In my previous post about RSS (RSS Explained – Finally!), we drew up some analogies to help us understand what exactly RSS is. In that post, we distinguished between content consumers and content providers. You’ll recall that content consumers will subscribe to an RSS feed so that information that they are interested in is automatically delivered to them. Here’s a great video by CommonCraft.com that explains what RSS is from the perspective of content consumer:

From the perspective of content developer – and if you have a blog or a website, you and I fall into this category – we’re interested in easily providing information to those who are interested in what we have to offer. Of course, they can visit our website/blog and get the same information, but why not make it easy for them?

In addition to the ease of automated delivery, there’s another advantage to RSS feeds: it has become a legitimate source of traffic to our website (and who doesn’t need more of that?). So it’s to our advantage to submit our site to RSS directories. With the right tools, it’s easy to do.

Here’s how simple it is:

First, you need to know the URL of your RSS feed. If you have a standard website, you’ll have to use special software to create your feed. But if you have a blog and use WordPress, it’s already set up for you. If you’ve done a lot of configuration to your blog, the URL for your feed may be different than most. But most of the time you will find your feed here:

http://www.YourDomainName.com/feed

As an example, the feed for this website is here:

http://www.NewbieTrail.com/feed

Go ahead and click it to see what it looks like. I didn’t have to do anything to set that up. But if I want to make my blog content available to interested parties, I have to submit the URL of my feed to RSS directories. That way, whoever is interested can subscribe to my feed. When they do that, they will be notified through their RSS reader anytime the content of my blog is updated.

There are two ways to submit your feed URL to RSS directories. You can do it manually by visiting each directory one by one and submitting your feed. Or you can use RSS submission software. Believe me, it’s not really a choice. Get some software.

There are a few directories that charge a fee; most are free. Of the free directories, there are just a handful that require you to open an account. But they don’t ask for much information, so these few accounts can be set up quickly.

In my next post on RSS, I will talk about how and where you should submit your RSS feed.