Understanding RSS and Its Effect on Viral Marketing

Oct 3
07:16

2007

Moe Tamani

Moe Tamani

  • Share this article on Facebook
  • Share this article on Twitter
  • Share this article on Linkedin

Understanding RSS and It's Effect on Viral Marketing.

mediaimage

RSS and Viral Marketing: Viral marketing is one of the most creative ways of promoting a business. It can work wonders for any business although there are certain principles that play a lead role in making viral marketing for business websites so effective. Different businesses use different techniques while applying viral marketing to enhance their visibility and here are some of the best and time-proven techniques that can help your business too.

 

One way is to create content and share it with other publishers. RSS makes the transfer of content a lot more simple and hassle free. With this ease in sharing content make sure you have a signature in your content so that your link spreads online virally as well to boost your link popularity.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is one of the most valuable technologies available for webmasters,Understanding RSS and Its Effect on Viral Marketing Articles administrators and users. In spite of RSS being such a valuable technology only 12% of users know what RSS is while only 4% have used RSS. So let us try and understand what RSS really is and how it can help you or your business.

RSS is a type of feed that internet users can subscribe to. The RSS feeds updated on a regular basis and mostly distributed in XML format. This helps in creating custom tags. There are quite a few websites, which will have the RSS logo in orange and if you click on the icon, you will get connected to the website’s feed.

As far as the content contained in a RSS feed is concerned, it depends largely on the feed that you might be viewing. Most of the RSS feeds consist of a title and a brief portion from the article. RSS is becoming overtly popular with bloggers because in this the headline format comes in automatically.

There are many reasons why bloggers and even regular users are choosing RSS. One of the primary reasons being that using RSS can save time especially on an everyday basis. Let us take an example to understand how it saves time. If you are a technical expert and you visit at least 6 websites on a daily basis to collect information then you probably open each website on a separate browser to look for news items. So in a way, you are visiting them one by one as you can’t see all of them together.

On the other hand, if you have RSS, then all you need to do is visit a RSS feed reader or a RSS aggregator and this will help you to instantly identify the websites that have added new articles and these websites will be separated from the ones that don’t. Another salient point is that you can see all the past entries using RSS.

If you are visiting only one website but on a regular basis then there are times when you will miss a new article added on the website on one of those days when you didn’t visit the website. This is where the RSS fits perfectly. Let us for once imagine that there are 20 websites for which you want to keep tabs then RSS will prove to be truly indispensable.

In order to use the RSS, you will first have to find a feed, the one that you can use. If you are using Mozilla’s Firefox then you will be able to find out with ease if a particular website has accessible feed or not. You don’t even have to go through the entire webpage looking for an RSS icon. When you open a website on the Firefox, you will see an orange icon on the right side of the navigation/URL bar. If you see the icon then it means that the website has RSS feed.

Click on the orange RSS icon in your Firefox browser and it will ask you where you would like to save the feed. Firefox treats RSS feeds as live bookmarks. Once you have saved the feed, go to the particular folder. The folder will have an expand arrow and you can click on the arrow so that it can show all the new entries that has been added on the website in an ascending order with the latest entry on the top.

 

There are times when your browser may not find a particular website’s feed as not all of them have RSS feeds. This is where you will have to search through the web pages to find any items related to feed. There are some websites that have FeedBurner feed, which normally displays the current feed subscribers for that website. If you find a FeedBurner feed icon then click on it and copy the location of the link.

This is the basic information regarding RSS feeds for all those who want to use it to their benefit personally or for viral marketing purposes.