Using A RSS Feed
As an Internet entrepreneur, one of your most valuable tools can be a RSS Reader. This is essentially an aggregator – a collection of RSS Feeds (that you can add or remove) from different websites that you are interested in. A typical RSS Reader would include RSS Feeds from news sites, sports sites, and perhaps a few niche sites (such as SEO forums, blogs on SEO, etc.). The main purpose of this software is to keep you informed of the latest news and content on websites that you are interested in. If you have used My Yahoo! or Bloglines , you’ve probably used RSS Feeds already. These are online RSS aggregators – you get to choose from numerous websites and within minutes you can have your own launch-pad for knowing everything that’s happening in your niche, in the world, or in sports. As a first step to understanding how RSS Feeds work, I’d suggest that you use at least one RSS Aggregator – either an online RSS tool or RSS reading software like SharpReader – and subscribe to a few RSS Feeds to learn how it works from a user’s perspective.

Marketing and RSS
Using RSS Feeds, websites can:
* Attract more customers / visitors.
* Keep subscribers informed of new developments
* Allow subscribers to instantly learn of new articles, content and products on their website.
* Reduce the load on the subscriber’s inbox by reserving newsletters for important news, special product offers, etc.

As a webmaster, you can use RSS Feeds to your advantage. Since blogging became insanely popular over two years ago, RSS Feeds have become mainstream. In other words, no matter what your niche, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find a few authority sites that publish RSS Feeds, thus syndicating their latest headlines. How can you use this? By providing your visitors relevant, self-refreshing content in the shape of the "latest news" by using RSS feeds from niche-relevant websites. Now I’m not saying that you should cover your whole website (or even one whole page) with RSS Feeds. Such practice is frowned upon by search engines and will actually get your website banned from every single search engine index! RSS Feeds are meant for headline syndication, not for content scrapping. Instead, you could use headlines from the top 3 forums in the weight loss niche to show the latest discussion threads on one side of the "News" page of your own weight loss website. The rest of the page would, of course, be covered with information (i.e. latest news) about your own website. Or you could put a news ticker on your politics blog to not only give your blog a look of "being updated" but to also provide your readers with relevant, useful information. If you sell sports goods and own an online store, you could run a "sports news" feed on your main page to attract the attention of your visitors and give your website a more authentic look and feel. There are many different ways you can use RSS Feeds to add value to your website. Make sure though, that you are merely using these Feeds as "icing on the cake", and not as the whole cake itself.

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