FAQ #6 – What is an RSS?

You’ve heard about feeds, RSS’s, and readers but you have no idea what it means let alone what it means to your business. In today’s video we’ll cover exactly what RSS stands for, why you should be thrilled it exists, and how to use them for your marketing efforts.

Watch the video and enjoy.

Bye for now,

Brian J Devine

Here is the transcript for the video it you prefer to read…

Hello again. Brian Devine here, your online marketing consultant. And we’re going to talk about question number six out of my top ten most commonly asked questions as a marketing consultant online. Number six is “what is an RSS feed?” And I do get that question on a regular basis, when people see it on blogs, they see it on websites, and they don’t really know what an RSS feed is. So let’s break this down. We’re going to make this very simple.

RSS stands for “real simple syndication” or “really simple syndication.” All that really means to you is that you can go to a website that has that little RSS button on it, click on it, and it will now be put into what’s called an RSS reader or a newsfeed reader. Google has that set up for you. It’s free, and once you’ve selected that, now when you look at your reader, it will automatically pull up every RSS feed that you have signed up for.

So what does that mean to you as an orthodontist? Well that means that if you put an RSS feed on your website, every time somebody comes to your website ‑‑ or more likely your blog ‑‑ and says “yeah, that RSS feed, I’ll click there, I’ll sign up for it, but I want to receive a notice every time you do something on that blog.”

No matter what it is, they’re going to get that information immediately in their reader. So, you put something on your blog, and it is updated on all of these RSS feeds.

Now, other things that this feed does. It allows you to use ‑ and I’m going to go back to blog marketing, because it’s very easy to do with a blog ‑ you can use a little piece of software. It’s called a plug‑in, but it’s an RSS feed plug‑in, and it allows you to take your feed from your blog and let multiple different sites know whenever you do anything on your blog. It’s called a ping, and your RSS feed will ping these sites and let them know that you have made a change, or updated, or created a post, put on a video, whatever it is that you did on that site.

When that happens, you now have all of these areas that are looking at your site, and it’s all done electronically. But they’re now looking at your site to see what you’ve done and they’re saying “OK, this is a legitimate place, I’m going to back‑link to it.” And now you’re going to end up with all of these new back‑links to your website. So, RSS feeds are your friend.

If you want to find out a little bit more about RSS feeds, I’ve just kind of scratched the surface. Go to one of your favorite websites or go to a blog that you’ve been to, or go to brianjdevine.com. Click on the RSS link button, and sign up for it, and you’ll see how it works. It will walk you through everything that you need, and give you an idea of what readers you might already have on your computer or what readers you need. It’s very straightforward. And then you can set up multiple RSS feeds to come into your reader, and in one place you can keep up to date with multiple different websites.

So, hopefully that’s given you a little bit of the background on Real Simple Syndication, RSS feeds. And I look forward to seeing you for the next video, number seven in the top ten questions.

And that’s it for today.

Bye for now.

One Response to “FAQ #6 – What is an RSS?”

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