Keep your company’s message fresh.

Small to midsize companies struggle to keep their message fresh and their websites up to date. So do marketing coaches and other service providers. Fortunately, there are free tools that make it easy to get the word out. There may be dozens, or hundreds, but I want to talk about FeedBurner.

This morning, I wondered if I could use my blog posts to drive fresh content to the home page of my website. I had used FeedBurner to set up an RSS feed, so readers could subscribe to my blog. I wondered if they might have a way to deliver the feed to my website.

Five minutes of research tops and I found the answer. They call it BuzzBoost. In effect, it turns a portion of a webpage into an RSS reader. You click a few buttons, complete a couple data fields, and SAVE. When the BuzzBoost page refreshes, it gives you a little bit of html code to copy into your webpage. Here’s a link to my home page so you can see the result of my efforts.

If html is not our favorite language, or if you have people who do this kind of thing for you, relax. They can do it once and you are all set. They can set up a blog for you on WordPress (for example), make it public or private, handle the whole BuzzBoost thing, and set up your webpage. Done.

All you have to do is think up something worth saying. Type it into a really easy blog form form (as easy as email, really) then hit the “publish” button. Your message goes to your blog, it gets sent out to subscribers via RSS or email, and it gets published on the webpage of your choice. Oh yes, one more bonus. Since Google owns FeedBurner, your message gets indexed in about 15 minutes.

Now, you can hire a PR firm to handle this for you. You can have your in-house marketing folks do it. Whatever method works best for you, the tools are there. They’re free, easy to use and a great way to keep your company’s message fresh.