Perhaps you run a website as part of your business. Or maybe you have a personal blog. If you’re like many website owners, you probably started your site by publishing a lot of new articles during the first few months. You may have noticed that after time it became harder to come up with new ideas.

You’re well aware that having a continuous supply of fresh content on your website is essential to its success. Visitors need to have a reason to keep coming back. Yet creating new posts and articles can take lots of time and resources. Thankfully, you can use RSS feeds from other websites to help supplement your own content creation.

RSS, “Really Simple Syndication,” is a well-established Internet technology. Websites use it to distribute their articles and blog posts more broadly. RSS technology allows websites to publish specially formatted code that an RSS “reader” uses to display new articles. It can also display article summaries. The code can be:

* A stand-alone program.
* An online service.
* A homepage widget.
* Or even just a snippet of code that you run on your own website.

RSS is quite powerful. It is automatically always checking for new articles and posts. It’s a great time saver.  You can use RSS to automatically publish new content from selected websites on your own website.

Getting Started.

Do a web search for “RSS to HTML” or “RSS feed converter.” You’ll find the most up-to-date options for getting this function up and running on your website. If you’re comfortable with customizing and integrating the website code yourself, you’ll find different techniques for integrating the third party feeds directly into your site.

If you’d rather not touch the underlying code of your website, there are also a number of stand-alone programs and “plugins” that you can easily integrate into your site’s existing structure. This is especially true if your website runs on a common platform like WordPress.

Remember that when you automate, you don’t have immediate control over precisely what gets posted to your website. Most of the time this generally won’t be problem. However, if one of the RSS feeds you’re using publishes an inappropriate article. It can get republished on your website. You’re the one that will have to deal with your unhappy readers. To minimize these risks, the best types of RSS feeds to incorporate into your website are generally breaking news, press releases and similar types of content.

If you’re looking for low maintenance content to add to your site, consider adding an RSS feed. There are a number of opportunities. They add value and interest. And they help you make the most of your time. If this is all gobbledegook to you get in touch with Navertech, the digital marketing and IT specialist, at www.navertech.com.