How can RSS magically help you market, improve communications with your audiences, increase attendance at your meetings, get better press coverage and research the competition?

RSS operates in two directions, sending and receiving. You should take advantage of both directions for the best marketing advantage.

Sending marketing information out from your Web site requires that you “RSSify” pertinent pages. Widely available RSS-builder software creates an RSS feed from your Web site. This will enable you to syndicate a ny page in your Web site, such as the online press room, announcements about your next event or a page of articles relating to your industry or service.

The exposure you gain by using RSS could include seeing your press release on the RSS feeds from online news sites which have RSS-feed capability allowing audiences to receive feeds based on keywords and phrases. Each time your release includes a word or phrase of interest to the RSS subscriber, journalists and others will receive your press releases in nearly real time or will be able to easily search for it.

You can also enrich your Web site content by including an RSS feed of your latest industry news. This would position your Web site as a resource to your audience and give them a reason to keep returning. To do this, you need to embed an RSS feed into the page.

Other outgoing options include syndicating your e-newsletter via RSS, rather than or in addition to your e-mail version. Since RSS feeds are not e-mail, your announcements bypass spam filters and firewalls and go directly to the people interested in the information. Imagine publishing your e-newsletter and with the click of a button having it syndicated across 4,000 content-relative Web sites at the same time.

You can now offer people the opportunity to “opt in” to your marketing messages by subscribing to your feed. Therefore, the number of messages opened and read is significantly higher than with e-mail distribution