A website or blog is a technology that 'pulls' users to you. Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a technology that enables you to 'push' your website or blog information to people who subscribe to it. The resulting information (such as articles) is read through RSS Readers like Microsoft Outlook.

A typical website might have a few different RSS feeds e.g. one for company news, one for their press releases, and one for articles they publish. For a blog, you might just have one RSS feed for all blog posts. When you setup an RSS feed on your website, visitors can then click on the link to subscribe and every time you publish a new article, the RSS feed is automatically updated and the article is sent to the user's RSS reader.

Why is RSS important? Because some people subscribe to blogs and websites via RSS and may rarely return to your website, but they stay informed through RSS. So rather than lose that person as a potential customer, you enable them to get information from you without having to go search for it.

RSS Advertising is the publication of ads in RSS feeds. In early 2009 Yahoo actually dropped this as a service; however, Google continues to enable you to turn on advertisements in your RSS feeds through FeedBurner. The Google RSS Advertising solution simply includes AdSense advertisements (i.e. those that businesses pay for via PPC advertising) within the feed.

Adding advertising to your RSS feed is positive from the perspective you can get your products and services message across to those people who rarely or never visit your site, however, it can be negative from the reader's point of view i.e. a lot of people just wish advertising would go away!

Below are three examples of different approaches to RSS advertising:

• Google – adding AdSense advertisements to RSS content using Google means that every time a reader of yours clicks on an ad in the RSS feed, you receive money for it. However, it can mean you are actually advertising your competitor's products! AdSense uses keywords to select advertisements that relate to the content and if your competitor is using PPC on those keywords then their ad may appear!
• Pheedo – Pheedo allows businesses to sign up to advertise not just through RSS, but also start pages, widgets and news readers (these are all technologies that push information to your customers).
• ThankYouPages.com – This company takes an interesting approach: instead of placing advertisements directly into the RSS feed itself (which can look messy), you configure your RSS feed to only have the first couple of lines of the article and provide a 'Read More' link. The Read More link takes the reader back to your website where the rest of the article is published but before they reach it, they are presented with a brief advertisement which automatically disappears within a few seconds.