I hope this information about RSS is as enlightening and helpful to you as it has been to me since I first researched it in early 2005. I’m sure you’ve noticed how quickly things change in the online world of search engines, RSS and internet marketing. One week you’re making easy money with Google ads, the next week you need a website, then an RSS feed, then audio in your RSS feed… And that’s just during the last six months or less!

Since things change so fast on the web, I’ve made my new free RSS Resources e-book a living document with hyper-links to my Free RSS Resources website. Whenever I mention a resource on the internet, you can click on the link I provide in the e-book and you’ll end up at the resource, regardless of whether its web address has changed since the last edition of the e-book. If the resource goes away entirely, I’ll direct you to a similar resource or to a note explaining what happened. Dead links are high on my list of pet peeves. You can always check the RSS Resource List on my website. I regularly add things which I think you’ll find useful as you explore RSS feeds and related topics.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

With my new free RSS Resources e-book and Free RSS Resources website, you’ll always be up to date. I don’t know about you, but I’m in this for the long haul. Nothing bothers me more than pouring through a how-to document, only to find out later that everything I just read and got ready to apply is so out of date that it’s no longer relevant, or worse, that it actually violates the latest search engine policies. Been there, done that? Me too. Several internet marketing e-books written in 2004 fall into that category, along with many (most?) which were written in earlier years. Things change fast in this business. Fall behind at your own peril. Look for clues within the content and examples of any e-book you read, to guess when it was really written (hint: don’t rely on automatically-generated dates in the sales letter or e-book). It could make or break your business financially. Just a thought.

With a few exceptions, I’ve actually used every product which I link to on the website and in my e-book, and I’ve given you my honest opinion of each. I really do want to help you succeed with RSS and your business, by telling you all you really need to know about RSS (but were probably too confused to ask), or at least showing you where to find it.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

RSS is the new wave of internet publishing, redefining online communication. Simply put, it’s a standard for publishing regularly-updated content (news headlines, blog posts, press releases, audio and video content, the possibilities are endless) on the web. Consumers select and read the content of their choice at their leisure with RSS feed readers (either web-based or installed on a local system). The feed reader collects a consumer’s favorite feeds together in one place, making the titles and summaries of individual articles, along with links to the actual articles and the websites they’re hosted upon, available as soon as they’re published.

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Implementing RSS technology today will give you a critical edge over your slow-to-adapt competitors. In 2004, not that many people were even aware of RSS feeds, kind of like the old days of the internet, when the web was quietly used and loved by academic researchers but not the general public. But more and more people are hopping on board every day – RSS is poised to be the hottest way to receive regularly-updated information in 2005. It’s certainly the best traffic-building and marketing tool for online businesses today, and should be at the top of your list of tactics.

Big players are moving into this market and ramping up quickly. Yahoo has their own web-based feed reader. Mozilla (creators of Netscape) built feed-reading into their new Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client. You just know the next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser will be able to read feeds too. Google acquired the Blogger blog service. AskJeeves recently acquired Bloglines. Microsoft has MSN Spaces, their own blog service. Are you excited about RSS feeds yet?

Now’s the time to get involved, before today’s free feed directories, blog directories and podcast directories become saturated and expensive. Get everything in place now and you’ll be ready when the huge wave of traffic hits, when RSS feeds move from the early adopters to the masses, just like email, websites and blogs did in the past.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

Today, the Firefox web browser and its email companion Thunderbird, which are the open-source successors of Netscape from Mozilla, come with an RSS feed reader built into the 1.0 release. They also run on most OS platforms. Microsoft is playing catch-up. MS Internet Explorer has no RSS feed reader capability. But you just know it will, and soon. Microsoft sees the potential of RSS and how it’s taking hold across the web. They see Mozilla trying to take the new browser market away from them again. When that happens, anyone who’s not taking full advantage of RSS for their business or personal promotion will be left in the dust. Even if Microsoft enforces a new RSS standard, everyone else will support it, because of the sheer size of the Microsoft-based market. That’s just how it is.

If you don’t already have Firefox and Thunderbird, download the latest releases here. The Mozilla website says they have been downloaded more than 25 million times already. Every month that Microsoft announces a new swarm of security patches for Internet Explorer and Outlook, thousands more switch to Mozilla’s excellent products.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

Many RSS feed readers are web-based – you don’t actually have to install anything on your desktop, or even use your own system. Just go online in the internet cafe or the library or on your own computer and you can read any feed you want to. My Yahoo, Bloglines, NewsGator and MyFeedster are some of the popular web-based feed readers, and they’re free. Set up an account at no charge and go feed surfing.

If you set up your own RSS feed, and then tell My Yahoo about it, you’ll wind up with a listing in the Yahoo search engine (which would otherwise be much more difficult to get). I show you how to set it up in my Free RSS Resources E-book.

There are hundreds of desktop-based feed readers out there, and many web-based readers as well. I have a list of RSS feed readers on my website to get you started.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary depending on who you listen to. It’s also confused with RDF (Resource Description Framework), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and a variety of other related TLA’s (Three-Letter Acronyms). RSS is actually a family of web syndication protocols which provide information in XML files known as RSS feeds.

The issue is further confused by some “helpful” RSS feed readers, search engines and directories, which claim that RSS feeds always end with the .rss or .xml extension. NOT! In fact, RSS feeds can have almost any file extension or none at all. The current version of WordPress, a popular and free (free for commercial uses too!) blog software package which I use, uses the .php extension for all of the feeds it generates. I suspect that many other blog packages written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) code also use that extension for their feeds. Feedburner, a great feed re-publishing service, doesn’t use an extension at all, unless you tell it to use a particular one.
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Yahoo plans to offer contextual advertising, similar to Google’s AdSense program. The question is , when? According to observations posted recently on Waxy.org, it may only be a few months from now, with testing already underway. Overture’s name is changing to Yahoo too. Sign up with Yahoo here to stay informed.

Read the whole article about Yahoo contextual advertising here.

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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.

Just like anything else in the high-tech industry, the standards for RSS are evolving quickly. For now, most programs which generate feeds seem to have settled on RSS 2.0, though RSS 0.9x and RSS 1.x variants are still around. There’s also a similar standard called Atom, which is used by Blogger and some of the other blog services. Most feed readers will understand and display all of these different formats, and will in fact deal with Atom feeds even though the programs are called “RSS” feed readers. (more…)

There are several ways to generate an RSS feed:

1) Directly from your blog software (if you blog), optionally enhanced by FeedBurner or a similar service. This is how I currently generate all of my feeds.

If you haven’t chosen your blog software yet, I highly recommend WordPress. It’s got a great feature set, it’s been around long enough to have a lot of the bugs fixed, lots and lots of loyal users of other blog software have moved to WordPress because it’s so much better, and it’s free, even for commercial use. It also seamlessly supports audio enclosures (podcasting) in your RSS feed.

If you need a place to host your blog and feed, iPowerWeb is by far the best low-cost service I’ve ever seen. Everything just works, they provide great statistics, site features and documentation, lots of storage and email accounts, proper and current PHP and MySQL support (necessary for many blogs including WordPress) and their tech support folks are responsive and follow up to make sure any issue gets resolved. WordPress installs and runs like a dream on iPowerWeb. With some other hosting providers, I’ve had to rewrite PHP code and place files in all sorts of unnatural places on my site to get it to work, due to silly restrictions and limitations of the hosting providers. I’ve tried several low-cost and medium-cost hosting services and now would never use anyone but iPowerWeb.
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