Increasing Your Articles' Distribution: Making The Most Of Your Author RSS Feed

The initials RSS stand for Real Simple Syndication.

At many article directories, you will be given an RSS feed for your articles. That means that when you submit your article there, your RSS feed will be automatically updated with your new content, and anyone who is subscribed to your RSS feed will receive it too.

What's the subscribing part about?

Think of your article submissions as a periodical such as a newspaper or magazine. People can buy newspapers or magazines one at a time, just as they might find an article of yours on one site and happen to find another article of yours on another site. They are not automatically signed up to receive any content, but find it randomly or by hunting for it by their own effort.

When someone subscribes to something, they are basically saying, "Sign me up to receive this content on a steady basis. Whenever this newspaper, or magazine, or article writer has new content available, please automatically send it directly to me."

Subscribing to offline newspapers and magazines costs money, but subscribing to a person's articles is free. All anyone has to do to subscribe to your articles is to click the link that says "subscribe now" (or something similar) next to your article RSS feed.

When a person opts to subscribe to your article feed, they will be asked what type of feed reader (also known as a 'feed aggregator') that they want to use. Some popular feed readers/aggregators are Bloglines, Live Bookmarks, Google Reader, My Yahoo, etc.

A feed reader is like a mailbox for RSS feeds. When a person subscribes to your article feed, they are basically saying, "Send this person's content directly to my mailbox (my feed reader)."

This is extremely helpful, because then the person doesn't have to remember to visit the site where your articles are published or search for your articles online. They don't have to do anything at all. After subscribing, they will just automatically be notified via their feed reader when you have published new content.

In the feed reader, your articles' title and short description is visible. If the subscriber is intrigued by your title and short description (article summary), then he can click on your title and be taken to a web page that shows your full article. (This is another great reason to carefully craft your titles and short descriptions!)

What purposes do RSS feeds serve?

RSS feeds can be used in a number of different ways. Here are a few...

1 - They help people to easily subscribe to your articles.

2 - You can use your RSS feed to help promote your articles. For example, you can use your article RSS feed to post automatic updates to your website or blog. Whenever you publish new content, your website or blog can be automatically updated with the title and short description of your article, along with a link going to the full article.

3 - People can also use your RSS feed to automatically add your content to their own sites automatically, either publishing the articles in full or linking back to where the full article is published.

I hope this article has helped you understand the purpose and the benefit of your article RSS feed. It's really a great tool for helping people to easily receive your content, either via a feed reader or on their own website. It also helps you to publicize your articles--you can use your RSS feed to automatically update your Twitter account, Facebook, your blog, website, your Squidoo lens--the list goes on and on.


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