Lesson 6 in starting your Adult biz for free - RSS

What is RSS and how does it help you?

There are a couple of explanations running around on the web, but for now the one I like to use is "Rich Site Syndication".

Syndication.

That means that content from another site has been copied for you to use on your site. RSS mostly started for use with newssites which didn't mind allowing other websites to pass along their news feeds (FEEDS are another name for RSS type syndications). Also, by making a link to the original page, not only does the original site get inbound links, but allows surfers to get a feel for the site. By publishing RSS feeds for other sites, the publisher is getting free advertising.

Other uses for feeds have developed. By taking a subscription to a feed using a news reader application, a surfer doesn't even have to load the webpage into his browser, he gets the content delivered directly to him.

On this page, for example, if you look at the sidebar section entitled "Website Info", you can see that as of today, I have 4 people subscribed to this site. You can click on that graphic, and be taken to my feed, which shows copies of my posts, as well as links to suscribe to various newreaders.

The next link down is to the same page, but I have used a simple text link, to allow web newbies to get to the feed page without having to recognize the feedreader symbol. If you ever see that orange square in the top of a site, it usually indicates that a feed is available for that site.

There are several types of feeds; RSS, XML, ATOM. For our purposes, and also because I haven't taken the time to learn them, it doesn't really matter. We are going to use a service called feedburner, at www.feedburner.com to regenerate our feeds from whatever original source we have to retrieve them from.

So WHY are feeds useful to us?

In the first place, as we set up our blogs, we are going to use RSS feeds to publicize our sites.

In the second place, we are going to retrieve content from our sponsors by using RSS feeds they provide for us, OR we are going to create RSS feeds for our use from their content.

And in the third place, we are going to make updating our blogs as easy and automated as possible by using RSS feeds.

So strap in for the next set of lessons;
the first of which will be
A list of RSS tools to use in setting up your Adult Site