It’s been confirmed for two weeks that IE7 will support RSS. What hasn’t been made clear is what that’s going to mean for your site.
So let’s talk about it, shall we?
One of the great features of your standard web browser was the ability to bookmark. Anyone who comes upon your site can add your site to their link collection. You might even have the code on your site displaying somewhere.
And yeah, I still use bookmarks. I’m a big fan of Firefox, and across the top of my broswer is my bookmarks toolbar folder with ten folders holding a total of about a hundred links I use every week, featuring about 15 I use every day.
But it’s at the point that if a link doesn’t directly affect my cash balance, and also need to be protected for some reason, I ain’t bookmarking it. Period. You better have an RSS feed if you want me back at your site because I very rarely sign up to newsletters that aren’t delivered online.
Of course, I’m currently in the minority. According to Pew’s Internet Research, I am part of a group that only represents about 5% of Americans.
And a good bit of that 5% was made up of people who learned how to increase their online income with the addition of RSS or blogging to their promotion and marketing arsenal.
Some of us bent to fit the technology of the times when Yahoo made it so easy to submit your feed to their directory. More of us saw the writing on the wall before that, when we realized that creating manual informational pages on our sites was out, and blogging was in, as far as search engines are concerned.
It was like an open invitational to get better search engine listings, get better internet visibiity, and brand ourselves, all in one shot. And it still is – IF you know how to blog the right way.
With the inclusion of RSS in the next version of MSIE set for later this year, some say as soon as later this summer, the window of being able to do it right before your competiton wakes up is closing fast.
It certainly can’t be denied, at this point, that RSS, once bundled in Internet Explorer 7, is set to become the replacement for bookmarking. It used to be that if someone didn’t see a good reason to bookmark your site, or join your newsletter, you could kiss them goodbye.
With RSS not only being added to IE, but Microsoft taking the lead to make RSS even more user-friendly, the time has come. Years ago, if you wanted to be player, instead of a spectator, you had to have a web site. Today part of your toolkit for that site has to include RSS, like it or not.
You don’t have to be a techie, or get every last thing about RSS to reap the benefits of how it works, just like you don’t need to know the ins and outs of HTML or XHTML to have a website. Get a feed-enabled blog added to your site, a little knowledge, and you’re in the game.
Tags: rss marketing :: website promotion
Resources:: Learn more about RSS :: Increase Your Blog Traffic :: Free Download on Why You Should Blog [pdf].
