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 !