

Newsletters: if you already send out a newsletter by email, then why not also send it out via RSS? You probably already have it on your website if you are using it correctly, so RSS is a logical next step!

Recommendations to get the best from your RSS feed

Although, RSS feeds are primarily designed to deliver and distribute information, there are ways to optimise it to help it do this more effectively, so that you are making the maximum impact with the information that you are distributing through it.

Since I’m no technical expert, I like to look at tools which can help me with this as well as things which I can achieve myself as I create the posts. I’d therefore recommend considering putting the following in place for your RSS feed and, don’t worry, you can make the changes at any point, they don’t have to have been there from the start.

i) Get Feedburner involved: we’ll look at Feedburner specifically later in the series, but it does so much more than just give you an indication of your subscriber numbers. In particular, the Feed Flares offer huge flexibility as to what appears on your readers’ RSS reader alongside your post.

ii) Think about your post title: just as you would look at your Title Tags for Search Engines, so you should think about your post titles in the context of your RSS feed. Why? Because it is the post title that appears in the RSS reader of your readers – the post title needs to be something which will grab their attention, like a newspaper headline tries to.

iii) Explain RSS to your blog readers: create a page on your blog explaining what RSS is and the benefits it offers your readers – they’ll thank you for it, believe me! If you feel that it’s appropriate then you can use the content of What’s RSS all about then? as the basis of it. Tell them not only how to get an RSS Reader but also how and why they should subscribe to your own RSS feed;

iv) Give them an RSS by email option: make sure that you also include the option to receive your RSS subscription via email – I know that this seems to conflict with the great delivery capabilities of RSS but it opens up the delivery options to people not yet ready to use an RSS Reader. Services from Feedburner, Feedblitz and Aweber amongst others offer this in conjunction with your RSS feed;

v) Full or Partial RSS Feed?: You have the option to delivery full or partial feeds, ie. ones which contain all of the information in your post to your readers (full) or only the first part of it (partial). My preference is for full feeds although opinion is divided. If you have a lot of site based advertising which therefore requires readers to be on your site then the partial feed is the better option as people will need to click through to your site to read the whole article. If not then let them read it in their feeder, though keep some of the additional linking focused on encouraging them to visit other articles on your blog.

Benefits from RSS without publishing one!

In fact businesses don’t have to publish an RSS feed to be able to benefit from them. Let�s think about it, all the benefits that you can achieve through giving people access to information that you can provide can also be used by your business to make sure that you are ahead of the game in business terms. And, as a byproduct of this, you can also supply your readers with the very latest information, further helping to cement your position with them.

We’ll be looking at the reader benefits in more detail in the next part of the series, but here are some thoughts on ways you can benefit:

Keeping up to date: you want to keep up with what is happening in your industry but don’t have time to visit the relevant sites every day. Get this information delivered directly from main industry or news sites and this will allow you access to all of the up to date information as soon as it’s published;

Basic brand management: you want to know what is being said about your company so that you are able to respond to it and in this time is of the essence. Having access to this sort of information via RSS can save time which can be of enormous value;

Competitor Tracking: no doubt your sales team will also be interested in monitoring and tracking the online activity of your competitors. Using services running through RSS, you can receive updates which will help you to maintain a watching brief on them and their activities;

Information provision: perhaps you want to include information on your own site from sources such as the BBC or other respected sources. You can do this and have it updated automatically by incorporating RSS headlines directly on your site, giving you a stickier site and giving your readers further reason to make you their first port of call for news on subjects which interest them.

So, is it worth it?

I hope that from the information that you have seen here, you will be agree that RSS has some really serious benefits that it can offer to businesses and other organisations looking to publish information … and more’s the point who wish to see it reach all of the people who would be interested in it!

Of course, if you are running a Business blog, then all of this functionality is likely to be at your fingertips already and it’s really just a case of how you decide that you want to use it which is key. But, above all, let people know about RSS and how to use it – it will be good for you and good for them as well!

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RSS Series:
1. RSS - An Introduction: So, what is RSS all about then?
2. RSS Benefits for businesses, bloggers and publishers
3. Business benefits of RSS to subscribers & readers
4. Ways to increase your RSS subscribers
5. Marketing with RSS
6. Using Feedburner to optimise your RSS

Was this post useful? Then please share it!

So, what is RSS all about then?

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:00:19 +0000

The internet has opened up a whole Aladdin’s cave of information which is constantly being updated and added to – it has also revolutionised the way in which we find and share it. However, keeping up to date with all that is going on can be time consuming and, in many case, nigh on impossible.

So what would be better? How about having all the latest news and information from the sources you want to hear from delivered directly to you? This would save a huge amount of time as you wouldn’t need to keep revisiting all the websites that interest you to see what new information they’ve added.

This is where RSS comes in. RSS offers a simple way of gathering and sharing information without all of that time consuming activity involved in actually going to look for it. All the latest news comes to you rather than you having to go looking for it.

So what is RSS, again?

RSS means different things to different people, and I don’t just mean what the acronym stands for – that’s Really Simple Syndication in case you were wondering.

You and I are looking for an easy (and preferably anonymous) way of keeping up to date with all the latest information from sites we’re interested in – a way to skim through it in our own time, reading items which are of interest and passing over the rest. With RSS, we can get it all in one place and be safe in the knowledge that all this comes without us having to part with our email address and that nagging concern that we might have just opened ourselves up to yet more offers of “enhancements” and “ebay security checks” .

For publishers of websites and blogs, they just want a way to distribute and share their latest news and information with individuals, sites and directories who have requested it. The fact that this happens automatically without running the gauntlet of touchy spam filters is great and the fact that people feel comfortable about subscribing because it is anonymous is even better.

Looks like a Win-Win situation to me.

How do I use RSS?

Ok, sounds good but what do I need if I want to use RSS?

Well, remembering that RSS is really just a way of distributing or collecting information, we need two things to use it: some information that we want to subscribe to (an RSS Feed) and then something to use to collect it and read it (an RSS reader).

Let’s look at RSS readers first – RSS readers can either sit on your PC or can be part of a website online. (Think of it a bit like your email programs: Outlook is a program on your PC, whereas Hotmail is a website online.) Recently, the most popular ones have been online so we’ll concentrate on those – Google Reader and Bloglines lead the way and now you also have the option of using readers which come as part of the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers too.

To start, I’d probably recommend that you pop along to Google Reader – you’ll need a Google Account if you don’t already have one but it’s quick and easy to set up and then you’ll soon be ready to start selecting what information you want to receive. You do that by adding RSS Feeds.

How to find RSS feeds?

This is getting easier and easier for us, partly because the browsers that we use have started to highlight the fact that they are there. Basically, you want to be on the look out for some of the symbols below, all of which do the same thing – they let you know that there is an RSS feed waiting for you!

Just click on the image – if you see a page of text then copy the URL (the address of the page) and then go to your RSS Reader, click on “Add Subscription” or “Add Feed” and paste it in. That’s all you have to do. If you see a more friendly page of images and some text, then it’s even easier – just follow the instructions there!

What’s next?

Well, in terms of anything technical, that’s it. Once you’ve subscribed to the RSS feed, or rather the information from the site, you just sit back and let it do all the chasing and collecting for you, delivering the new stuff from that site to you – and the website will never know it’s you. Safe secure and instant. If you want it to stop, then that’s a simple click of the mouse, deleting the feed in your RSS reader.

Using RSS really is a massive time saver – you get the information delivered to you, saving all the hassle of having to revisit your sites in case there’s some thing new. All you have to do is decide what you want to read and delete the rest. And for publishers, you get to deliver your news securely to people who really want to receive it, but remember that the onus is on you to keep the quality high because, if not, they’re gone!

Questions?

I hope that has helped but if you’ve still got questions then leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll try to help.

Bloggers / website owners – if you’d like to use this on your site then please feel free. You can even modify it if you’d like. However, if you would link back to Better Business Blogging to return the favour then that would be great. Something like “Thanks to Better Business Blogging for this RSS overview” would be great.

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RSS Series:
1. RSS - An Introduction: So, what is RSS all about then?
2. RSS Benefits for businesses, bloggers and publishers
3. Benefits of RSS for users & subscribers
4. Ways to increase your RSS subscribers
5. Marketing with RSS
6. Using Feedburner to optimise your RSS

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RSS needs a good PR agent

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:54:40 +0000

To most, RSS is not going to appear to be the most exciting tool in the social media box – it’s not coming out in video any time soon, can’t rival podcasts in the audio department, doesn’t seem to interact with anything and, all in all, comes across like someone who’d prefer to sit in the corner at parties rather than get out there and mix.

True, but only half the story. In fact, it seems to me that RSS is in need of a good PR agent.

Well, I’m no PR Guru, but I’m going to try to show with a series of posts over the next week, how RSS is an immensely powerful tool which can be used in any number of exciting (yes, exciting) and useful ways, whether you are looking at it from a user’s or a publisher’s point of view.

The posts will be looking at:

1. RSS - An Introduction: So, what is RSS all about then?
2. RSS Benefits for businesses, bloggers and publishers
3. Benefits of RSS for users & subscribers
4. Marketing with RSS
5. Using Feedburner to optimise your RSS
6. Ways to increase your RSS subscribers

So subscribe to my RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss anything and if you don’t know what I mean by that then the first part of the series will be right up your street!

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RSS, Blogs and Newsletters

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:15:28 +0000

The RSS Feed is one of those key underlying technologies in a blog that can do a huge number of things for us and yet most of us, myself included, are still only scratching the surface with it.

Its main use is of course to give your readers a secure and immediate way of receiving your latest posts by subscribing to your RSS feed through an RSS Reader. Nevertheless, with so many internet users still unfamiliar with RSS in spite of its many benefits, I always recommend also offering the option of subscribing to the RSS feed via email as well.

The easiest way to offer this is by using a third party supplier. Feedburner, for example, provides you with the code to create a basic sign up form on your blog and then visitors can use to subscribe to receiving your blog updates automatically via email. A similar service is provided by Feedblitz and Zookoda.

Normally, you receive these on a daily basis as posts are published. However, there is another provider, Aweber, which gives you the option to take that one step further and effectively create a newsletter with your posts.

Aweber is probably best known as an autoresponder and email service provider along the lines of Constant Contact and Vertical Response. However, last year, they also launched a service called Blog Broadcast which essentially delivers your blog posts via email but also offers other features in as well. As you would expect from a company which specialises in email and newsletter delivery, this is includes a range of templates to control the look of the emails sent out, personalisation of aspects of the message and title, and tracking of links or ads.

In addition, as of this week, they have added a scheduling feature to the service. This means that you can now use the service to send out your posts on a schedule which suits you and your readers rather than one decided by the software. For example, you can now automatically send your readers a newsletter every week or every month by email with all of your posts. A great way to use emails to help support your blog.

Granted this is not a free service but the additional benefits that this gives you are certainly worthwhile and particularly if you also use the other services it offers. For example, I use the autoresponder to deliver my Business Blogging eCourse and you can also use the email broadcast system to send other ezines or general communication to your readers.

So, if you want to do more than simply send out each post as you make it or you’re looking for an automated way to publish a newsletter to your list of readers, then this might well be worth looking at.

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Google embraces blogs again

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:10:37 +0000

To say that I’m not a fan of Blogger is probably understating things a bit – when it comes to business blogs, their system is certainly way down the list of blogging platforms that I’d choose or recommend.

However, when it comes to their owner Google, then as part of their foray into the world of blogging, Blogger is a crucial part. Firstly, in spite of my reservations, they certainly helped the personal blogger (and splogger – but that’s a different story) by buying and developing Blogger when blogging was still something that the general public knew nothing about and businesses had never considered them as a serious marketing tool.

After that, they introduced a blog specific search engine which, although it doesn’t match Technorati in the level of information that it offers, is still blog specifc and is updated very quickly through pinging. Recently, they have also bought Feedburner which is the preeminent RSS tool – a key element of blogs around the world.

So what have they done now? Well, in many respects, nothing as innovative as the elements that I have mentioned above, but nevertheless, something which is significant … although it may not sound it. They have added blogs to their universal search engine.

So what is good about that? Well firstly, this is the selection that you can make on Google’s homepage which currently allows you to choose images, news, maps … etc or others. In the near future, you should also be able to choose blogs as well as an individual “category”. This is a real change and step forward for blogs because of the preeminence and influence that Google has as a Search Engine which will in its turn benefit blogs more than simply having the blog search engine as a separate entity.

So, yet again, Google leads the way in terms of accessing and referencing blogs … so let’s take advantage of the elements that they offer and use them to our advantage!

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Feedburner snaps up Blogbeat

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 18:39:43 +0000

Feedburner announced today that it has acquired Blogbeat, which is a provider of blog analytics based in Raleigh, Durham.

As a fan of Feedburner and the services that they offer, this is good news that that they are further extending their services and particularly so because they have expressed the intention to include the blog analytics as an extension of the free services package. These are already hugely useful in tracking and customising RSS feeds and so adding in the ability to track visitors as well can only add to this.

As they have also announced that Jeff Turner, Blogbeat founder, will be joining Feedburner as Lead Engineer, Web Analytics, they are clearly expressing their intention to develop this area further – another positive step. For a Business Blog to be truly effective, we need to be able to measure its success according to the goals that we have for it – visitors to the blog and RSS readership are two of the possible criteria by which to do so.

We should also be using stats packages and analytics to get a better idea of which posts and subject areas are proving the biggest attraction for our readers – with this information at our fingertips, we can then make sure that we adapt our writing, provide the type of information that is most in demand and so give our readers what they are looking for.

Feedburner expect to have the Blogbeat services integrated by the 4th quarter of this year and I for one will be looking forward to using them.

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Greater RSS integration – Blogger, Feedburner and Typepad

Mark White, Blog Consultant — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 16:31:48 +0000

A couple of small steps last week to note regarding RSS feeds and getting a more common and compatible system across more of the main blogging platforms.

Firstly, Blogger.com finally added support for RSS to their system in addition to the Atom feeds that they had been using. While not riveting news perhaps, it does give people using Blogger a better choice of how they want to syndicate their content which is certainly for the best (although Im sure theres no need to repeat here my views on whether Businesses should be using Blogger!).

In any case, you will ideally still put your feed through Feedburner for all the good reasons that I outlined in Feedburner: using your feeds more effectively.

Talking of Feeedburner, the other news was that they have been working with Six Apart on the TypePad system and they are now able to offer better integration between the two systems. This means that anyone using TypePad can also benefit from all the subscriber information and promotional elements that Feedburner offers.

So what does this all mean? Well, its really just another step in the integration of all of the services across the main blogging platforms which should ultimately be of benefit to bothe publishers and readers of Blogs alike, because they will be able to use the same familiar tools no matter what blogging software is being used. Having worked for may years in the mobile computing industry where this was the exception rather than the norm, I for one am glad to see it happening.

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