Social Media and Cookies
There is a Little Cookie shop that makes the best cookies I've ever eaten. Every week, this Little Cookie shop makes brand new cookie flavors, and hands them out for free at the Little Cookie shop.
I remember when I first found the Little Cookie Shop, I would stop by on Tuesdays, when the new flavor was brought out, and I would have one for free. I loved it, but then I got busy.
It became harder and harder for me to remember to stop by the Little Cookie shop, and then the Cookie Maker had a brilliant idea - Free Shipping to anyone that signed up for the special delivery service at the Little Cookie shop. All a person had to do was stop by the Little Cookie shop, sign up, which would let him know where the the Cookie lover's lived.
The Cookie Maker would using a cool service called, "RuSS's Speedy Delivery Service" to deliver the new flavor cookies to the Cookie lover's home. All the Cookie lover had to do was have a special Cookie box (kinda like a Mail box, but just for the cookies) available.
Every week, when a new Cookie flavor was ready, RuSS's Speedy Delivery Service would be alerted. Russ would pick up the new flavored cookies and delivery them to the Cookie lover's home in the Cookie box at their house. And that, is an easy way to understand the parts of transmitting digital content to those who are interested to read/listen/watch your creations. Let me compare the terms;
The Little Cookie Shop can be compare to your website that includes a blog.
The Cookies are your Blog/Podcast/Vlog.
The Cookie lovers are your fans that love your digital creations.
The Cookie Box at the Cookie lover's house is the Aggregator that receives in the new creations once you post them.
The Sign Up process at the Little Cookie shop is adding cookie lovers addresses to Speedy Delivery's Cookie route. It is hust like adding RSS feeds to an Aggregator, many refer to this as subscribing.
The Speedy Delivery scheduled delivery service is a part of the RSS feed that automatically goes out to the Blogs, checks for new posts, and returns any new posts to your Cookie Box Aggregator.
I know your brain is full at this point. I understand it can be a tough concept, but once you understand this, the rest is easy, well easier.
