Last week I posted an article on Bloggertone titled 8 Reasons it makes CENTS to give your content away. As a content marketing practitioner and enthusiast, I promoted the practice of unlocking the content on your website – making it available to anyone who wants to read it. The idea behind this is you will get more benefit by freely sharing your knowledge than protecting it and charging for the privilege of your expertise.
Social Media vs. RSS
This week I’ve been thinking about ways to make your content even more pervasive. Social media is one of the 3 components of content marketing and my preferred method for driving traffic to my website. I was speaking about this to Ryan Briggs and he asked me how I was utilising the RSS (really simple syndicate) feed on my site. I admitted, sheepishly, that I probably wasn’t making the best use of it. I know it feeds into the Perth Web Industry News Digest but hadn’t used it anywhere else. He suggested an RSS feed is a perfect content marketing tool because it gives content legs. He also said not enough people are embracing RSS and are missing valuable opportunities to increase their online footprint.
Here are the reasons Ryan recommends every website needs an RSS feed:
- Subscribing to an RSS feed allows you to get real time web content updates from your favourite sites, usually used for news, blogs & events.
- Most browsers allow users to add RSS feed tabs on toolbars for easy access
- Google reader and other such utilities allow you to subscribe to all your favourite sites in one place, which allows you to get the latest feeds from multiple sites at once.
That was all I needed to hear to start exploiting my own RSS feed. I immediately went back to work and registered my website in 3 different places.
- Technorati
- Wotnews
www.wotnews.com.au
After only a couple of days, I’m hooked on the possibilities of RSS. Some of the benefits include:
- Publishing to multiple audiences without any additional effort
- Real-time updates
- News, blog posts and events can all be included in an RSS feed
- Depending on where your RSS feed is registered, the content on your website becomes mingled with official news sources from around the world
Are you using an RSS feed to promote your blog, news, or events? Where have you registered your RSS feed?
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