Last week I wrote about Blogs and the power of this publishing tool for your small business.

This week, I want to tell you about a related technology that will (is) take the marketing world by storm in 2005. The generic term for the technology is RSS, which stands in some circles for Real Simple Syndication. In a nutshell, RSS allows you to publish or syndicate content in a host of very creative manners. I’m not going to try to teach you everything about how it works in this space. I am going to show you some very powerful examples of how and why you might want to find out more about this tool.

Let me show you a couple of example of RSS in action.

This newsletter. Currently you are reading this newsletter because you went to my website and filled out a form requesting I send it to you. Then, once a week you receive Duct Tape News in your email inbox – assuming you or your email host didn’t think it was some sort of undesirable message. With an RSS feed for this newsletter, MyYahoo users could receive this newsletter on their MyYahoo homepage the minute it was updated. MSN users will have this capability soon as well. But the rest of the world could also use one of a host of very affordable software programs called News Readers or Aggregators to receive this newsletter and any other newsletter or blog they subscribe to each day in the form of a tidy package of custom information. Here’s an example of what my blog looks like in a reader called Feedburner.

I could go on for the entire issue about Aggregator programs but briefly, they fall into two categories – ones that collect the feeds you subscribe to and sends them to your email inbox (Newsgator) or ones that
collect them and show them to you on an Internet web page (Feedburner). Once you have one of these programs or join a site that hosts the program for you, you can simply copy a URL for newsfeed, one that looks something like this http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/index.xml into your program and you get this.
Instead of bunch of XML code. (Here’s a good NewReader Overview – you should find and use one of these so you get the hang of how it works and how easy it is to access a lot of sites and content in one place.)

Let others bring high quality traffic to your site.

Okay, I wrote about using RSS to publish your own content and find new readers, but now I want to tell you about another very powerful use of RSS. RSS technology and a few related add-ons allow you to go out there and find content that is being syndicated by others and publish it to a web page on your site. This accomplishes a couple of very useful things. You get relevant content that is automatically updated regularly. Search engines and surfers love sites that change and multiple sources of good (keyword rich) content will drive your site’s ranking through the roof for your most important search terms.

You know I love referral, marketing right? Well go to Google or Yahoo and type in the term Referral Marketing and you will find my site in the top 3 or 4 spots. I went from 20 to 3 when I published a series of feeds that provide the latest referral marketing information on a daily basis. Great, pat myself on the back, right? No, take orders for Referral Flood, that’s the power of content syndication. A side note for when you get into this. When you publish an RSS feed on your website, make sure to find a software that doesn’t use JavaScript. You need that actual feed headline and content to show up in the HTML source code of your page or the search engines won’t index it. That was probably a bit too technical for a primer on this subject but just file that away. The program I use to accomplish this is called Carp.

I hope this article got you interested and excited about content syndication via RSS. If so, here are two places to get an advanced degree. Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS and Robin Good's MasterNewMedia.