Using RSS Feed Syndication for your Joomla website Promotion

Joomla! has some great features build in to set up an RSS Feed that your visitors can describe to.

First a short explanation of RSS from wikipedia;
“A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.”

This means that the content of the updated or new pages in your feed is delivered to your feed subscribers frontdoor…

They don’t have to go to your site to look for updates, they are notified of new content by the RSS Feed.

The Joomla Components for RSS
In the back-end of Joomla there are two standard components to handle RSS Feeds.

• News Feeds which you can use to publish other RSS Feeds on your website
• Syndication that is only for Frontpage syndication.

If you are going to use the last one , you need to change some things to make it your own, other wise you get the standard lyrics of “Powered by Joomla 1.0″ to change this, read about Joomla RSS Feed setup

But there is a better option available, a component released by www.Run-Digital.com which is there RSS Feed manager now Run Digital is a German website, but I think you are able to find the download….

A special Feed section
To get a separate section for your feed you can create a special section, lets say… oh well, just call it Blog.
Then create a Categorie with the same name or whatever you dream up…
You then throw in some content like a test message or so, you know how to create the content.

By now You have downloaded and Installed the RSS Feed manager.
You can now create a new Feed, don’t use the standard if you don’t want to syndicate the Frontpage!!

Within the Feed manager you can choose just that special section/category, or you can select multiple ones, like the news flashes as well.

The new feed states a line like http://run-digital.com/index.php?option=com_rd_rss&id=2 inside the Component.

Just copy that line, and paste is into you browser address bar, to see  if it comes up with the content you put in there, you should see some real xml definitions..

If you would serve this to you visitors, they probably won’t now what to do with it, unless they are already are RSS Feedreaders…

So lets make it easy for your visitors to describe.. 

Burning your Joomla Feed

Next thing to do, it to head over to www.feedburner.com and get a login, its a free service, so subscribe!
Now follow the guidelines from Feedburner to create a Feed by using the feed URL you tested above.

The service Feedburner provides has also a neat little feature they call Chicklett Chooser, which You can find under the Publicize section.
Take the first option which is the standard.
Scroll down the page and Copy the HTML section.

In Joomla you now have to create a new module and copy that HTML code into it. (Use a Editor that doesn’t change your code, or temporarily disable the rich text editor.

Once you created you module, publish it some where into you menu… clearly visible if you want subscribers !!

Click the button that shows up, and see the options you get from Feedburner, this ranges form Google to Netvibes and more!
Now that is service to you visitors!

More Benefits 
Besides the obvious easy subscription there are some more great benefits of using Feedburner..
- Search engine’s spider Feedburner to look for new items, and they find you!!
- The syndicated content is spidered and indexed as well pointing to your website.

But the best part is.. Feedburner is mostly used by Bloggers, and Search Engines love Blogs, because of there regular update content.

And that is the downside for you… you have to start feeding you Blog content categorie on a regular base…
But, since you build a website on your topic, you should not have any problem with this.

P.s. Dont worry that your visitors will only read your RSS feeds and don’t come to your site anymore, most of them want to read from the site itself if the topic is of their intrest!
So you get more quality visits to your website.

Update: You could use the DS-Syndicate Component from JoomlaFun if you do full posts in your feed and want to remain your layout of the pages.

The standard of Joomla cleans out all html and layout before sending the Feed, that is why most people only use short descriptions.
With the above mentioned Component you can work with full post feeds and you can download it from: http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/dssyndicate/frs/