Subscribing by RSS, and eMail Explained

by Jay Myers on May 29, 2009

Have you ever thought to yourself while visiting My Denton County Real Estate or any other number of blogs out there on the internet; What’s with all these icons? or this talk about subscribing all the time? Well, I am going to do my best to explain this to you here.

I get emails occasionally from visitors asking things such as:

Hey Jay, can you let me know when the new information is available for using the $8000 Tax Credit Used as a Down Payment is available?

or

I’d like to know when the next Texas Veterans Land Board Forfeited Land Sale is going to be, can you email when it is announced?

Naturally, I do not mind emailing this information to those interested. But there is even a better way to not miss out on any of the information I write about here.

You can also do this without fear of being bombarded by emails from a pushy real estate agent begging for your business, at least here at my site. Nor do you need to worry about being spammed with pointless, or unrelated subject matter to real estate, or Denton County events or news. I do try to stick with a Quality instead of Quantity as far as the content I post here. So Subscribe with confidence.

Now on with the explanation:

RSS: An acronym for Really Simple Syndication allows you to subscribe to a feed. Using an RSS Reader such as Google Reader, or My Yahoo, or even Outlook you are telling that program to check when new post or articles have been posted, and then delivered to you. A good analogy is this; When a new issue of your favorite magazine is available it is delivered to your mailbox, rather than going to a news stand to purchase it. RSS when using a reader is the same as your mailbox, you open up your reader and read the new articles that have been post.

eMail Newsletter: Is perhaps the easiest way to find out about new content. Simply due to the fact no special software or websites are needed. You would simply click on the Subscribe by email icon, enter the email address you want new post delivered to, confirm your subscription from your inbox, and then simply sit back and wait for new information to be delivered to you. This beats going out to check your favorite blogs for new post.

Either one of these options can be stopped at any time, in an RSS Reader you simply Unsubscribe, and with the email you simply opt out. As I have mentioned numerous times I am a no pressure type of real estate agent, so if you decide to choose either of these options there is no threat of me collecting these addresses and beginning to contact you saying “I should be your real estate agent” or anything of the sort, unless you contact me first saying “I need you to be my real estate agent!”

Other alternatives to find out about new information or what I am up to is Following me on Twitter¹. It seems the whole world is Tweeting² these days, I must admit I am not one of those that in “In LOVE” with it. I believe for the most part it is a bunch of people talking out-loud and hoping someone is listening. It does have it’s place, I think it is great for people who promote specials on shipping, or sales on products, as well as announcing new listings, and price reductions. I do not follow any ones Tweets religiously, and I tend to UnFollow those that send out automatic, or “What they are listening to..” type of tweets. But I do get some good Twitter fodder occasionally, and do use it to announce new articles. But just talking, without much to say, and hoping someone is listening is not socialable. Besides that fad will pass as well, and I will have saved a lot of time by not getting involved.

You can also Friend Me on Facebook, again no fears of random garbage, I tend to only say something when I have something to say. Perhaps it goes back to the quotation from Abraham Lincoln:

“‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Also I urge everyone to use the social bookmarking links that follow every post. I only include the most popular ones, such as:

Microsoft Live
Google
del.icio.us
Stumbleupon
Technorati
Netvibes

You can also bookmark an individual article to your LinkedIn, Facebook, or even Print, or email it to yourself or someone else just in case you want to make sure you have it for later. Again all this without fear I am collecting email addresses stalk ya later as so many other agent are trained to do. I will confess; It does really help my site rankings if you choose to bookmark it to those that bulleted above.

So I hope this clears up some questions, I try to keep mechanics and blogging jargon off this site. But did feel this needed to be addressed to help all of the visitors. As always feel free to contact me with any questions, comments, suggestions, or concerns.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets [↩]
Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers) [↩]