RSS feeds are in essence like keeping a constant look on some aspect of a remote web page. You may want to know when your favourite website has been updated. Or perhaps you might need the latest weather update. Regardless of the information you desire, you simply need to setup a RSS feed to the site of interest. You then need to bring all your RSS feeds together and output that information in one place such as your websites home page. This will allow you to continuously monitor a large variety of pages without having to manually visit the sites.



The second aspect of RSS feeds revolves around advertising. If you would like to increase traffic to one of your blogs or websites, you can simply publish an RSS feed on another website. The scenario being, visitors to the site you publish your RSS feed on, will see the links (via the RSS feed) to your web page, which will enable them to know exactly what is happening on your site at any given time. The idea is to have your RSS feed published on as many sites as possible. If you can get enough people to add your RSS feed to their site, you will be able to create a large network of visitors viewing your site via the feeds.

Looking at the technical aspect of RSS feeds, they are based on XML code. If you wanted to insert an RSS feed on to a web page in the olden days, you would have had to manually paste a significantly large piece of XML code into the already existing code of the web page. This was very awkward and beyond the capabilities of most bloggers at that time. RSS makes handling XML simple and easy to use. Nowadays, pasting XML code into a web page is a rare occurrence. You can follow a simple step by step protocol to have your RSS feed on your ?feed aggregator? page or software, or have your feed published some place else.

The meaning of RSS has changed over time. However, the term currently means ?Really Simple Syndication?, according to Wikipedia. To view a feed on any page, you will need to use an aggregator. This can be a site such as Technorati, Del.Ico.us or Feedburner. These sites have proven to be very helpful to personal bloggers, people who read a variety of feeds or blogs, and people who use their blog or website to run an online business. These sites are usually referred to as ?communities?, and they usually function as both feed publishers and aggregators.

Feedburner claims to be the most patronised of feed publishing networks. Having your RSS feed burned can result in a large increate in traffic almost instantaneously. Simply by choosing Feedburner to publish your RSS feed, you automatically gain access to many new marketing channels. It's likely; you'll discover tons of new channels that you didn't know existed. Technorati is primarily a blog-hosting site. However its feed publishing potential and source of huge quantities of traffic shouldn't be underestimated.

Del.Ico.us is used mainly as an online bookmarking service specifically designed to attract end users rather than publishers. This simply means that publishing your RSS feed on this site should encourage more end users to visit your website.

Ultimately, publishing RSS feeds from your personal website can greatly increase your web traffic resulting in huge profits (for those running an online business). Publishing feeds is one of the most effective ways of letting people know what is happening on your website.