As RSS news syndication gains popularity among users, new ways for publishing RSS are emerging. In this article, I examine the three most popular methods, and help you decide which one works best for you.

1. Blogs

Weblogs, or blogs, as they are commonly called, are the primary reason RSS gained popularity. In fact, one of the earliest uses for RSS was for bloggers to monitor other blogs for updates.

Most blogging systems will produce RSS newsfeeds automatically. All you need to do is enter content, and the blogging software will build a newsfeed based on the information you enter. No extra work is needed. Just add content to your blog, and you have a newsfeed.

But there is one major disadvantage to using a blog for publishing RSS: you do not have complete control of the RSS output. Most blogging software will simply take an excerpt of your blog entry (eg, the first 15 words), and use that to create your RSS item. As you can imagine, this can lead to problems. The first 15 words of a blog entry don’t always capture the essence of that article.

2. RSS Publishing Software

Because of the inadequacy of blogs as a reliable and accurate RSS tool, new stand- alone software was developed. This software has one purpose: to provide the user with an easy way to create and publish RSS newsfeeds from their desktops. No longer do you have to write a long article in your blog to produce RSS feeds. All you have to do is enter a title for your news item, and (optionally) a couple sentences to describe that headline – and your feed is better than the blog-produced feed.

3. Online RSS Publishing Systems

While subscribers to feeds generated by RSS software enjoyed the simplicity and clarity of the new feeds, some publishers began to run into problems that came with the publishing software. They missed the convenience of blogging’s online publishing that allowed them to add news — regardless of whether they were at their home computer.

News publishers wanted the accessibility of online blogging with the accuracy of RSS publishing software. The new demand lead to the emergence of online RSS publishing systems such as FeedServer RSS Hosting (http:// http://www.globalsyndication.com/rss-hosting). This new format of RSS publishing allows webmasters to login to an online control panel and publish their news – without having to worry about restrictive software licenses. Since most online RSS publishing systems run on a subscription basis, you can make use of the free trial or subscribe for one month and evaluate if the service meets your needs.

So which system should you use to publish RSS? It depends on your needs. If most of your readers manually visit your site to get new information, a blogging system may be sufficient. However, if you plan to take advantage of the full capabilities of RSS news syndication, you would do well to use a stand-alone RSS publishing system. RSS publishing software will satisfy your needs if you plan to use one computer only. But if you’re looking for flexibility and a lower startup costs, look into the new online RSS publishing systems.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been referred to as a “pull” technology rather than a “push” technology. Similar with autoresponder, this technology allows people to keep up-to-date with new information without having to visit the site that provides the information every day. However, the capabilities of RSS technology have made many people believe that RSS publishing will replace email marketing.

Nowadays, people have realized the importance of using spam filter to catch spam emails. Thus you need to think about avoiding your email messages from getting caught by spam filtering software. With RSS, there is no risk that your messages will end up in spam folders. RSS is a much less intrusive way to communicate with potential or existing clients and customers.

RSS can help you drive traffic to your website too. This is done by submitting your feed information to RSS directories and search engines. Moreover, some webmasters might use your RSS feed to provide dynamic contents on their websites. Allowing others to publish your contents will drive more visitors to your website.

Without RSS, if a webmaster find your article and wanted to display it on his site, he would need to copy that article and integrate it into his template file. With RSS, this time consuming and tedious process can be eliminated. Publishing contents which are created by others can be performed automatically with software like Carp.

However, although RSS enables you to perform various marketing tasks which cannot be performed by using email, there are times where email marketing tools such as autoresponder come into play. It is arguable that email marketing will still be around for quite a long time. Even many successful marketers today still market their products on the internet by utilizing autoresponder.

Until today, autoresponder is still used for sending out follow up messages. This marketing tool allows you to personalize your messages with subscriber’s name and other personal data. Personalizing your autoresponder messages will most likely improve your response rate. Research has shown that personalized emails are opened more often, and people are generally more receptive to the contents of the email message. Although possible, it is still uncommon to perform such activity with the ordinary RSS technology.

Many autoresponder services and software also enable you to setup a thank-you page easily that can be utilized to perform something likes displaying a One Time Offer to new subscribers. Thank-you page is a good place to recommend other similar products or services. There are many sales that have been made by using this marketing technique.

When someone places an order through your website, autoresponder enables you to immediately acknowledge the purchase. This email marketing tool also gives you chances to ‘speak’ to him/her in the future. For instance, to let him know about other products that work well or similar with the one that he purchased. If you have a good relationship with your customers, they will be anticipating your new offers.

So far RSS has proven itself as becoming the preferred method of distributing news and information online. This technology has been widely used to deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to news readers. In addition, submitting RSS feeds to directories and search engines has become a popular way to drive more visitors.

In summary, there are times when RSS is a preferred method to perform particular tasks. On the other hand autoresponder is still an important marketing tool. Modern autoresponders provide various controls which are needed for marketing or sales applications. Although many marketers claim that email marketing is dead with the increasing of spam complaints, the reality is many companies, even the reputable ones, still use emails to perform various marketing tasks such as to develop a relationship with potential customers.