A couple of days ago, we discussed about the basics of RSS. While a lot of people know about it already, we still need to touch on some basic points to help those who don’t. Once we got on that, now I am going to suggest some ways to utilize RSS to help your business.

Here they are :

• Subscribe to feeds that you read often or daily

This is just a practice based on a common sense. By doing that, you’ll save huge chunks of time from your typically-busy day.

• Find some feeds from a field that’s relevant to your business, – and subscribe to them

If you are in the tech business, you should subscribe to TechCrunch, Mashable and other prominent tech blogs out there. If you’re into news, catch the feeds of CNN, New York Times, and the likes. It goes similar way in whatever field your business in.

At first glance, this is also a sensible practice. Yet many of us ( – including me back then ), missed doing this because they can’t see the point. Please refrain from doing the same mistake. It will help you heavily in staying abreast of the most recent development in your particular business field. It will help you catch the newest trend and fad in the way you never thought possible.

There are 2 ways of doing this :

· If you already knew what sites are relevant to your business, you can go to their URLs, and subscribe manually. The process is elaborated in the first post of the series.

· If you are not sure, then Google is your friend. Find the best sites there is, and subscribe to their feeds. Alternatively, you can go to Google Blogsearch, and search for your topic. On your result page, just click the “RSS” link under the “Subscribe” menu in the left side of the page. You will then be asked to enter your preference of Feed Reader, – and you’re done.

• The last point you really need to consider has something to do with your business online activities. Does your business have its own website / blog ? If yes, then by default it will provide an option for people to subscribe to its own RSS feed. In this sense, you are a feed publisher.

What I will recommend for a serious feed publisher is : signing up for a feed optimizer service. The most well-known ( and so far has proven to be reliable for me ) is Feedburner. Acquired by Google in 2007, you can sign up for their service for free. Once registered, you can optimize your feed by customizing it in such a way to fit your readers’ needs. For example, you can include a menu below each feed, where any reader can bookmark your post to social bookmarking sites like Delicious or Digg; – all without going to your site. There are many other features to browse and use. Bottom line : better publication for you and your business. Try it.

There you go. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this matter. That’s why I said I “offer” some suggestions. One thing I do know : RSS is a very powerful thing to use, – both for personal productivity purpose, and as a platform to help growing your business. Have fun !

Before we start, let’s look at some definition quoted from Wikipedia on what RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) is all about :

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader“, “feed reader”, or “aggregator“, which can be web-based or desktop-based.

Quite a lengthy definition by itself. When simplified, RSS basically means a way to publish / send a content to the reader without requiring him / her to visit the source site. Hence the word “feed”. Think of it this way. If you’re a busy business person, but still need to keep yourself abreast of the latest updates from the news sites, you’d relish a way to have all the updates sent to you. It saves your worthy time.

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The way you do this is by using a feed aggregator / reader. It’s a small piece of software ( desktop or web-based ) that acts as as if it’s “pulling” all the contents you subscribe. For easiest adaptation, you can try the web-based Bloglines. All you have to do is signing-up and start to subscribe for your preferred feed. If you prefer a desktop application, Snarfer would be a good choice too. Download the software, install it, and there you go.

Next, is the part of subscribing to the feeds. Both Bloglines and Snarfer have their set of feeds that you can browse and pick. For most users, these are enough to start with. I myself only added less than ten feed to my selected ones in Snarfer. Don’t make the beginner mistake of subscribing too many though. If you do, it will be very easy to get yourself lost in thousands of unread contents on a daily basis. You wouldn’t want this to happen, as this may mean that a particularly useful news for your business gets lost in the pile. Be selective.

Also, chances are some regular sites that you frequent are not there in the default subscription list. This is the point where you have to go to the site itself and find its RSS link. For example, I really like to read The New Yorker. What I need to do is going to its site, and finding a link / icon / menu where it says something about “RSS / feed”. In this case it looks like this ( look for the right area where I made a red circle ) :

In most cases, any RSS link from any site will look similar to this. It may mention only the link text ( “RSS” ) or even maybe just the icon ( the orange RSS icon ). Familiarize yourself with the way they look. The rest is easy enough. All you have to do is clicking on it, they will give you some links where you can copy and paste to your feed reader. Give it a few minutes and you should start seeing their updates in your aggregator.

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To sum it up, RSS is a handy way to stay updated on important contents scattered all over the web without visiting the sites themselves. A powerful time-saver, it’s easy to use by some simple steps:

• Pick your choice of a reader.
• Sign-up for its service ( if web-based ), or install it ( if desktop-based ).
• Pick your choice from its default set of RSS feed.
• Add to your subscription by visiting the site you frequent, and copy/paste its RSS link to your reader.

That’s basically it. It is proven time and time again that RSS is a very powerful method to utilize the web to your advantage. Why not taking part and join the crowd ?

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P.S. :

ZDNet has a good video on the basics of RSS that you can view here.

Next, I will be talking on how to utilize RSS for your business. Stay tuned.