Complete Dealer Solutions

First, the biggest question may be “What’s an RSS Feed?”.  The easiest way to think about it is that it’s like a news ticker, but anyone can publish anything using it.  It’s basically a text-based website, that is constantly updated with the latest information the publisher wants people to have access to.  Then, visitors subscribe to the feed (keep in mind that subscription doesn’t imply a cost — in fact most RSS feeds are free).  By subscribing, you tell your RSS Reader (more about this shortly) that you want to be kept up to date by that feed.

An RSS Reader is a program that will download the feed on a regular basis (usually every few hours, or when the feed tells it that the information will change.

A few examples:  A Large news corporation like CNN will have multiple RSS feeds for the interests of their varying readers.  They may have 1 feed with the latest money news, another feed for the top stories in the US, another for entertainment news, another with baseball highlights and so on.  You can subscribe to as many of the feeds you want.  So if you want info on your stocks and baseball scores, you would subscribe to their money feed and their baseball highlights feed.

Or, for example, if you want to stay up to date on this blog.  We post an RSS feed that will update with changes to the blog, such as new posts when they are added.

Now generally RSS feeds do not include the entire story.  They usually have a title, description and a link to view the whole article.

To view RSS feeds, simple do a Google search of RSS Readers.  Many sites, like Google’s iGoogle page, you can add an RSS feed directly to your portal page.  Or just use their reader at www.google.com/reader.  There are also window applications if you prefer those over web pages.

Stay tuned for more information on how to use the RSS feeds in your business marketing.

- Aaron

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