RSS feeds and your marketing toolbox

Copyright 2006 Kelly Robbins

I've been exploring RSS feeds and how to get your company's information on them. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and as a reader is an easy way to get short bits of information on a topic. This saves you the time of reading the entire article if you're not interested in the topic. It's also an easy way to keep up with news on a particular topic that interests you. Like healthcare. Or marketing.

RSS feeds contain headlines with hyperlinks to a longer article or web page. Many of us receive daily email updates from healthleaders.com. Each of these headlines is an article from another news source. These are RSS feeds.

So as a marketer, how do you get your hospital or clinics information on RSS feeds?

Here are some steps Catherine Seda gives in the February issue of Entrepreneur magazine.

Decide what information to syndicate as an RSS feed. Blogs, special offers, company news, events, product announcements and articles make compelling RSS content.

Prepare an XML file. A sample is at www.usatoday.com. Go to the very bottoms and click on RSS feeds. You can then click on one of the topic links and see all the articles picked up by that feed. She also recommends checking out http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss. (That site is way to techie for me. It explains the details of how to set it up. That's what IT is for, isn't it?)

Get RSS aggregators to pick up your feeds. You can submit your feeds to major search engines like www.google.com/intl/en/feedfetcher.html and http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/submit. Seda says that if your RSS feed becomes popular with readers other aggregators will find it and pick it up.

I have to admit I haven't done this yet. It sounds pretty simple (for my web guru to figure out) and a great and inexpensive way to share information about your company using another medium.

Let's take a quick look at some of the benefits of marketing through RSS feeds

Not email so doesn't run through spam filters People choose to receive information on your topic. You not only have a better chance of getting their attention, but they are much more likely to read it because the feeds are topic specific. A cost-effective way to drive traffic to your Web site. Especially for companies that publish content regularly (events, jobs, articles, news). Once you produce an RSS file, you are enabling others to syndicate your headlines without any work on your part.

Experts have said that RSS feeds will soon join email marketing, web site banners and search engine keywords as viable marketing tools. You owe it to yourself to investigate.

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