Saturday, September 8, 2007

RSS – Cutting Edge Content

The use of a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed can ultimately offer business owners the opportunity to feed self updating knowledge-based content to your website visitors.

Agreements can be worked out with applicable third-party websites that allow content to be updated on your website without your intervention.

This third party information can provide industry related news or recent applicable blog entries related to your industry for your site visitors to feast on.

It is possible for a web designer to create a page that draws relevant information from highly specific RSS feeds. This data can be updated and archived as needed.

As a business owner this is good news. It can take some time to receive the permissions needed and then some additional time to recast a website in the image of a multi-source pool of information, but it can be well worth the effort.

Believe it or not, this scenario can also provide the perfect reasoning to work at supplying original content to others through an RSS feed. Other sites may be interested in your original content.

Generally speaking, sites that use this third-party data include the first sentence or paragraph and a link to the full article. This redirects visitors to the site of origin, which if you allow the information to be used elsewhere provides a unique backlink to the originating site.

Many business websites rely on third party (self updating) RSS feeds to supply the most current information to their visitors. These visitors view this information as a comprehensive network that allows them to glean large cross section of knowledge-based content helping them gain a better understanding of the industry you are involved in.

This process allows businesses to see the value in allowing their content to be made available through RSS feed. Obviously most people look at RSS feeds as a means of simply informing subscribers, but the potential with RSS feeds reflects the real power of syndication.

In traditional publishing and broadcasting the idea of syndication has been reserved for those who had the most money and the most skilled writer staff. The Internet removes all barriers by allowing anyone with something to say to syndicate their material through RSS. That doesn’t always mean there is an audience for the material, but RSS continues to allow the material to be distributed as widely as interested subscribers make it.

Sure there are risks involved in blindly accepting third party RSS feeds for ‘publication’ on your site. You should either work with only trusted third party content providers or develop a system with your web designer that will allow you to manually approve the content that is ultimately available on your site.

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