As a blogger or content provider, one of the reasons why you create content is for people to read. Right? So you go through the hassle of writing, editing, proofreading, do your best to ensure your work is presentable, and offers some benefit to your readers.  Creating content is one thing, you still have to figure out a way to make your content available to your audience. There are many ways to get your content out to your subscribers. You can post your content on social media, send it out to your subscribers via emails or have readers subscribe to your RSS Feed.

Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format used to deliver web content. It is used by a lot of online publishers, blogs, in politics, finance, news related or special interest sites, and even in photography, to syndicate their content automatically as an RSS Feed to anyone who subscribes to it. RSS is great for the information junkie, people who love info. When you sign up to receive RSS Feed from a website, you are requesting that these sites deliver their content directly to your monitor. The benefit is instead of going to multiple sites to get all the information you need, all the information is aggregated into a single window, so you get everything from one source.

Here’s how it works, a webmaster publishes new content in the form of simple text files called RSS headlines, and this content is submitted to a special feed server. The RSS feed server then pushes these text files to the subscriber’s screen, where the subscriber can view the content. The subscriber would have to install an RSS Reader Tool on his computer, this tool provides a user interface where the subscriber can access the content.

Some common RSS Reader Tools are SharpReader, Mozilla Thunderbird, and BlogExpress. The majority of these tools are free and fairly easy to use. To view the content, the subscriber simply logs into his RSS reader page. Subscribing to an RSS feeds eliminates the need to manually check websites for new content because the browser monitors the site and informs the subscriber of any updates. The subscriber can also set the browser to manually download new updates.

If you are a newbie to blogging or content marketing, you may opt to use RSS Feed to provide content to your subscribers and ditch signing up with an Email Service Provider, because adding an email subscription option may be a complicated process. Indeed email marketing can be a little difficult to manage especially when you begin. It takes some time to figure out the system, and get it to working for you.

However, what I see happening is that blogs change over time, most especially when you decide to monetize your blog. A blogger may decide to offer their products or someone else’s products, run affiliate or partnership programs. When that happens, you may find the need to have subscribers you can email directly about offers outside your blog post. Building your list at that point could delay the launch of your new program, because, it does take some time to build an email list.

The best advice I ever got on Email Marketing is this, “The best time to start building your email list is now.” It may not be easy to come up with ideas for your next email, but sending regular blog posts updates to your community can be helpful.

I am not here to say that using RSS Feed is a no-no. It is also useful and I use it as well, although its usage has declined a little bit. If your goal is to share your content to other sites and allow them to publish your articles on their sites, then using RSS can be a good option. But if you want people to visit your blog regularly and have people you can promote products and new opportunities to, your best bet would be to go the email marketing route. As an alternative, you can do both. Email Service Providers have tools that can send RSS to Email, so your subscribers can receive the feed via email.

Ultimately, you should go with the option that works best for you and is in line with your business goals.