Really Simple Syndication - How to Make your Favorite Content Come to You
Syndication, by definition, is making available content to simultaneous sources for publication. So, for example, a columnist may write a weekly column that gets published by many different newspapers simultaneously nation wide. Syndication is not exclusive to columns or articles; in today's world, whatever content you can imagine has the potential to become a syndicated work.
So what does this mean in today's world of internet marketing? I want to answer this with a question. Would you invest time, effort, creativity, and money into a billboard without leaving a phone number or website allowing your audience to contact you? Let's Imagine for a moment that you designed the world's greatest billboard and it was guaranteed to convert 90% of all exposed to the billboards content. Of course the answer is no. The entire purpose of erecting a billboard is to advertise to the largest audience possible allowing the viewers a means or a method of contacting your business or service. Would it be worth your time to go through all of that effort and not create a means whereby all of those who are interested in your product could easily follow up with your content? You work too hard to obtain new customers with the efforts you are putting into your marketing but what are you doing to maintain your position as the customers number one supplier of the goods they are interested in? How are you reaching out to those customers or potential buyers if you are focusing so much time and effort into new and creative content?
It sounds silly, but believe it or not this phenomena happens all of the time. Marketers focus so much on the content and making sure whatever is being created is engaging, fun, witty, and clever many times they rely on their viewers to come to them anytime content is published. Many amateur web content creators such as fan sites, small businesses, and bloggers accept the timeless phrase coined in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." True for Kevin Costner but for the internet marketer this will only lead to discouragement and disappointment. After you've caught their attention once, you've built it, advertised it, they came, now how do you keep them there?
And of course there is the flip side. Many content readers waste hours daily searching the content they find interesting by having to visit each site individually. They visit their top 5 favorite blogs on a daily basis to see if there is anything new, or they'll visit Google News, or Yahoo news, or any news site available. I know people who spend hours scouring the local news websites religiously in an effort to stay up-to-date with the world surrounding them.
Why do they do it? Because that's how we've been trained, is always the answer I come up with. Back in the olden days we would go to the magazine stand, or the newspaper stand to get the news we seek. Eventually newspaper made it easier by offering a delivery service, and people were content in reading the newspaper in the comfort of their own home, on their own time, without having to run out to get the information that engages them. If a service like this was valued so highly then why don't we think to do that now? You can and I'm going to explain that right now.
RSS & Your Web Content
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it really is exactly what the name states. Imagine in your mind any blog, or news website you've visited lately and see if you can remember seeing a little orange box with rounded edges, with and dot and two curved lines leaning off to the side above it. This icon is usually off to the side of the content or near the bottom. That is your newspaper delivery boy and a large part of content viewers don't know how to use it. RSS makes it possible to syndicate your content to those customers you've already reached out to and keeps them appraised of the new content you create almost as quickly as you can create it. RSS makes it possible to retain those who are engaged in your website, product or service. So, now you know who the delivery boy is you need to give him somewhere to deliver your content to.
RSS readers take all of the feeds and display them in a central location. It's like the delivery boy (RSS feed) collects all of the feeds and brings them to your home. Google has a reader that is great for this! This is the perfect delivery system for the company who wants to easily get their content out there, and perfect for the consumer who wants to keep up to date. Many people don't understand how to use the RSS feature on blogs and websites. This is a shame because it makes the serious web-surfer a master of web content delivery.
Even at the top of this article is the orange RSS box. just mouse over it and look at the explanation it gives. It even supplies you with a direct link into a RSS reader, making it easy to subscribe to.
So find the reader that would best suit your needs. Start collecting RSS feeds and pointing them to your reader, and begin to enjoy all of your favorite content brought to you from the comfort of a single RSS reader.
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