Use RSS To Highlight Content On Your Website

Most of you are probably already using RSS to syndicate your content out via a blog.  However, are you also using it to bring content back to your website?

If you are writing press releases, articles, or have a blog, how are you making this information available to your website visitors?  If you are burying it in a deep link somewhere, your visitors are most likely not going to find it or read it.  If you are using a static link to direct them to the content, they may not be impelled to click it.  Using RSS, you can get this content in front of your visitors in an interesting and interactive way and increase the chances of it being read and acted upon.

Here are 3 examples of how RSS can be used to highlight content on a website:

• Example 1:  Joe Blow has a website that sells coffee makers, coffee accessories, exotic whole bean coffees, etc.  He also has a blog where he discusses the best coffee makers, how to choose the right coffee for each occasion, how to keep your coffee beans fresh and so on.  Instead of just using a static link from his website to his blog where people may or may not be impelled to click it, he can use RSS to feed his compelling blog post titles to the site and entice his visitors to click through.
• Example 2:  Suzy Jane has a website where she sells her self help books.  She also writes articles and publishes them to an article directory.  She would like to incorporate her articles into her site, but does not want to publish the content in both places.  She might just use a static link that says ‘Read My Articles Here’ (boring!) or she can use RSS to feed her exciting article titles to her site where her visitors can actually see what her articles are about and will be more likely to click through to read them.
• Example 3:  A small business is very active in the community that it serves.  They are involved in community projects, improving the neighborhoods where they live, and helping others that are less fortunate.  They would like to highlight their activities for their online customers/web visitors.  They could use RSS to feed their press releases to their front page where visitors can easily see how active they are in the community. 

You can find tools to help you add RSS content on your site by Googling “rss to html”.  One of the tools that we use to convert RSS to html on our websites is called FeedForAll,  which is free to download and use.   

There are a lot of ways you could use RSS feeds on your website.  In the process you will improve your visitor’s experience and can highlight content that you would like them to take note of.  Maybe these 3 examples will spark an idea or two of how you can use it for your site.

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