RSS Explained

Many local small business owners that I speak to don’t know what an RSS feed is (and don’t want to in lots of cases!) and so are missing a great opportunity to ensure that they keep up to speed with information and changes in their local area and industry, as well as what their competitors are up to, online.

An RSS feed enables you to subscribe to get web site changes, usually blog posts, sent to you automatically when they are updated rather than having to revisit sites to check for new content. So, it’s much easier to keep ‘in the know’ than trying to remember whose blog you like to read and how often they usually post so that you can check back regularly enough to get fresh information.

I use Google Reader to collate mine. You can find a link to a video by Google explaining how to use Google Reader here on our website but there are many options out there; just do a search online if you are interested in finding out a bit more or want to find an option not provided by Google!

You can sign up for our RSS feed in the top right corner of our website ‘Subscribe to RSS feed’; I blog about online marketing for local businesses about three times a week. You’ve got to practice what you preach! If the reader that you use isn’t listed then just copy this link into your reader: www.counterpointmatters.com/feed/

You can set an RSS feed up to email your readers if they would prefer rather than them needing to use a ‘reader’ to keep up to speed with your fresh content (you can also do that at our site if you would prefer – using the form in the first sidebar); RSS is still quite new to a lot of people, but I really would recommend it.

Another way of keeping your readers up to speed with your fresh content is by ‘tweeting’ in Twitter each time you publish new content. And, social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to automatically post your fresh content into your profile if it’s coming from a blog. Otherwise you could include a link to it in your status update.

Don’t worry if you have no idea what we are talking about at this point; we will be covering this stuff in future blog posts.

Originally published in the Kent on Saturday on Sat 4 Jul 09

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