If you’re new to blogging, or Internet Marketing, you may have heard the term RSS bandied about but not really understood what is means or why you ought to be using it. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a way of syndicating your content via an XML feed, or subscribing to feeds from other blogs and sites. By subscribing to a feed you can consume the content without actually visiting the site, either through an online service like Google Reader, or in an offline RSS client or aggregator. That means you can collect the feeds from all your favorite sites, and read them from one place without having to visit each site in turn. As you can imagine, this really speeds up your research and time spent reading blog posts which means you can be much more efficient and read more blogs.

The reason having an RSS feed for your own blog is so important is that in this day and age, many people are consuming information on the Internet in just this way. They don’t want to, or have time to, visit every blog they are interested in and so they simply subscribe to the feeds. If your site doesn’t offer a feed you may be missing out on a lot of regular readers.

RSS – Really iS Simple

The great news is that you don’t need to know any technical stuff, or even understand XML, in order to have a feed on your site, or to subscribe to other feeds. As with most things, we humans learn best by doing, so let me show you how to best use RSS.

Subscribing to feeds

First of all you need a reader. As already mentioned you can use an offline reader, or a web service. I like to use the free Google Reader so head over there and get yourself an account. Once you’ve done that subscribing couldn’t be easier. Just head to your favorite blog (this one would be a great start!) and click on the orange RSS feed logo (you may see more than one, look to the top right of this blog and you’ll see one feed for entries and another for comments, so click the entries button). You will then see the feed page which will look something like this:

If you’re subscribing via Google Reader, or one of the other services listed in the dropdown menu on some feeds just select it and click the button. Otherwise, copy and paste the URL into your reader and you’re done! Now every time you visit a site that you want to keep track of, simply subscribe to their RSS feed.

RSS on your own sites

The great news is that your blog probably already has an RSS feed as standard. If you’re using one of the mainstream blogging platforms such as Wordpress or Movable Type, or if your site is built using a CMS like Drupal then you’re in luck. If not then you can still create a feed without too much trouble by using a feed editor such as FeedForAll.

If you want to check your feed for errors there is a free validation tool at Feed Validator, and once you have done that, you can promote your site by submitting your feed to blog and feed directories. There is a long list of sites allowing RSS submissions at RSS Specifications.