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Create an RSS Feed for Your Website Step-by-Step
By Michael Fleischner (c) 2007

Syndicating your own website content is a great way to provide
information to your readers with little or no effort. Using RSS,
your updated content is delivered to individuals who have
subscribed to your feed automatically. In this article, I'll
briefly explain RSS and show you how to syndicate your own
website content - even if you know very little about RSS feeds.

RSS Defined
According to Wikipedia, RSS is a simple XML-based
system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite
websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a
standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through
RSS-aware software or automatically conveyed as new content on
another website.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list
of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles
that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites
and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between
RSS or Atom formatted web feeds.

Feeds are typically linked with the word "Subscribe", an orange
rectangle (http://www.sitepronews.com/images3/feed16x16.gif), or
with the letters RSS (http://www.sitepronews.com/images3/rss.gif)
or XML (http://www.sitepronews.com/images3/xml.gif)
Many news aggregators publish subscription buttons for use on
Web pages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.

Choosing the Content you want to Syndicate
Okay, so you're interested in syndication but aren't exactly
sure what you should be syndicating. There's really no hard and
fast rule here. Howerver, keep in mind that anything you plan
to syndicate via RSS should be unique, of value to a given
audience, and something that gets updated on a regular basis.

Some individuals syndicate their content by placing an RSS feed
on their home page. As the website is updated, and a new feed is
produced, content is sent directly to subscribers. Others choose
to provide a feed of specific content pages on their site. The
choice is yours.

So How do you Create an RSS Feed?
All RSS feeds are written using a code type called XML. If
you're not familiar with XML, don't let that scare you off.
I'll provide the specific code you need and instructions on
what to do with it.

To begin, you'll need to create an RSS file that contains a
Title, Description, and Link URL. This information will be used
by the RSS reader when individuals subscribe to your RSS feed.
Follow these simple steps.

1. Go to your "Start Menu" in the lower left-hand corner of your
computer screen. Click on "All Programs" and navigate to
Accessories. There you'll find an option called "Notepad".
Notepad is a simple text editor that you will use to develop
your RSS script.

2. Write the RSS script which contains information about your
website or content page and information about the content you'll
be syndicating. To do so, copy the following into Notepad.
Replace the bold content with your own site's information.


<<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="0.91">
This RSS feed should be viewed using an RSS Reader or RSS
Aggregator. Firefox users click the Subscribe to feed icon.

Feed URL: http://www.marketingscoop.com/

<channel>
<title>Marketing Articles
<link>http://www.marketingscoop.com/articles.htm
<description>Marketing articles covering a variety of marketing
topics
<language>en-us
<copyright>MarketingScoop.com

<item>
<title>How to market your small business
<link>http://www.marketingscoop.com/market-small-business.htm
<description>If you own a small business, you probably don't
have a lot to spend on marketing. These simple techniques will
help you generate more referrals than you can handle.
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

That's it. As noted above, be sure to use the Title of your
website and article, links, and descriptions. When your done,
save your file by selecting File, Save as, from the top bar in
the Notepad window. Warning: name your file with a .xml
extension but save as text. (example:
http://www.marketingscoop.com/rssfeed.xml).

Be sure not to use any ampersands or quotes in your code as this
may cause an error. XML requires ampersands to be replaced in
the code with "&" and quotes with "" whatever is
included in your quotes" The best advice I can give is just
don't include quotes or ampersands and you won't have any coding
issues.

3. Save, Upload, and Validate your .xml code. After saving your
RSS file via notepad, the next step is to upload your .xml file
to your web server. This file should be placed in the same
directory as your homepage or the directory of the page you've
selected to syndicate.

Now that we've created and uploaded your RSS feed, we must
validate it. By doing so, we know that the feed is active and
will work when individuals subscribe. To validate your feed,
visit http://validator.w3.org/feed/ and enter your feed URL. The
URL of your feed is simply the URL of the .xml file you just
uploaded to your server. So, if your file was saved to your
website's main directory and was called "rssfeed", then simply
enter your website's URL, followed by /rssfeeds.xml. Once
validated, your RSS feed is ready to be syndicated.

4. Place your RSS code on your website. The best way to do this
is to copy the RSS button ((http://www.sitepronews.com/images3/rss.gif))
and include a link to the RSS feed you just created. You can
grab the RSS or XML image by simply visiting a website like
MarketingScoop.com and right mouse clicking the image. Save the
image (give it a name like RSS.gif) and copy it onto your server.
The code should look like this:

<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com/rssfeed.xml">
<img border="0" src="images/rss.gif" alt="rss feed for my
website" width="36" height="14">

Be sure to replace the information above with your own feed link
and image link.

5. Subscribe to your own feed. After you've uploaded all of your
pages to your live site or testing server, open Internet
Explorer and click on your own RSS button. You should be taken
to a dialogue box that asks if you'd like to subscribe to your
feed. Subscribe and confirm that the feed has been added to your
list of RSS feeds (it should appear in a dialogue box on the
left hand side of the page).

Note: If you're using Firefox, you will only receive a text page
when clicking on your RSS button. Those using the firefox
browsers can click on a small icon that resides on their browser
nav bar to add your feed. Additionally the text file contains
your feed URL which can also be used.

6. Ping aggregators to let them know that you've created an RSS
feed. In order to let the world wide web know that your feed is
up and running, you must give them a Ping. This is very easy to
do - just go to http://pingomatic.com/ and choose the
appropriate sites to inform. Select blog related sites if you're
a blog and non-blog related sites for other content. Complete
the information and Ping.

Another site you should Ping is Yahoo! Simply visit the Yahoo!
RSS submit page at
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php and add your
feed URL. This will let the big boys know that your syndicating.

A final note. Whenever you want to syndicate new content, you
will need to update your .xml file with a link to the content
and a revised description. Once you've done so, upload the
file to your server, replacing the existing .xml file and the
code will do the rest.
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Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert
(http://www.marketingscoop.com) with more than 12 years marketing
experience. He has appeared on The Today Show, Bloomberg Radio,
and other major media. For more free marketing articles
(http://www.marketingscoop.com/articles.htm) like this one, visit
http://www.marketingscoop.com.
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