HomeQuest

admin on Sunday, March 1, 2009

RSS is a method of subscribing to information from a comptible website via their RSS “feed”.  The feed is just an address that your browser (or other RSS reader application) uses to contact the website you subscribe to, and grab the most recent blog posts.  Most news sites like cnn.com and msnbc.com would use the RSS feeds as a news channel to their subscribers.  With an IDX site, your feed will keep your subscribers updated with your blog posts.

An example: I have 100 visitors to eugenehomefinder.net and 10 of them are interested in subscribing to my blog updates, so those 10 people click my link to eugenehomefinder.net/rss and subscribe to the feed using their preferred RSS reader.  Each time a subscriber checks their daily news through their RSS reader, they will see each new blog post that I created since they last looked, as well as any other new items from other feeds that they subscribe to.  Click here for more information on RSS.

To add an RSS link to your site, simply add “/rss” (without quotes) to the end of your web address.  www.yourwebsite.com/rss

My example: eugenehomefinder.net/rss

It is important to note that most of your visitors will not know what RSS is or how to use it, so you may not have many subscribers.  For the visitors that do know and use RSS, make sure your blog is updated frequently with relevant, useful information that your readers and clients will want to see to maintain your subscribers interest.