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Have you recently seen an increasing number of orange RSS and/or XML buttons on web sites you visit? Do you know what they're for?
In general terms, RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Syndication is defined as the supplying of content for reuse and integration with other content. The most common examples of syndication can be found in newspaper Web sites, where AP Newswires, Columns, Comics, Horoscopes, and Weather are often syndicated content. All of this information and more is now readily available through syndication over the Internet. RSS technology has been around for 10 years, but has increasingly become used as another marketing chanel. RSS users make periodic calls to a database, which is much less obtrusive. Virtually every news website, forum and Weblog uses RSS to syndicate its content. More importantly, much of the online content syndicated via RSS is free. RSS provides opportunities for affiliates and partners to incorporate free content from sites like ours that provide feeds about our promotions. Incorporating such feeds will safeguard your business from the following: - Merchants' non-trademark bidding policies - Fortune 500 companies with big branding budgets driving up PPC pricing - Google AdWords Policy These changes hurt affiliates because they make affiliate and partner sites harder to locate. However, RSS gives affiliates and partners the chance to build unbiased, content-heavy e-commerce sites, which should help foster customer loyalty and earn high SEO rankings. To access this content, affiliates and partners will need to build an RSS reader into their database. Once an affiliate has developed a system to subscribe to one RSS channel, he/she can subscribe to thousands of unique channels. Free RSS readers are offered through FireFox.com, Pluck.com, and FeedDemon.com. |