Thursday, July 07, 2005
All About RSS and Blogs: New Models for Information Exchange
Search engines love blogs. That’s a fact!
Run a search on any topic you want. Chances are, blog entries will be one of the results on the first page.
Blogs were originally designed to be online journals, or diaries if you will, to chronicle the daily happenings of the blogger’s life. It was only recently that people started to realize the sheer advertising power of this method.
Blogs are designed to be user-friendly. You could set-up a blog site with the many free blogging services out there, like Blogspot and Blogger. Upon registration, you could immediately post some entries, and instantaneously after submission, it would already be published on the web. Yes, it’s that easy!
But what makes a blog an Internet Marketers dream is the way content can easily be updated. Search engines prefer sites with constantly changing content, right? Blogs make updates very simple.
Blogs also encourage linking. One link to another blog can easily transform into a network of a thousand links. One colleague of mine tried blogging a product he was selling. A day after he posted his entry, he was surprised to discover 2000 hits and around 30 comments on his blog page.
Blogs are also free and easily customizable. You don’t have to spend a fortune for an elegant web design. Blog services offer a variety of features that could make your blog stand out.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, on the other hand, is a publishing standard that allows information to be delivered directly to the subscriber’s desktop. It is an amazing new tool that works like an autoresponder.
Instead of delivering your business message via e-mail, you could do so via RSS feeds. Instead of having a mailing list, you’ll have subscribers who have agreed to accept your RSS feeds.
RSS can also be integrated into a website. Your site could use an RSS news feed to stream in content from another site. Are you part of multiple affiliate programs? Stream your different products through RSS and your visitors will have an easier time sifting through them.
Do you have multiple sites for your business? Provide all of them with a centralized RSS feed to instantly update them in one single motion.
You will need an RSS feed generator to be able to stream RSS content. There are many of these that are downloadable from the Internet. Your viewers should also have an RSS reader.
Not all Internet users have acclimatized to the use of RSS, but experts predict that in a couple of years, RSS will be the new model of information exchange.
Ross Storey (horizonprm@iinet.net.au), Director of Storeyworks Communications (http://www.quokkasoft.com), has been fascinated by the internet and web marketing for more than a decade.
RSS Made Easy - http://snipurl.com/c1yb
Blog in a Box - http://snipurl.com/c1cr
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
