Feeding Time
- By Rodney Goldston
- Published 07/25/2007
- RSS
Would you like a free and easy way to help your site reach new readers? Or let current readers know when your site's been updated? Sounds like it's feeding time. A "feed" is what everyone from bloggers to big-league website publishers use to syndicate a summary of their latest content. Syndicated content comes in many shapes and sizes: headlines, photos, video, podcasts, sports scores, stock prices, weather -- almost anything that gets updated regularly. Users subscribe to feeds via news aggregators, which gather the user-selected feeds and display all the content in one convenient location. Subscribers can even access feeds via their mobile devices or email.
Why Syndicate?
Syndication is a simple and low cost way to get your name and content in front of new readers and remind existing readers that it's time to pay your site another visit. A feed is easy to set up, and once you've got one, subscribers automatically receive new content whenever you update. And it's much less hassle than other, more traditional methods of pulling in readers, such as newsletters. With a syndicated feed, you have no spam filters to battle, no shifting email addresses to manage.
Who Subscribes to Syndicated Feeds?
A person who subscribes to feeds is a person who's looking to keep life simple. Rather than visit each of their favorite sites individually to see what's new, feed subscribers simply scan their syndicated headlines (or photos, or podcasts, etc.) and click through to get the rest of the story.
Subscribers win because they get a nice overview of what's going on without having to visit multiple sites, and you win because you attract more readers while also helping to retain your existing readership. And all you have to do is set up your feed and submitt it.
There are hundreds of rss submission sites to possibly submitt to. Click here for a list of top rss submission sites.
