blogging 102

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes While RSS end-user adoption has been relatively slow, marketers have jumped at the chance to use this new internet channel increase their online sales. If you’re new to the world of RSS — RSS is a simple technology that allows you to deliver your online content directly to your subscribers, other websites and the search engines. It helps you improve your content delivery, as well as increase your online traffic and reach, and even conduct business intelligence more easily. RSS content is delivered through so-called RSS feeds, which are just simple files that carry your online content. Each of these simple files containts multiple “stories” that you may want to deliver to your audiences, called “content items”. A content item can be anything … an article, a blog post, a whole newsletter issue, a sales letter and so on. But there is more to RSS than simply getting your content out. One of the fields of RSS marketing... 

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes The importance of RSS for marketing can no longer be disputed, but do we really understand all the benefits RSS brings to us as marketers, or really understand why we need to use it to get closer to our customers? WHAT RSS WILL DO FOR YOU AS A MARKETER? a] Get your content delivered without fail to all of your subscribers. E-mail delivery rates are dropping, spam is everywhere and it’s getting increasingly difficult to get our marketing content read by our subscribers, prospects and customers. RSS is the way out. b] Increase your web traffic and your online visibility. With more and more sites competing for business every day, you need to do everything in your power to increase your online traffic, and RSS will help you get an upper edge. c] RSS enables you to easily get your content published on dozens and dozens of other sites. d] It will serve as a platform for ad sales, e] It will provide advertising opportunities to promote your own business f]... 

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes Even after all that’s been written and explained, even reputable online marketing publications such as ClickZ still don’t get RSS metrics. In an otherwise good RSS marketing article, Add RSS to Your Marketing Mix, Heidi Cohen has this to say about RSS metrics: “From a marketing perspective, RSS’s measurability is still evolving and therefore limited. You can’t tell who has received your feeds as you can with e-mail.” Yes, RSS’s measurability is still evolving and probably will evolve beyond e-mail metrics. In some ways it already has … And it’s also true that you can’t tell who has received your feeds … if you’re using the most established RSS approaches and just the basic technologies. However, once you connect your feeds with your existing user databases, you can in fact go beyond what e-mail metrics offer. Here are some possibilities … a] Use the “unique feed URL”... 

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes Contrary to general opinion, RSS meets the needs of even the most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does, except for the strong push factor. Most direct marketing reasons against RSS are in fact the result of inadequate understanding of RSS by most marketers. a] Scheduled and autoresponder messages There are already a few services and software packages on the market that allow for scheduled and autoresponder messages via RSS feeds. Once your visitor subscribes to your special RSS feed, he can receive a pre-determined set of messages in a specific time frame, determined by you. Use these messages to welcome your new reader to your RSS feed; thank your new customer after the purchase, send him additional information about the ordered product and give him the opportunity to buy an additional product at a lower price tag a couple of days later, and so on. b] RSS metrics RSS can in fact be tracked: track anything from... 

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes The RSS promise for end-users is simple: –> a unified one-stop-shop to consume online content, without having to visit dozens of sites every day to see what’s new and without having their online subscriptions interfere with their personal and business e-mail communications; –> complete control over their content consumption, including a quick, easy and reliable mechanism to unsubscribe from content they do not wish to receive; –> the ability to receive breaking news as it becomes available, without having to wait for a monthly, weekly or daily recap sent to their e-mail addresses; –> the certainty of actually receiving the content they want, without the fear of it being stopped by spam filters on the way; –> the ability to receive rich-media content directly to their desktops, including audio and video content; –> the promise of providing the tools to make their lives easier, including receiving...