A quick guide to RSS feeds and making them work for you.

This video will undoubtedly will explain RSS feeds better than I ever could.  Even though it is 5 years old now it still has important information for many.

Watch,  enjoy then read on.

Right then so now you know what RSS feeds are and how you can use them to get other peoples news to your computer without having to go to all of those websites to read it.

But and there is always a but … are you making sure that visitors to your website are able to do the same.
Are they able to subscribe to your news via RSS feed?

Cutting down on the hard work

Through using a Feed Reader like Google Reader or the other many and various apps and addons now available your news feeds can be read on your customers phones and in their favourite browser.  More than that by using RSS feeds you can post your content straight out to those people that follow you on Twitter or to your Facebook profile or even to your business’s Facebook page. So if you are looking to attract people to your event or to respond to your news you would simply post the item once to your website and let RSS take the strain.

But before they can do that you need to set up account on other platforms.

 

Earlier this year I found a case where an arts organisation had recently completed their website build but it had no RSS functionality.

Whoever commissioned it needed to see the video above.

 

 

Making Feeds come alive by using platforms to repost your content

Here are a couple of great platforms that can repost your content for you. It does this by reading your website news feeds or the xml file, and noticing every time you make a new post and reposting it to the places that you have authorised it to.  The two most popular services at the moment are http://twitterfeed.com and http://dlvr.it/ both are equally as good as each other, but I recommend Twitterfeed mainly because it will give you statistics on how many times your link has been clicked.

Just a quick update note on dlvr.it be careful how many articles you ask it to pull through at a time. Speaking from experience it can be a little embarrassing when it pulls through 10 articles in one night TWICE.

 

 

For older websites that don’t have feeds you can use Page2RSS which can turn a new item on your website into an RSS feed. Page2RSS is a service that helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. It will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS reader.

 

 

 

 

Using Mailchimp to deliver your updated news through feeds

A recent addition to mailchimp, the free email marketing platform is the ability to use it to deliver your updated news in email format to all your subscibers. So even if your clients have missed your tweet or Facebook post they will receive an email.

I’m a strong believer in email as most of the population still prefer to receive something and they often pay more attention to their emails than anything else. And with Facebook becoming so full of events invites it has become like information overload. It is always easy to forget that tweet or facebook post but emails are searchable and I often scan back to find emails that feature events I’m interested in.

Mailchimp allows you to set email templates for how your news will look and if you are still sending email manually then this will be a real bonus and has a great look and feel, plus it’s free.

 

So lets see how far we have come.

Time is the great enemy in any job and some simple techniques can really help to streamline your digital information flow if you are working in any business small or large.

You have a site that can now post new content to Twitter, Facebook and create a enewsletter for you that goes directly to your customers.