Improve your marketing game—and your marketing speak—with RSS

As the resident web designer/ developer/ girl of all things Internets here at Point to Point, I’m often the one who has to explain all these “new fangled” technologies to clients who are usually delving head first into territories unknown. And sometimes, in order to not appear like a complete newbie, we go with the flow of a conversation, glossing over unfamiliar terms and acronyms and just make it up as we go along. Which brought us to the inspiration behind this post.

What the heck is an RSS?

Stay with me, I’m going to attempt to show you right here in this blog what it’s all about, and why it’s important to you. RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication.” WTF? Exactly! Just as all the other technology acronyms you’ve conquered: SMS, PDF, heck, even HTTP—for you, the casual user, it’s not about knowing what it stands for, it’s about knowing what it can do for you. So… what does RSS stand for? It means this: have content come to you, don’t waste your time going to the content.

Have you noticed lately that everyone is clamoring over each other to share and comment on all these articles and blog posts and Twitter gems? It’s all about what you know, and if you can be one of the first to share those nuggets, the better. How do you think your coworker who is always impressing everyone with the latest and greatest marketing tips does it? Does she spend her whole day searching the web, jumping from site to site, sifting through lists of recent articles, signing up for a dozen email lists? Nope, she doesn’t. She uses RSS and lets the content come to her, she doesn’t go to the content. And here’s how you can do it too.

Use an RSS reader to assemble all the top web sites and blogs that interest you, and you can view as many web sites as you want all at once. A reader brings all the content that you want to “subscribe to” (yup, that’s an RSS term) onto one page. So no more jumping from web site to web site to stay on top of the latest marketing news. And if you want to use RSS to become a well-read, top of the heap marketer, the first thing you gotta do is get yourself a reader.

How to find an RSS Reader:

If you have a Yahoo! or Google account, you already have a reader, it’s built into your account. And btw, if you don’t have an account with either of those services, you probably should anyways. Just go sign up with either Google or Yahoo, pick either one, I don’t care which (and no, unfortunately, they’re not paying me for any endorsements here.) NOTE: signing up for either of those services does not mean you need a Gmail or Yahoo email account. It just means you can access all the services they offer. And you don’t have to use either of those as your reader, if your Cousin Bill who helped you set up your web site recommends another one, go for it. Go ahead and email me (or Bill) and one of us will help you set it up.

Adding content:

RSS relies on “feeds” of content from a web site or blog. Here’s more lingo: “add an RSS feed to your reader” to get that web site’s content onto your web page. So where to start? First, find a web site that you like. How about the Point to Point Point of View blog? Look for a button or link that says RSS– you’ve probably seen that odd little orange icon on all the blogs. Now here’s the tricky part. That button’s link goes to the raw text (aka “feed”) of the blog.

And what you do next depends on your browser. If you click on it, hopefully it’s going to take you to a page that will ask you to find your reader of choice. Worst case scenario is that you click on it and you get to see all that raw text. If that’s the case, just copy the address that’s in your address bar. Go to your new reader page, if you are using Google or Yahoo, look for the button or link on the reader page that says something like “add content” or “add subscription” and paste that address in there. Voila! You’ve just subscribed to a feed!

Here, try it out with Point to Point. Here’s the link to our feed. We’ve made it simple for you as we use a service to promote our feed.

Now what?

Once you have your reader set up, keep going! Find web sites you visit and add their feed to your reader. Now instead of spending an hour each morning visiting a dozen web sites, just visit your feed. Revel in all the extra time you now have on your hands and use it to contemplate if your company web site needs a feed, or interesting ways to promote your feed. Need more on that? You need to contact us!

Here’s the other great thing about RSS. You can use RSS to find web sites that you don’t know about. Stay on top of your game by discovering companies and people and web sites you never knew about with RSS. And in my next post, I’ll show you how to do just that.

And to all of our readers who are savvy RSS users: what’d you think? How’d I do? Care to add to the conversation? Tell me about it in the comments below.