If American colonists had electricity and the internet, and they wanted to know when the British were coming, do you think they would keep checking their websites to see what was happening?
Our would they prefer that the website CONTACTED THEM with the news?
Lucky for us, Paul Revere was available.
Your website or blog or Facebook page can easily reach out and touch your users with news feeds, audio, video, or whatever, using website RSS.
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. RSS for websites uses a standard XML file format to publish information. It is a widely used format to get pieces of news or information to people quickly. Users sign up for RSS feeds, install a reader, and they are off and running. Website RSS is pretty easy to write but even if you cannot, there are services that will do all the work for you, or software that can handle the job with minimal input from you.
A website RSS feed makes your whole design more interesting because as much as you input those feeds, your website will always have up to date information. The website is always fresh, even though much of its content may not change day to day. Users subscribe to website RSS feeds to follow information they are interested in around the web. Because nobody knows your customers better than you do, your website RSS feeds will land right in their sweet spot. And you do not need to create all the RSS feeds yourself, you can display categories of various feeds you collected from other portions of the web to give your customers a little gazette of what is happening…and all the content is fresh.
Service like this and using your website RSS feeds this well means that not only do your customers keep close contact with you, they bring in other like minded customers to your website. That kind of traffic gets noticed by search engines and when they take note, your rank on the search engine popularity pole rises. Your judicious and effective use of website RSS pays off, and it is inexpensive to do.
Remember that when you write the headlines for your RSS fees, use words and phrases that pique the interest of your users. Use enough of a description to have the reader want to read more, and try to make the reader act, or react, to your RSS feed.
A website RSS headline like THE BRITISH ARE COMING BY LAND! will surely get read.