First of all, what’s an RSS feed?

Wikipedia says:

“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.”

The major features of RSS feeds:

• RSS feeds update automatically. Once a new blog entry is published all the subscribed clients receive the update.
• In comparison to mail campaigns it is much cheaper as you don’t have to deals with black lists and spam filters
• An RSS feed is 100% optional choice. The subscribers are really interested in the information you provide. In order to read the updates the feeds are submitted to special reader services which are able to translate the RSS code into decipherable entries. You see that if a person is not interested in your services he/she wouldn’t bother spending time and effort subscribing to RSS feeds

Bill Flitter, of Pheedo.com, speaks about the future of RSS feeds:

“RSS becomes a little bit easier, I think we’ll see a huge surge in its use.” A number of Internet Browsers (like Firefox, Safari and Opera) are already RSS-enabled and the others will be soon.

Owing to the simplicity of RSS campaigns they are destined to gain popularity in the near future. Flitter continues:

“I think we’ll see… individual subscriptions increase so you can send information that’s more relevant to that end user… like Tivo for the web.”

Another option that is still to come is the ability to manipulate and customize the feeds. You will be able to make your feed stand out in the crowd by giving it exclusive appearance and other features.

Can RSS feeds help an eBiz?

RSS feeds can be used to send:

• Newsletters
• product promos
• blogs
• special offers

RSS feeds are universal for all the types of blog software (Type Pad, Word Press, Movable Type). All software solutions allow RSS feeds. So now the only thing you need to do is keep the content on your pages fresh, relevant and interesting so that the visitors would like to get the latest updates.

Related posts:

Selling on eBay: Boosting your eBiz

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Directory of Ideas, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.