Keep Customers Informed With RSS

Posted by Norm on February 27, 2009

Having a great business web site with up to date content is just not enough. How do your customers know when you add new information to your web site? Newsletters is one way to let them know, but there is a new game in town that does it much more effectively and automatically with no effort on your part.

RSS, a technology introduced in 2000 primarily for news web sites, can now be used by web site blogs to easily inform a list of subscribers that something new was added to your web site. The use of RSS has snowballed recently and a free service by “Feedburner” makes it much easier to use.

What is RSS? The acronym stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. News agencies, such as Associated Press and Reuters, have syndicated their news reports for years as their primary business.  You can often see their news articles in your local newspaper.

How does that work on the Internet? Maybe I can explain with an example.  If you go to any number of Internet portals (like Yahoo, MSN or AOL) they will list links to current news articles.  These links may take you to The Washington Post,  CNBC, or any other web site that originated the article. These web sites have provided information feeds from their web sites to the portal web sites… syndication!

So what does that mean for my web site? A company called Feedburner (owned by Google) has set-up a  syndication method for blogs.  They more recently offered a service that uses email to notify subscribers that a blog has added a new article.  So if you are subscribed to SmallBiz-webdesignguide.com, you will receive an email message from Feedburner when I add information to this web site.

Feedburner can be set-up to send a full copy of the article or only the title with a brief excerpt. If you click on the title in the email, you will be linked directly to the full article on this web site.  I prefer the later so a long email message is not sent and if you are not interested in the title and description, you can simply pass.

The message is only sent when a new article is posted. If more than one article is posted in one day, only one email is sent daily with info on all posted articles for the day.  As I said earlier, it is totally automatic.

What is the downside?  You place a small subscription form on your web site and you need to entice people to subscribe. When someone does subscribe by entering their email address, they will receive a confirmation message from Feedburner.  They must click on the confirmation link before they will be subscribed.  Therefore you can not add subscribers from another email list you may be using to send newsletters.

If you are sending newsletters to a list, you could of course request that the recipiants go to your web site and subscribe to your Feedburner feed.

This doesn’t work unless you have a web site designed with a blog engine, such as Wordpress.  The blog engine includes the software to feed your new articles to Feedburner.  I guess that’s another reason to review your web site needs and consider a redesign with more current technology.