3 ways to use RSS on your website

There are a few ways to notify your website readers when you have news.  The most popular are sending emails or using RSS feed readers. Emails can be generated automatically from your websites RSS feed, or they can be sent manually using an email service.  Additionally, there is now an option to do both which we will discuss later.

First let’s talk a little about RSS feeds.  These feeds distribute the information that you publish on your website.  They can be setup to broadcast all your info or just parts of it, and they can distribute text, images, video and audio.  To see an example of this sites RSS feed for our articles click here.  You will see a list of all our articles and clicking on any of the links takes you to the website.  This is done automatically.  Everytime we publish an article the feed gets updated.  Another example would be the podcasts that you see in iTunes.  They are just RSS feeds from the individual podcasters website.

So how do you use RSS feeds to get your articles to your readers?  Well, there are two main ways:

1. RSS Feed Readers

If your visitors use RSS feed readers like My Yahoo, My AOL or iGoogle, they can subscribe to your feed and automatically receive updates when you publish an article.  We use a service called Feedburner that adds configuration options to our feed.  To see these sites feed through Feedburner click here. When you click on the link you are presented with a page that allows you to subscribe to the feed using a variety of readers.

2. RSS Emails

Using Feedburner offers many benefits.  One of them is the ability to email your readers whenever you post a new article.  Your reader just submits their email address, and whenever you publish a new article Feedburner sends out an email.  It’s free and it works great.   Just sign up for a free Feedburner account and provide them with your RSS feed.  Under the PUBLICIZE option, choose the EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS option and configure.  Feedburner will provide you with some code that you can place on your website.  This code generates a form that will allow readers to subscribe to emails.  That’s it!  Your done.

But what if your site doesn’t have RSS feeds, or you want to send emails manually?  In that case you want to use email services like Constant Contact or aWeber.  These services also provide you with a form that you can place in your website, which will allow visitors to sign up to your mailing list.  Just login into your account, create your email and press send.  Both Constant Contact and aWeber are paid services but worth it.

3. Automatic and Manual Emails

Here’s where it gets exciting.  aWeber allows you to send manual emails and also automatically produce emails from your RSS feed.  Yes, you read correctly.  You can do both with aWeber.  At the time of this writing Constant Contact is not able to generate emails from RSS feeds.  Additionally, you can configure aWeber to send the RSS email whenever you post a new article, or to send your readers a weekly summary.  And in between you can email them manually whenever you like.

Do you use Constant Contact and aWeber? What are your thoughts?