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RSS Feeds with Sydney Johnson (Part One); Transcribed from The Entrepreneur Magazine EBiz Radio Show, 4/25/2005
To Read more Transcripts, or Listen to the Audio Archives of this Radio Show on your computer, and to find the Entrepreneur Magazine EBiz Radio Show Resource Center, please go to www.EBizShow.com
Rob: Sydney Johnston is a contributing editor here on the Entrepreneur radio show. She is an expert on many aspects of e-commerce, auctions, eBay specifically, and every kind of upselling trick in the book. Today, however, we’re going to talk about something different – feeds, what is a feed and how can it help you make your business grow.
Rob: Sydney welcome back and let me start by asking you what is it? What is a feed?
Sydney: Well, Rob, it’s not a meal, darn it (laughter).
Rob: Okay (laughter).
Sydney: Okay, what a feed is is simply a way of sharing content, 21st century internet style. You know how we used to pick up the paper and read Dear Abby or Ann Landers or whatever, those columns were syndicated and I don’t know how they delivered them, but you’d say Dear Abby is in 800 newspapers or whatever, so all 800 newspapers would pick up her column. Well, that’s all a feed is, only it’s on the internet now.
Rob: Sure, I mean syndicated content has been a part of news distribution for a while.
Sydney: For a long time, but it’s now, for the first time, what’s new about this Rob, is that it’s becoming accessible to everybody because it wasn’t that way.
Rob: Absolutely.
Sydney: And it’s growing. you know, Rob, my whole life, I’m one of these people who, as the tidal wave rolls by, “oh, I get it.”
Rob: (Laughter).
Sydney: Well, this is one time in my life I’m in front of the tidal wave and I’ll be the first person on your show to say that the future of the internet for entrepreneurs is in feeds and if people don’t master it they’re going to get left behind, period.
Rob: Well, it’s certainly something that we’ve talked about from time to time before so, let’s talk more about them. How do they happen, where do they come from?
Sydney: Okay, right now the general internet public doesn’t have a clue about what a feed is and very few entrepreneurs do, so anybody who gets it now is going to be out in front of this. Where they come from is, it’s in your best interest, if you write anything at all, the blog is the most famous, of course, you know, the weblog…
Rob: Right.
Sydney: …but if you write articles, whatever you want to write, it’s in your interest to put it in a feed. See, because the great thing about a feed is everybody wins. The writer of the article, anybody can pick up that content and put it on their website if they want to.
Rob: Okay.
Sydney: The reader wins, it takes care of the whole spam problem someday. People are not clear on what these feeds are yet so it’s going to take some time, but it’s going to eliminate the whole spam issue because these creeps can’t send you Viagra ads and worse every day…
Rob: On a feed, right?
Sydney: Yeah, on a feed that’s not possible. You, the reader, are totally in charge of what comes to you via feeds. You subscribe or you unsubscribe and it’s totally up to you, so it gives the power to the reader, which is where it belongs, of course.
Rob: Right.
Sydney: And then another winner is people like you and me and everybody who listens to your show, the entrepreneurs. Now, here’s why it is so awesome for entrepreneurs…
Rob: Okay.
Sydney: What’s so exciting about this is, if you want to sell a product, and I used an example with my class on Saturday, so let’s use that, harmonicas. I find a good source in the Drop Ship Source Directory, our product, for harmonicas and other musical instruments. Now, I build a website selling harmonicas and clarinets and drums and guitars and all that sort of thing, one of my great channels of customers has got to be the free search engine….
Rob: Sure, absolutely.
Sydney: What do they want? They want content. They are content monsters. Because when somebody comes to Google or Yahoo and types in harmonicas they don’t want to see all this spammy junk that’s all over the place, they want to see real information about harmonicas.
Rob: Absolutely.
Sydney: So, where are you going to get that Rob, if you’re going to sell harmonicas? You’re going to spend your life writing articles about harmonicas, well it would drive you insane. What do you do? All you have to do is use a feed, and there are people out there, I’m sure, writing right now about harmonicas and other musical instruments.
Rob: So, I can subscribe to a harmonica feed that is being written…
Sydney: Right, you just take a little piece of code…
Rob: Right, it has been written by people who think a lot about harmonicas…
Sydney: Right, which you don’t know anything about or care anything about, maybe.
Rob: Right, and I can actually put that content directly and relate it to the item that I’m selling, that’s what your telling me?
Sydney: Exactly. So you’re getting free content. Not only that, it auto-updates.
Rob: Wow.
Sydney: So, you get an article today and tomorrow somebody writes another article, it just automatically appears on your site and you don’t have to do anything.
Rob: That’s fantastic.
Sydney: Isn’t that exciting. Now, see, the problem has been with entrepreneurs, there’s been a way to put some of this stuff on your page, but you had to use JavaScript…
Rob: Right.
Sydney: …which the search engines do not read, so a customer would come and they would see the harmonica feed and they’d be happy, but it wouldn’t help you with Google or Yahoo because they can’t see it.
Rob: Right, because the search engines, the bots crawl the code and it just doesn’t mean anything to them.
Sydney: Right, because it’s invisible as far as how it works. I don’t know exactly how that works technically speaking, but I know that’s the way it is.
Rob: Right.
Sydney: So, about six months ago I got so frustrated with this and I said here’s this great free content all over the place and I can’t do anything with it and it would help my site enormously. So, you know my partner, Jeremy, I said, “Jeremy, you’re a programmer, figure it out.”
Rob: (Laughter).
Sydney: And that’s what he’s been doing the last six months. So, what this software is that he’s done, it’s so exciting Rob, it will turn any feed, any feed, into a live link that the search engines can see.
Rob: Wow, wow.
Sydney: So, that’s one of the many things it will do. So, you’ve got this harmonica site and you just put one line of code wherever it is you want it and you decide if you want five articles or ten or whatever, and you’ve got live content on harmonicas. Your customer is happy, the search engine is happy, you’re happy.
Rob: Absolutely, it’s a phenomenal way and, boy, have we not talked about, on this radio show, over and over and over, content is king. People come to your website for a differentiator and that differentiator is always content. It’s expertise.
Sydney: That’s right.
Rob: And so, here you go, here’s a wonderful source of content that you can bring to people. But, let’s step back a second and I know you’re going to stick around with us for a couple of segments, so I’d like to kind of explore some various things. Let’s step back and really get an understanding of how these feeds come. For example, when people talk about feeds, you know, I’ve heard the term RSS feeds, I’ve heard the term XML feeds…
Sydney: Right.
Rob: Can you briefly describe what that is?
Sydney: Yeah, they call it RSS feeds, but that’s not exactly right.
Rob: Ah, okay.
Sydney: RSS, XML, atom, there are a whole bunch of them, simply are different ways of accessing a feed. They’re different technologies, different code, that’s all they are.
Rob: Okay.
Sydney: So a lot of these things will read RSS, but they won’t read anything else.
Rob: Right.
Sydney: So you’ve got to have a service or system that will read them all or you’re limited to only RSS, let’s say, or only XML. See, most blogs now are in the RSS format. It’s just different language, that’s all. So, what I also told my programming partner is that we’ve got to be able to take any feed in existence and put it on a webpage.
Rob: Okay.
Sydney: See the beauty of that is you’re not limited then. Rob, now there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of feeds and it’s just growing like mad.
Rob: Exponentially.
Sydney: Exponentially. Pretty soon, if your a merchant or your a web owner or your a writer, if you don’t have a feed you’re just going to vanish.
Rob: Well, you know, there are all kinds of questions that I have. Are these things searchable, can you place them anywhere, are they contextual like can you attach them to products…
Sydney: Absolutely.
Rob: There are a whole bunch of those kinds of things that I really want to get into with you in the next segment and also want to really get to the bottom line, you know, how these feeds benefit…
Sydney: …can be used…
Rob: Yeah, exactly. So, let’s explore that a little bit more as well.
Sydney: Alright, I’ll be here.
Rob: When we come back with you in the next segment, Sydney, thank you so much. Go to Sydney’s website www.cyberwebsolutions.com. We’ll be back when the Entrepreneur Magazine E-Biz Show continues on wsradio.com, the worldwide leader in internet talk.
To Read more Transcripts, or Listen to the Audio Archives of this Radio Show on your computer, and to find the Entrepreneur Magazine EBiz Radio Show Resource Center, please go to www.EBizShow.com
