How and Why to Create an RSS Feed

Have you ever seen that orange square logo with the dot and two white waves? If it reminds you of an old-timey broadcast of content, you wouldn’t be far off. The logo represents what’s known as an RSS, or “Really Simple Syndication,” feed. RSS feeds are used to push content out to people with RSS readers, or programs that accept RSS feeds. It’s a great way for users to consolidate content from their favorite sources as well as an excellent resource for content-intensive businesses to instantly reach their users.

Setting up a feed is a lot easier than you might think. RSS feeds are usually formatted inXML, but there are a lot of free and paid tools that can do all that hard work for you. This is a great option to reach a user when and where the user wants to be reached.

RSS feeds won’t work for everyone, but they’re great to employ when they do. Here are three reasons to consider creating an RSS feed and a quick guide on how to create one:

1. When You Have a Blog

RSS feeds are great for businesses that update their websites frequently, especially if their websites include a blog. If you already use a platform like WordPress or Blogger for your blog content, RSS functionality can be added easily, whether it’s through a plugin for WordPress or just configuring it on Blogger. If your web designer created the blog from scratch, then they should have already created an RSS option for you. If your custom blog doesn’t have an RSS option built-in, any experienced web developer should be able to code one to work with yours.

2. When You Have Many Products

Let’s say you are a small business that creates and sells jewelry. When you have a new product, you will of course want to share it on your website. Your site may not be blog-based, but you can share new products with your customers through its own RSS feed. Remember, you can convert your static webpage to be published through an RSS generator, but you should first consider the type of customers that subscribe to RSS feeds. Such customers expect a constant flow of information about a particular subject, or they want to know when new products come in. If you don’t change your website very often with respect to updating its content, then an RSS feed might not be for you.

3. When You Have Frequent Press Releases

Perhaps your business sends out press releases on a regular basis. Or maybe your business is based on sending and receiving press releases at regular intervals. RSS feeds make it incredibly easy to passively send and receive such releases. You will most likely already have a page dedicated to your press releases on your website, but if you don’t, one of the easiest ways to convert all your press releases into an RSS feed is to ensure they are all initially on the same page of your website.

How to Create an RSS Feed for a Static Website

If you’ve decided that an RSS feed would be great for your website, it’s time to create one. Luckily, not every business owner needs to understand how to code. Besides creating your own XML-based feed manually, here are a few RSS feed generators to help you in your creation.

A great free RSS feed generator is WebRSS, which lets you create, market and track your RSS feeds. You can also run someone else’s feed into your site’s own RSS feed. 

Many of these free generators can be upgraded to paid versions; however, your site may be too large or too complex for just a free generator. Other RSS generators feature added functionality that you may or may not need. Here are three generators that require a fee, but also offer very useful functionality:

1.         Feedity: Not only does this generate quality feeds, but it also displays in mobile apps and delivers podcasts to iTunes.

2.         RSS Ground: This service gives you a lot of different types of access to generate many different types of RSS feeds. If you use eBay or Amazon for your business, you may want to consider this generator.

3.         RSSTweed: This unique tool allows you to turn any Twitter page into an RSS feed. If you have a lot of followers on Twitter, you might consider using it.

A good habit is to validate any feed you decide to create. Most webmasters usefeedvalidator.org to do this.

For more information on RSS feeds, including information for setting up your own feed manually, you can use this step-by-step guide to creating one.