An Author’s Introduction to RSS Feed/News Sites

Bert Swope

8 years ago

Blogging - An Author’s Introduction to RSS Feed/News Sites

The information age is fantastic, but there’s only one problem: too much information. It’s very difficult to keep track of your favorite blogs, sports, and news without some help. One of the ways to achieve this is by using RSS sites writers.

What is RSS News Feed?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a type of web feed that enables you to keep track of your favorite websites, such as online magazines and blogs. It consists of computer-readable files known as XML files, which automatically update information.

Previously, to keep track of your website updates, you were to bookmark websites in the browser and manually get back to them frequently to find out whether there were any updates. But browser bookmarking had its share of downsides.

The problems with browser bookmarking

As a web user, you were to do the entire work. You were to access a website, find out how relevant its information is to you. If it had useful information that you could read often, or it had significant, frequently updated information, you could bookmark it and look for the bookmark from time to time.
Tracking many websites can be daunting. As you continue scouring the internet, you’ll come across hundreds of websites with valuable information daily. If you bookmark most of these sites, it becomes a bit tricky to track all of them, as it’s overwhelming.
You can miss information whenever you forget to check out your bookmarks.
Some websites don’t update their information, and thus, you’ll end up seeing the same old information every time.

How to know whenever a website runs an update?

Well, this is precisely what RSS feeds list does. It allows you to receive relevant, up-to-date information, delivered to you on the fly so you can read it at your own time. This saves time and gives you the information you want as quickly as it’s published

How RSS Works?

RSS feeds work almost like an email. When you subscribe to the feeds, you’ll realize that the unread entries from the websites you’re tracking are marked bold. Once you click on them, you will be able to see the most recent update, which you can read right from the feeder. You can either click to be directed to the actual website, or move on to another unread item, and this marks the previous one as read.

What problem does RSS solve?

Many people are interested in many sites whose content keeps changing unpredictably. Examples of such sites include news sites, medical websites, information pages for religious and community organizations, product information websites, and weblogs. Frequently visiting a website to find out whether there’s any new information can be tiring.

Earlier on, email notification was a solution to this problem. However, when many sites send you email notifications, they are typically disorganized, overwhelming, and can easily go to the spam folder.

With RSS, you can be notified of any new or changed information. Handling notifications to many websites is easy. Also, the results are presented in a well-organized way, entirely distinct of email.

How to Integrate an RSS Feed To My Writers’ Blog

Many websites are built on a content management system (CMS), and each CMS comes with a default RSS feed. You can easily find the RSS feed for your writers’ blog. The easiest way is to add /feed toward the end of a URL, which should look like yourdomain.com/feed.

You can also do this for individual web pages on your blog to obtain specific RSS feeds. After that, follow the following steps:

Download an RSS reader, also referred to as an aggregator. There are numerous commercial and free readers, apps and extensions available on the web. Download one of them to your mobile device or computer.
Copy your blog’s RSS feed created/found earlier to allow you publish to a RSS news feeds.
Paste the RSS web address into the RSS reader you’d downloaded earlier.
Your readers can now subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed

How to Market my book on RSS feed News Sites

To market a book to RSS feed news sites, you should:

Create a landing page on your blog with information about your new book, what it contains, the value it adds to the readers and more. Include the price as well. The landing page should provide links to all those retail outlets that have your book.
Search for sites with RSS feed in a niche related to the title of your blog. Those sites have probably thousands of readers who’ve subscribed to their updates.
Contact them for an opportunity to create a guest post, a press release or any other content whose topic should be related to your book in a way, and also resonate well with the site you want to publish to. You can check out a few of their posts to know what works well for their audience.
Create the content and include links to your landing page. If it’s published, it will appear in the RSS feed of that website, and the subscribers will see the update and read it. Interested ones may click on the links and access your book.

A Sampling of RSS Feed Resources for Authors, Bloggers, And Writers

Authors, bloggers, and writers can subscribe to many RSS feeds.

For authors:

Feedspot
Book News Feed
Top Reader Reviews
BookBrowse Blog
BookBrowse Member Ezine
Bookbrowse Free Newsletter

For Writers and bloggers

Freelance Writing Jobs RSS Feed

FreelanceWriting RSS Feed
Freelance Writing Riches RSS Feed
Make A Living Writing RSS Feed
Be a Freelance Blogger RSS Feed
Reddit-Freelance Writers RSS Feed
Daily Writing Tips RSS Feed
The Write Life RSS Feed
Writers in Charge RSS Feed
All Freelance Writing RSS Feed

Final words

Whomever you are a writer, author, or blogger, it’s important that you leverage on the potential of RSS feeds whether it’s on your own website for your readers to subscribe or on other sites for your own inspiration and promotion of your digital products.

RSS Feeds: The Better Way To Consume

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