Creating A Basic RSS Feed For Your Site

The future of RSS Feeds and internet marketing is looking bright and promising. It would be a wise decision to get yourself up to speed on this developing content sharing technology by putting together your own news feed for your site.

In the previous article on RSS Feeds you learned some of the basic information on what an RSS feed is and what it can do for your website. Today we're going to learn to create a basic feed that you can put into use within a few minutes.

To see what RSS Feeds will look like on your site you can take a look at mine at:

http://www.cashway.com

Is it difficult to create the feed?

No not really. You do need to know how to set up and edit html code using a few symbols that I'll show you below.

Without getting into all of the technical details of whcih version or RSS specification you should use, let's just get down to the nuts n' bolts of it.

You can build an RSS file from scratch pretty easily, as long as you keep the features aligned with the material you're trying to present. You'll need to start up your favorite html editor to create the one your file (page that will contain the code and content links) for your RSS Feed.

NOTE: Once you have created this file you will need to upload it to your server to allow other web sites to display your feed on their site(s). The best part about this is that once the file is created you can easily update your channel and content by updating your file.

OK let's begin....

You must be in html format to enter the code on the page. At the top you must include the following: This lets RSS readers know that the page is set up for an RSS Feed.

Next you will be adding the code that identifies your channel information. This tells readers about your feed. Add Your sites's feed title here http://www.yoursite.com Describe What Your Feed Offers en-us What's the above mean? Here's the breakdown.

Tag definitions...

The "title" tag tells viewers the name of your channel. The "link" tag provides a link to your web site. The "description" tag describes what your channel offers and the "language" tag indicates that you're writing in English.

Now for those of you who want to provide an image like your logo within your feed you can add the following tags: Title For Your Image http://www.yoursite.com/image.gif Place a link here such as http://www.yoursite.com/ 88 31 Describe What Your Site Offers OK - now that we have all of the business side of the feed out of the way we can get on to the code that will allow you to display your content. For each item you want to allow others to see you need to add the following code. My First Article, etc http://www.yoursite.com/myfirstarticle.htm Provide the headline or short description here For every new item you add you will need to follow this same format. Pretty simple, huh!

Now lets close up your feed. To do this add the following code after the last item you want to display. There, you're done. Now save your page with a .rss extension and upload it to your website. It doesn't matter where you save it to, it can be in your root directory or in a separate folder.

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You can get more indepth information and complete step-by-step instructions from the FREE ebook "RSS Publishing Made Easy" that you can download when you subscribe to my Net Review newsletter.

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Now that you've created your feed you'll want to share it with others on your website and maybe even syndicate it on other sites.In order to view your new feed on any of your webpages or let others display it on their's you need to do one or two more things.

You can....

1 - Convert your RSS Feed URL to a java script code that you can add to any webpage on your's or others sites. To do that you'll need an RSS to javascript converter. Not to worry because they're Free online services that you can use to do this very quickly.

My favorite one is...

http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/lite/

Here's another...

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/

You can also look for news aggregators and reader directories that you can submit your feed to for more exposure.

Now, with an RSS feed you have an efficient way of sending your content directly to the viewers who have asked for it. This gives you another avenue to get your message viewed by more and more people across the net.

Ed Duvall is webmaster for http://www.cashway.com and http://www.instantnettraffic.com providing internet marketing tools and resourcesto help you with your online business.

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Copyright 2005 cashway.com

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