What is RSS and How Can It Help My Online Business?

Posted by Aerion Miles on under Website Traffic | 4 Comments to Read

Many people have researched how to make their businesses more profitable online, but have been left with the question “What is RSS.”

Everybody says how great it is, and how it will help your business. Unfortunately they have not been to forth coming with what it actually is.

An RSS feed is very much like a text only version of your website, that can be displayed in any number of locations. You can take this text only version and quickly and easily submit it to feed aggregators.

Feed aggregators are like libraries for these feeds. People can go to these online RSS feed libraries and subscribe to them. Many people like to subscribe to a blogs feed for the purposes of keeping up with what is going on with a company or person.

As a business you can create an RSS feed easily for any blog, and then post this feed to the aggregators. The RSS feed will automatically update on the aggregators website, in real time.

So what is the advantage, what is RSS, and how does it help.

Well as we have these RSS feeds aggregated in multiple locations, every time we update our website, each aggregated feed will also automatically update.

By putting links in our blog, we not only give the link juice from that one link, but also from every updated feed that mimics it.

Also it should be noted that RSS feeds always have links back to the original source they are drawn from. These are effectively back links, and as you may know, back links increase our chances of showing up higher in the search engine results.

Hopefully by this stage your question, what is RSS and how can it help my business, is starting to seem like one you are very glad you asked.

There are a vast number of RSS feed aggregators available for you to submit your feeds to. Each one will count as yet another back link, and will also helping to promote anything you link to.

I recommend cross linking to different posts within your blog. This will give you many back links via the RSS feeds pointing to your individual blog posts.

By having these links to actual blog posts within your RSS feed, you will help to funnel any readers back to your actual website.

So now you maybe wondering how this can help you if you do not have an accompanying blog for your website. You may ask, what is RSS for if you don’t have a blog.

Many people assume that RSS is a function purely for a blog, but in fact this is not true. There are now many online internet services, that will create an RSS feed of your static website.

The advantage of creating a feed for a static website is obvious. You will be able to have all the advantages of an RSS feed, even though you don’t have a blog.

While this approach is an effective way to promote your business online, I think it is more effective, to not only create and submit feeds from your main website. But also to have an accompanying blog where you can answer your customers questions, and also to generate even more link juice back to your main website.

Hopefully this article has put the question, what is RSS, finally to rest. Now you know how it can help your business, I highly recommend you get to work creating feeds, and aggregating them.