A topic in [our blog book](/blog_book/) is finding a niche and we use [TDFBlog](http://www.tdfblog.com/) as the example. TDFBlog aggregate cycling news with a human touch (not zombie style), adding commentary, and most importantly an RSS feed. At the time of Lance’s last tour, no other cycling site had feeds and TDFBlog’s resulting traffic and ad revenue proved there’s a audience for RSS — a big audience. Fast forward to the start of the 2006 racing season and other cycling news sites are figuring it out including [PezCycling](http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/) and [Velonews](http://velonews.com/).
When we talk and evangelize blogging in Colorado next week, during [Bloggy Mountain High](), I’ll note those examples. Even if a resort like [Cooper Mountain](coppercolorado.com) or [Keystone](keystone.snow.com) may think they have no need to blog, they could certainly offer an RSS feed of their deals, specials, and club incentives like [Club Colorado](http://www.coloradoski.com/clubcolorado/) does. Businesses should use RSS, at a minimum, to replace or complement an email newsletter.
RSS Tip
Add a [relative link](http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html) to the code of your home page so that your RSS feed is auto-discoverable by browsers and News Readers. If you bury your RSS, like Velonews did, your readers will have to find it. One line of code makes all the difference.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Jason Swihart 02.10.06 at 10:11 am
Thanks for the mention.
We’re finding RSS and XML to be incredibly useful–we’ve got both RSS and XML available for our Colorado Snow Report (in addition to the RSS on Club Colorado) and it’s pretty remarkable how quickly we’re picking up subscribers. We’re working on feeds for just about every other page for which syndication makes sense (e.g., calendar, deals, homepage photo).
Tim Jackson- Masiguy 02.10.06 at 11:33 am
DL,
You bring up great points. I guess I need to make sure my RSS feed is working on my blogs. I found that during last year’s Tour, my traffic increased considerably as well. I did a rehash of each stage with my own commentary and it got picked up by a lot of folks (many who thought I was a “real” reporter at the Tour…). The RSS was certainly a part of that increased traffic.
Tim
-b- 02.10.06 at 12:32 pm
Thanks. I think what’s important is that you can add bloggy features to a site, without blogging — if your business isn’t ready or wants to. Target is doing it with RSS for sales items and look at Apple’s site with custom rss feeds for all sorts of things.