How to Market Your Website with RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy to use, and often underused, technology. It can be used much like email marketing. It offers much easier segmentation and an abundance of marketing options and opportunities. Here are just a few basic ideas to market your website with RSS feeds.

#1 Syndicate

Syndication is the ability to republish someone else’s content. As a website owner, you can syndicate your own content. When others publish your articles on their website you earn exposure, increased awareness and of course traffic to your website. Due to duplicate content issues, consider syndicating newsletter content rather than content that is published on your website or blog.

Once you have RSS on your website, you can submit your feeds to aggregator sites like FeedBurner.

#2 New Product Feed

If you offer a lot of new products, promotions or sales, you can offer a new product feed. When people subscribe to this feed they learn, often before anyone else, what you have available on your website.

You could also send subscribers information about new product features or improved features, coupons, discontinued products or products that are in limited supply. It’s a great way to boost sales.

#3 Content Feed

This is the most common type of feed. In fact, your basic blog RSS is this type of feed. Readers subscribe to it so they can receive your most recent blog post in their email inbox or on their RSS reader.

#4 Affiliate Feed

You can provide your affiliates with a feed that they subscribe to. When you have new content, contests, promotions or other marketing tools, you can notify them. It’s a great way to keep your affiliates connected to you and up to date on all your product offerings.

#5 Email Feed

You can also use RSS just like you would email marketing. Send subscribers valuable information, new blog posts or content on your website, and insider information. You can announce new content on your website, new products or services and/or industry or company news.

There are a number of ways to use RSS to market your blog or website. Take a look at the technology and what it has to offer. Consider how it might integrate into your existing marketing tactics. For example, if you’re already using email marketing why not syndicate the content and offer it to publishers via RSS? Create goals and a plan to market your business website with RSS.