Copying part of your comment from this thread in the Tech forum to start a discussion here as I have lots of questions and am probably not the only one who could benefit from understanding more about RSS feeds and their potential as a promotional tool. I am appealing to the teacher in you to approach this from the angle that I (and other readers) know NOTHING yet about RSS feeds so need to start with the very basics before going into advance uses. 😉
Don't know RSS? Oh, now you've opened a can of worms! I really need to write this up for the tricks and tips board, but I'm a teacher at heart, so here we go...
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a tool used to conglomerate various sources of information and "push" them. As a person, you would use an RSS reader app, tell it all the websites you want to read regularly, and have it just pull all the new info regularly so you don't have to remember to go back to all those spots manually. Handy for news websites and blogs. And Zazzle has been kind enough to give us RSS versions of all our stores' URLS. Not only that, you can add an affiliate id to the RSS URL and it will automatically get translated into affiliate commissions.
I have a basic understanding (which is likely wrong) of what an RSS feed is and I know we can make them for our Zazzle stuff. I think of an RSS feed as something you embed on a website in a little box so visitors can scroll the box for all the latest whatever from the site the feed is for. So like maybe it would be for weather or breaking news or all the latest articles regarding a certain topic of interest to your visitors. So in my mind an RSS feed is something you add to your website/blog (maybe we'd call it a widget now?) for the benefit/interest of visitors. But it seems like from reading it's the reverse, that RSS feeds are made by viewers so they can "pull in" stuff from a website without actually going to the website. This very first concept is where my brain starts going into convulsions. Is the webmaster making & displaying RSS feeds for visitors to their site, or are visitors setting up their own RSS feeds to monitor the website?
The last time I gave any thought to RSS feeds was several years ago. What I realized then was that to see an RSS feed you need a feed reader app, otherwise you just see a string of behind-the-scenes coding gibberish like this when I click your link in the other thread to your sample RSS feed.
I use Firefox as my everyday default browser and it does not have a feed-reader built-in. I recall searching for a feed-reader add-on and the choices were too numerous & complicated for a beginner who just wants to see what an RSS feed is supposed to look like these days.
So keeping all this in mind, my first questions as a total beginner are:
1) Can you recommend a simple RSS feed reader add-on that will let me see feeds as intended?
2) If you add a feed "widget" to your site/blog, what does it look like to people who do not have a feed-reader add-on?
I have tried Googling up examples of sites with embedded RSS feeds and get nowhere, just get results that tell me how to add a site's content to my own reader app. Sigh.
3) If ones main purpose in using RSS feeds is to promote, how does that work? The viewer would have to have a RSS reader in their browser to see your feed as intended?
So that's my first round of questions. Are RSS feeds primarily something a site adds as helpful content for viewers, or are they something viewers create themselves for the site for their own convenience?
First, in terms of "add-ons" there's nothing I can recommend as I don't have any recent experience with browser plug-ins. All my devices are Android phones and tablets. MOST web browsers for Android don't support plug-ins at all, Firefox being the exception, though the selection is very limited. The simple one that I do use regularly, mainly for testing my Zazzle store and WordPress blog RSS feeds, is this one...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play
It has the benefit of (1) no ads and (2) no sign-up required. Just start plugging in your URL's and away you go. Here's what the root RSS for my Zazzle store looks like...
https://feed.zazzle.com/biblebasics411/rss?at=238934623323789224
(All that part after the ? isn't technically necessary for it to work, that's my Zazzle affiliate ID, which gets attached to all the links in the RSS feed so when people interact with it and go back to the store...)
What those Zazzle (or other) RSS feeds look like on the BLOG side can vary a lot. If we're talking freebie WordPress.com blog which can't have any extra widgets/plug-ins, then we're talking pretty plain vanilla stuff. Text with links, no images. Here are some screenshots of the WordPress RSS widget in action, again, linked to my store, with various settings...
What that looks like to blog readers is pretty seamless... it's just a sidebar or insert (WordPress "blocks" can be "widgets" in a sidebar or footer, or directly in an article)... text that when the visitor clicks on them, just goes straight to the appropriate product on Zazzle. Here's a sample on my home page...
I'll go head and leave that block there for now, it's "live" so you can see it in action. The screenshot has a link to the site.
A few things worth noting for future discussion...
- Zazzle DOES provide IMAGES for its RSS feeds, and some blog Widgets (and scheduling programs that support them) give you the option to turn the images on or off. But I've found those images to be grainy and hideous (at least, they are in my scheduler).
- WordPress ITSELF has RSS for the main blog and all the categories and tags that you might want to set up. And THOSE feeds ALSO support images. Specifically, whatever you set as the "featured image" for a blog post goes to the feed. And I've noticed that when I duplicate a Zazzle product as a post on my blog (that was THIS blog's primary intended purpose, though I'm doing tutorials there now too), those WordPress feed images look awesome in the scheduling program. Go figure. Whatever works to get traffic the store. And having the products on the blog, with WordPress categories matching my product types and collections, well, that's one more way for the search engines to find things, even if it IS a bit of extra work.
OK. So you are saying that this sidebar content is actually an RSS feed?
Because that's exactly how it looks to me when i visit your blog, even without a RSS feed reader app in my browser,
Then you have two other images that show what the RSS feed looks like if you open it in the reader you have installed and set up.
But then there is this view
and that's the one that puzzles me. Is that what people see if 1) they have a feed-reader installed and 2) they click the RSS link to view it n their browser rather than in the reader app?
I just found this, some people might find it useful. Web based, browser only, no app. And no need to sign up for anything or log in just to see what an RSS feed looks like, or test to see if it's working...
I just discovered on the menu for each blog post HERE that individual posts/threads in these forums all have their own RSS feeds too. Keeping tabs on the ones we want to stay on top of is FAR easier via an RSS reader, an example where a HUMAN not a blog or scheduler might want to use these things. Just for fun I plugged the initial post for THIS discussion into my RSS reader app, and now I have this...
Another great techy topic to start, @ColsCreations. I use RSS feeds with SnuggleHamster.com too. Zazzle does have a bunch of them. Let me start by pointing to one of Zazzle's published tech documents about their RSS feeds:
https://asset.zcache.com/assets/graphics/z2/mk/sell/RSSGuide_2016.pdf
So here is a very down to Earth way of thinking of what Zazzle's RSS feeds are. They are another way to search the Zazzle site that machines use that is nearly identical to how humans search for products. Try this URL for example:
https://www.zazzle.com/rss?qs=teddy+bear
This is the main Zazzle.com URL with /rss added to the path. "qs" means "query string" and "teddy+bear" is just "teddy bear". Here's what that will look like in your browser:
After some header stuff there are a bunch of <item>...</item> tags that represent the search results. I've highlighted one here. Inside it you'll see some XML code (it looks like HTML code) containing useful data like the product name ("Baby Boy Astronaut Teddy Bear Napkins") store id ("dryfhout"), the price ($47.25), and so on. This is obviously not meant to be read by humans. It is well structured for software that can read XML to consume.
Your own store can be used in the same way. Try taking the URL to your store and adding "/rss" to the end of it like this:
https://www.zazzle.com/store/gigigreetings/rss
It's like your Store > Products page but meant for a machine to read and search through.
You guys have already discussed the most obvious way to use this data for marketing by getting an RSS feed widget to consume this information and add a snippet of your store or some other product list on your own site. So I'll say that it can be used for more. In the case of SnuggleHamster.com we use it as part of our store importer. The RSS feed is very fast compared to the main search. Calling it is much gentler on Zazzle's system and does not send mixed signals to Zazzle about user interactions. One specific value I get out of it is that I can quickly get the latest prices of products to keep my database fresh.
I know some other services use Zazzle's RSS feeds for their own purposes. I'm fairly certain that is just about the only source of data used by Your Dream Built. Here's an example:
https://www.yourdreambuilt.com/zazzlept/gigigreetings---1--~r-customize.html
They even say they don't store this data on their servers. In their case they are using SEO to seek referral bonuses from Zazzle. The RSS feed is thus the heart of how they make revenue.
Zazzle's RSS feeds are one useful way for software to search Zazzle's site for products and a few other kinds of things. None of the data is hidden or magic. But it does make programming easier and suits Zazzle's preferences for how we should use automation to help ourselves and help Zazzle promote their bread and butter.
Where I last stalled out on this is the "widget" part. If you have Wix or Wordpress or blog, most of those type sites offer widgets you can choose and give you a snippet of code to paste where they tell you to to have the widget on your page. I'm hosting my own bare-bones website and finding a free RSS widget code that actually worked right + offered some customizing, well I couldn't find one. Searching for how to add your own to a website gave me mountains of results of directions for installing a widget using Wordpress or Wix or some other specific site builder. Sigh. I did though find a couple of resources on coding your own but it was honestly way above my modest skill level. I do love the idea of them (since learning visitors can still see them even without a reader app installed in their browser) but gave up on pursuing it any further for the above reasons.
I use the free version of wix which is extremely limited, so I had to search by myself for the suitable widget(s) for my needs. ( But I was a software engineer in a previous life, it helps a little bit!)
I use the html embed control in wix, it just allows you to add a bit of html of your own in an existing page. ( as I can’t access the full html source in my version)
The widget itself remains hosted on its own external platform, it just gives me, once configured, a bit of html to integrate on my site, ( sometimes through iframes or scripts depending on the widget you use.)
On the example I give above it looks like this:
The reason why I chose wix is that I wanted a free, quickly made website because I had no time to spend on it. I created the first version in four days, 1,5 hours of work per day. For sure it’s not the best solution for a good SEO, but I couldn’t do more in the given time.
