Are you looking for dynamic, automatically refreshing, sticky content to spice up your website? If you are a webmaster, you’ll know how difficult it is to create fresh content to attract your subscribers and new visitors to your website. Paying freelance writers can cost you a fortune when you are just starting out and don’t have site revenues to fund expenses, and writing the articles yourself takes way too much time and takes you away from other important tasks (like actually running the site and making sales happen). Luckily, there’s a little-known but extremely easy tool that you can use to instantly jazz up your website and provide your traffic with valuable information. In fact, you might have heard of this tool before. Headline syndication, aggregators, XML format? Sound familiar? Yup, I’m talking about RSS Feeds.

If you haven’t heard about RSS Feeds, or what they are, I strongly urge you to print out this article, go to a quiet corner where you won’t be disturbed and literally devour every word of the rest of this article. Not only will it probably save your business, but it will revolutionize the way you think about the Internet. And if you’ve come across RSS feeds before or used them, then skim through the next section to refresh your memory (seriously, there is a lot of useful information that you might be missing out on) and then dive into the meat of this article, which will show you how to set up RSS feeds on your website to display dynamic, self-updating content with very little effort.

What Is RSS?
RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary", although other terms such as "RDF Site Summary" (which emphasizes the file format) and "Really Simple Syndication" (which highlights the main selling point of RSS) are also useful in defining RSS by the book. However, bookish definitions don’t always explain things very well. What really is RSS? RSS is a platform over which a webmaster can instantly deliver summarized information about the latest / most important content on his website. This summary is usually a list of headlines and snippets – the headline will instantly inform the reader of what this new article or page contains and the snippet (usually the first few lines of the article) is to further entice the reader into visiting the website, or to simply give the reader more information. RSS has evolved into a commonly accepted XML standard, and many websites now use RSS Feeds (XML files containing the summaries) to publish "updates" about themselves. From the webmaster’s point of view, an RSS feed is meant to allow visitors and subscribers an easy way to keep themselves abreast of fresh content on their website (without having them visit the website first). Additionally, an RSS Feed also allows the reader to "preview" this fresh content, thus letting them decide immediately if the new article / content is interesting to them or not. All in all, RSS Feeds have the main purpose of enhancing user experience. Keep that last point as we go through the rest of this article – it is an underlying mindset to making RSS Feeds work effectively.

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