RSS is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the Internet marketing community, but outside of that world, not many people know what it is.

First things first, what does RSS stand for? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a way for people to keep track of updates to websites/blogs that they are interested in without having to constantly visit the site. A user can “subscribe” to an RSS feed and all updates to that website/blog are “pushed” to the reader’s “RSS reader”. The most popular “RSS Reader” these days is Google Reader.

How RSS Works
An RSS feed is a file hosted on your website that contains a list of all the content you have on your site, along with a time for when each item was published. As new items are added to your website, entries are automatically added to the RSS feed so that it stays up-to-date. The most common example of this is on blogs when new blog posts are added to the blog these are also added to the RSS feed.

People can then use their RSS reader to subscribe to your RSS feed and get notifications when you update your website or blog. The notifications they receive can include the actual content you posted to your website or just a short description and a link to read more.

Sign People up to Your RSS Feed
Once you have an RSS feed for your website, you need subscribers to sign up for it. There are a couple ways to do this and the most popular one is to simply add a button to your website that tell people where to find your RSS feed. Another way is a little more technical and involves coding your web pages in such a way that Internet browsers automatically tell users you have a feed available.

RSS is super simple way to grow the number of consumers that read your content. It helps you engage some of your bigger fans. If you don’t have RSS on your blog or website you should add it. It’s not hard. We will cover how to do this in a future post.