RSS is the answer to the question you didn't know you were asking. RSS allows you to syndicate your site using a fairly simple XML format. By syndicating your site you get your readers to come back more often. As they can choose to subscribe to your feed and stay up-to-date on the topics of your site.
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I love RSS. I use bloglines.com as a feedreader so I can easily read the latest website updates trough my mobile, at work and at home.
Also a nice tip for webmasters is to subscribe to http://www.feedburner.com . You can get an alternative url to your RSS feed here which you place in your website. It is linked to your ‘own’ RSS feed, so it does not change anything for your visitors. The best part is that feedburner can now give you all kind of statistics on your feeds. How many people are subscribed for example.
Also, feedburner offers a mailinglist option so people can subscribe to your feed by e-mail. There are still a lot of people not knowing what RSS is, so they can still recieve daily updates.
[EDITORIAL WARNING from Jennifer]This appears to be an advertisement to me. Mark does provide some interesting information, but the content appears to be more self-serving than actually commenting on the article. If you don’t like ads, skip reading this content.[/EDITORIAL]
There are some really interesting things we’ve learned about RSS when working with PR, Articles and other online media.
One is that you can actually embed advertising on RSS. There are a few firms leveraging that ability.
The other is that currently rich content does not deliver actual media assets through syndication, but a “ghost” of the media.
Companies like RichContent.tv solve that problem by distributing the rich media right inside video, image, text and audio web sites, creating true media placement.
One resource we use for creating RSS feeds from ANY online content is at http://www.RSSPAD.com. This online service is free, and does a great job of providing RSS to otherwise non-syndicatable pages.
RSS is great! I’ve set it up on several sites for clients, some have had more success than others. Those for whom it hasn’t been a success have usaually missed the point of a blog / latest news facility. i.e. when you go and have a look after a couple of months gap they still have the ‘welcome pto our new website’ story that you were nagging them to update 3 months ago!
If you’ve got something to say, say it with RSS, if not, RSS won’t help…
A final comment, if you do have regular updates and make use of RSS make sure that you add those lovelly web 2.0 buttons for iGoogle and myYahoo (and any others that might be relevant, make it easy for people to remember you.
JMHO
Cheers
Keith
I think that RSS is really useful.