RSS for Retailers

Really Simple Syndication. What is it and why should you care? If you're involved in online marketing, you've seen a lot of buzz about RSS recently. RSS has been around for several years, but is quickly gaining popularity, and is about to move from "early-adopter/geek tool" to the mainstream.

If you use a site like Yahoo as your start page, you've probably seen the "MyYahoo" links. These allow you to customize the content that is delivered to "your" page. You can choose from a list of content on these sites, or, if you're surfing and find something you like with a button that looks like this one: (You'll notice that I have a button like this in this blog's sidebar).

Click on that button, and the content will appear on your MyYahoo page the next time you visit. Congratulations, you've just subscribed to an RSS feed!

OK, so what?

Well, as a potential publisher of an RSS feed, there are lots of reasons to position yourself early in the adoption phase. Here are some good ones, courtesy of Stephan Spencer writing in Multichannel Merchant:

• Bypasses spam filters
• Encourages links and garners PageRank score
• Serves as a content delivery channel to your affiliates, giving them something they can republish on their own Websites
• Easy for your subscribers to manage communications from you without clogging up their inboxes
• Allows you to change content midstream (no need to push an "unsend button" as with e-mail)
• Is the only way your blog can be included in Google's new Blog Search
• Increases the likelihood of media coverage because RSS is a hot topic retailers are slow to embrace