Today's solo business owners have an amazing array of tools at their disposal to share their story and their wares with customers compared to days bygone.
Now I'm not an expert in the use of this strategy by any means, but I'd like to mention to you one tool that is easy to put your hands on, and learn how to use, that will open the door to greater customer loyalty and put your web business in front of a growing audience.
I've always believed that business owners should stay on the leading edge of technology available to businesses in order to profit from new advances and efficiencies.
One of those advancements of the past few years is the emergence of RSS, "rich site summary" in the beginning, but today more often referred to as "really simple syndication."
RSS is, in the simplest terms, a format for a family of web site feeds. These feeds allow Internet users to watch, monitor, and view other web sites that they choose to subscribe to. Most often the sites that employ RSS feeds are those that change or update content very often.
Sites like news publishers, article directories, blogs and others that primarily feature free content of one type or another seem to fit the RSS model most appropriately.
To add this technology capacity to your web site, you simply employ specialized software (either paid or free depending upon the features you want) that automatically sends your new content to all your subscribers as soon as it is posted at your web site.
What a subscriber sees in his "news reader" is a short summary (a few lines of content) of the updated content and a link to the full article back at your web site.
Subscribers to your web site and others that have an interest in tracking your content, will use some type of feed "aggregator" which collects and displays multiple feeds or "channels." The aggregator sits on the viewers desktop and quickly shows all the latest site updates that have been made to the subscriber's chosen channels.
Web-based feed or news readers and aggregators require no software installation.
The process saves the viewer a great amount of time since he/she has (right on the desktop) links to every new article or blog post made at their favorite web sites. RSS also allows the viewer to see which sites have updated content without having to surf directly to his favored sites one by one.
Think of the advantages such a tool could provide your web business!
As the owner, you have the ability to keep your latest news and information in front of your fans (customers) 24 hours a day. Just as important though, is your new ability to allow others to check out your content for the first time by advertising your RSS feed in the many blog and RSS directories that are now online.
How do you know which web sites offer RSS feeds? It's easy to tell -- just look for a link that says "Subscribe" to our feed, or our web site. You can also search for a small orange rectangle with the letters "RSS" or "XML" printed on it.
In future posts we'll look at the ways a solo business operator can take advantage of RSS technology to offer added value to his customers and greater marketing capacity to his business.
Stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed here at Home-Run-Business. Why not add this blog to your list of important feeds? Do it right now!
