What is an RSS Feed & How It Can Benefit Your Blog & Your Business?

Most blogs today incorporate an RSS Feed and the logo that goes with it.

It has become a highly recognizable symbol online but few people know what it really means. The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) logo. Accompanied only by words like "subscribe" or "follow" this logo speaks for itself, or does it?

RSS feeds have become an "everyone else is doing it" cliché on today's blogs. We assume we need one but not everyone entirely understands exactly what the RSS feed does.

Today's web savvy prospects have become hesitant to sign up for email reminders or to subscribe for updates from businesses they like simply because of the increase in emails that will result. If you are like most people, we are frantically unsubscribing from every newsletter that hits our inbox to reduce email clutter and overload. For businesses with blogs, readership is the key to success and subscribers create a fan base that you can track and market to. Making the decision to offer an RSS feed to readers is giving them the ability to follow your blog with ease. Your content can easily be shared via a person’s RSS Feed reader, email, or even Outlook has a section for strictly RSS Feeds.

RSS feeds act like a subscription to your blog however there are no email alerts when you post new content. A user chooses a web feed format and then adds their favorite blogs or news sites to their feed. When new content is published on these sites the reader will see the content in their web feed.

By definition this is a form of syndication such as a newspaper might use to publish valuable news from across the country. The benefit of an RSS feed is that it is completely designed by the consumer. They choose their news and information sources and build the perfect news feed for their interests. Also, another huge benefit of RSS Feeds, is that people can easily share your content on their own blogs or share posts via social media and you get links back to your site in a lot of these instances.

Giving your audience the ability to keep up with your content through a web feed is a must in today's fast paced internet marketing arena. If they like what they see they may decide to sign up for your e-newsletter as well and eventually make a purchase or contact you for more information. You spend a lot of time writing content for your blog and website. Don’t let it go to waste, make it easy for your consumers to follow you and keep up with your content using an RSS Feed.