How to use RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds are ways to send information around the internet to be used in other places.

Most commonly RSS Feeds of blogs are used to promote blog posts on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. (It’s RSS Feeds that mean as soon as I publish a blog on eCommerceMasterPlan.com it’s tweeted – I don’t do it manually!)

You can see the eCommerce MasterPlan RSS Feed here: http://ecommercemasterplan.com/feed/

To use an RSS Feed – first you need an RSS Feed.

If you’re using a standard blogging platform you’ll have one already (so on WordPress, Blogger etc). If you’re running your blog on your website then ask your website builder if you already have an RSS Feed, otherwise they’ll need to build one for you (great article on doing just that here).

Once you have your RSS Feed you can start using it to get your content out there:

1. use it to automatically post to social media engines (twitterfeed.com is great for doing this – and not just to twitter)
2. allow customers to sign up for RSS updates (just give them the link to your feed, like I have above)
3. submit it to blog curation sites like technorati