Internet Marketing

Using RSS Feeds as a Marketing Strategy

How to Create RSS?

(page 2 of 3)
Published on: January 29, 2007

If you're interested in RSS submission for your web site, you'll have several choices to make:Main tags of RSS

The content of an RSS document is always placed between rss tags. They always contain a version attribute that specifies the version according to which the RSS document was created. On the next level there is the tag, which comprises the metadata of the RSS feed (mandatory or not), and also the list of contents.

Metadata

There are three mandatory elements:

title: Defines the title of the feed.
link: Defines the URL of the site corresponding to the feed.
description:Describes the feed in a succinct manner.

Other optional elements are:

pubDate: Defines the date when the feed was published.
image: Allows the insertion of an image in the feed.
language: Defines the language of the feed.

Content

For every article, an item tag is added to the document. Within this tag there is data corresponding to specific items, marked with tags. All elements of the item section are optional, however at least one of title or description must be present.

The most common tags are:

title: Defines the title of the item.
link: Defines the URL of the feed corresponding to the item.
pubDate: Defines the date of the item.
description: Contains a succinct description of the item.

Other tags found here are:

author: Defines the author's email address.
category: Places the item into a category.
comments: Defines the URL of a page for comments relating to the item.

Where and How Can RSS Be Used?

RSS feeds can fall into many categories, such as blog feeds (on blog sites), article feeds (news sites), forum feeds (forums), schedule feeds (schools, clubs, organizations), discount / specials feeds (stores), or news monitoring (companies).

Given that RSS is so versatile, there are industries where RSS feeds have become one of the many ways of marketing, promoting and communicating.

RSS advertising is a must in industries such as real estate (to let potential clients know about newly-arrived properties or inform them about certain opportunities), IT (to let users know about software updates, new virus definitions, etc.), or human resources (job openings, job fairs, various information). This shows that RSS can meet communication needs of each and every sector of activity.

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