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[Unleash the Power of]
Marketing
The Complete Step-by-Step Guide for Marketers on How to Profitably Implement RSS Marketing to Generate Traffic, Increase Sales, Manage Customer Relationships and Conduct Business Intelligence the Easy Way
Written by Rok Hrastnik, MarketingStudies.net
[Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...... 2 Introduction: Setting the Stage for RSS Marketing ...... 3 I. Know! What is RSS? ...... 15 The Quick Introduction to RSS...... 16 Understanding How RSS Works & Comparing It With E-mail...... 35 What Kind of Content Can You Publish via RSS? … Or How RSS Isn't Just About Delivering Blog Content and Getting News From The New York Times...... 49 Seeing the Technical Side of RSS From the Business Perspective ...... 50 II. Understand! The Business Case for RSS...... 67 Why RSS Really Matters for Marketers: The Business Case for RSS ...... 68 Taking a Structured View of the Business Case for RSS ...... 87 The Disadvantages of RSS ...... 120 III. Integrate! RSS Marketing Strategies...... 122 RSS Marketing Mix Integration...... 123 RSS Content Strategies ...... 126 RSS Marketing Models and Marketing Mix Integration ...... 226 IV. Act! Your 9-Step RSS Marketing Plan ...... 240 1. Start Using RSS as an End-User...... 241 2. Start Using RSS for Business Intelligence...... 250 3. Plan Your Outbound RSS Content & Marketing Strategy ...... 260 4. Define Your RSS Marketing Requirements & Select Your RSS Marketing Vendor ...... 268 5. Promote Your RSS Feeds Internally...... 270 6. Promote Your RSS Feeds Externally ...... 277 7. Measure and Optimize Your RSS Feeds ...... 279 8. Use RSS to Syndicate Your Content to Other Media ...... 285 9. Use RSS to Enhance Your Website ...... 299
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Introduction: Setting the Stage for RSS Marketing
Real RSS Results From Real Marketers
Will these real results from real marketers motivate you to learn about RSS … and then start implementing it as part of your marketing strategy?
• Increased Online Sales W. Atlee Burpee & Co (the garden seed people) saw their RSS strategy help them increase November 2005 sales by four times ... just from a trial RSS feed featuring a "seed of the day". [source: MarketingSherpa.com]
• Improved Click-Through Rates Lockergnome.com, one of the most popular tech sites on the Web today, used to distribute more than 400.000 e-mail newsletters weekly. Today, they have 5 times more RSS subscribers than e-mail subscribers and their RSS click through rates are 500% greater than their e-mail click through rates. [source: Lockergnome]
• Online Advertising Standalone RSS ads are achieving an average 7.99% click-through rate. Compare that with traditional and rich-media online ads with CTRs ranging from 0.20% to 1.17% CTR, according to a report by DoubleClick, and the opportunities of advertising in RSS feeds immediately become more inviting, although the reach is still only getting there. [source: Pheedo]
• Visitor Loyalty RSS users visit top news sites more frequently than RSS non-users, meaning they are more loyal to their favorite news sources. [source: Nielsen/NetRatings]
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• Public Relations 87% of influencers are in fact using RSS to keep up with news and other information. If you're not using RSS chances are you won't be able to either reach them or reach them affectively enough. [source: Nooked]
• Subscription Generation In mid-2005 RSS subscriptions were growing at 5% weekly. [source: FeedBurner]
Let's face it --- marketing today is all about grabbing attention and then keeping it.
As much as these quick examples are here to grab your attention for RSS they also demonstrate how in fact RSS will help you grab and keep attention through all of your key marketing functions.
Really, it's all about attention … About Stories and the Attention Economy
Each day marketers are faced with rising challenges of grabbing attention from the wary consumer or the B2B decision maker.
But they don't want to give attention, unless they feel we deserve it or they need it.
From e-mail to search, there are more and more competing marketers fighting for that same piece of attention … every single day. Millions of marketers fighting for the one consumer, and it's the consumers' choice who they give attention to.
"Free shipping!"
"Get now, pay later!"
"Two for the price of one!"
"Best quality!"
"Best prices!"
"Order within 5 minutes and get a free gift!" (which incidentally isn't really worth anything, and they'll give you the gift if you order after half an hour anyway)
"Only 5 more days until this amazing offer expires!" (and until it's available again after a 5 day rest)
"Lifetime guarantee!"
"Free white paper!"
A ruthless attention game in a ruthless attention economy.
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And make no mistake about it --- today, with gazillion offers out there wanting to get a piece of the consumer's wallet, it is all about attention.
About who grabs it, earns it, keeps it, uses it … and monetizes it.
And about who gives the consumers more value and better (at least "perceived better") value as payback for the attention.
How will you win attention? What's your marketing strategy for taking attention from your competitors, and even more importantly, keeping it?
As Seth Godin would put it, it's "all" in the stories you tell to your market and the stories you live and use to better explain your value to the consumer.
Well, almost, but not quite "all".
It's also about getting the story across to the consumer.
• Crafting the story to resonate best with your audience and the current market situation.
• Making the story visible.
• Making the story findable. For those that actually want to find it.
• Making the story accessible … the way that your audience wants to access it.
• Bringing (delivering) the story to your target audience.
• Keep bringing your "stories" (content) to your target audiences.
• Empowering consumers to give feedback on your story.
• Enriching your story to give it more lasting appeal.
After all, what's a story worth if no one can "read" it and then act on it?
This book is not about crafting your story. Read Seth Godin for that … or any other book on marketing strategies for that matter.
It's about the other side of the coin --- helping you get the story out to your target audiences and helping you keep getting its parts to your target audiences again and again, day in and day out.
The "content delivery" side of the coin … What's Stopping Jane Doe From Giving You Her Attention?
Jane Doe is either the average (there's really no such thing as average, but just for the sake of the argument …) consumer or the high-powered CEO or the lawyer next-door or a purchasing officer at a target company or even a reporter … or even your employee. It doesn't really matter.
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Jane represents your target audience, or better yet, the different target audiences you are communicating with online.
But communicating with Jane demands that you master all the different elements of getting the story across to her in the right way.
Crafting the Story
Communicating with Jane demands that you know what she wants, what your competitors are saying and even what everyone else that has Jane's attention is saying.
Your story won't live in vacuum, so make sure that it's crafted to appeal to Jane, also taking into consideration the other "attention-grabbers" - your competitors, the influencers and everyone else - talking with her.
From developing your content strategy to creating your content every day, you need to make sure it's as relevant as possible to your target consumer. That it's spot on with what's happening in your consumer's world today.
The keywords here are market research and business intelligence. The only problem is that as the market grows bigger and bigger by the second (and it is --- in February 2006 Technorati reported that on the average there's one new blog created every second) so is the scope of market research you need to do to be the most relevant.
Market research is no longer something you do when you start-up or every year when you prepare the next annual business plan, but rather something you need to do every day.
Welcome to the world of streamlined market research … and press clipping just won't do the job.
Making the Story Visible
Jane is shot at by thousands of your competitors with their own stories every day, even multiple stories per second.
If your story isn't contextually visible to Jane when and where she's ready to see it, it will probably just pass her by.
Today it's all about making your story visible in places where consumers will actually take interest.
In essence, you want to make your content available online on contextually relevant websites, which can then point their visitors to your own website. It's about syndicating your content online.
It's also about getting your story read by those that Jane listens to, not just by Jane. It's simple --- we live in a low-trust world. Your customers are much more likely to believe your story if it comes from a reputable source. Again, it's about syndication to the right places to make your story visible.
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Making the Story Findable
If Jane is interested in a particular story, she'll try searching for it in any given online search engine.
Ergo, your story must be easily findable and possibly findable "at the top".
The only problem --- about a million of other marketers are trying to get their stories findable as well, fighting for Jane's attention. Welcome to the search marketing jungle.
Getting high natural search rankings on traditional search engines (Google) is getting increasingly difficult every day as there are more and more sites competing for the same #1 spot.
At the same time, Pay-Per-Click advertising (sponsored keywords) prices are also getting completely out of control. For many marketers the prices for their keywords are now actually so high that generating a positive ROI is almost impossible for them.
So on one side you need all the help you can get to rank higher on traditional search.
But to make your content even more findable, you need to take advantage of all the new search engines being constantly launched. And many of these don't play by the old rules, but rather require you to support new technologies to use them.
Making the Story Accessible
When Jane actually sees or finds your story, she might be interested in learning more.
But she's either not interested right now or doesn't have the time, or she actually wants to you to bring her new "parts" of your story over a longer period of time (lucky you).
So now she wants to subscribe to receive your stories either later or again and again. But she wants to subscribe to your story in a way most relevant to her --- your story must be accessible to her specific needs.
Not every consumer wants to subscribe to e-mail newsletters and alert services. Some are fed up with spam and don't want to receive any more new e-mail (yes, they're actually beginning to be afraid of subscribing via e-mail), while others prefer to use other content consumption channels for any number of reasons.
Surprise surprise, they might even rather subscribe to your content via their mobile phone instead of their PC or Mac.
The bottom line is simple --- if you're only using e-mail to generate online subscriptions you're losing out on your prospective audiences. Today it's all about choice and making your content more accessible.
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Bringing the Story to Your Target Audience
Once Jane is subscribed it's up to you to start bringing the story to her.
If you're depending only on e-mail to do just that you're now in heaps of trouble. The e-mail services (her ISP, her e-mail client, her spam filters) that Jane uses will do their best to keep your story away.
Your competitors will also be sending her stories she perhaps once actually wanted, making her distribute her attention and perhaps skip on giving any to you. Welcome to the e-mail marketing jungle.
Getting content delivered via e-mail is one of the major marketing headaches today.
• E-mail Postage Beginning of 2006 AOL and Yahoo! announced they'll start charging e-mailers $2.5 - $10 to guarantee e-mail delivery, via the Goodmail System. Those that don't pay might get their e-mail delivered or not. It's the actual start of paid e- mail postage, making e-mail no longer free. What will that do to your ROI?
• E-mail Deliverability Only 87% of all permission-based e-mail in the U.S. is actually delivered. That means that at least 13% of all the e-mail you send out is never received by your subscribers. [source: Lyris Q3 2005 ISP Deliverability Report Card]
• E-mail Open-Rates Depending on day of week, e-mail open rates range from 13% to 21%. In your best case scenario this means that on the average at least 79% of the e-mail messages you send out will never be opened, let alone read. How is this affecting your marketing results? [source: eROI Q4 2005 E-mail Statistics]
• The E-mail Junk Folder Even when your messages get through to your recipient's e-mail client chances are they'll be placed in the infamous "junk folder". But 45% of your recipients don't even bother to routinely check the "junk folder" to see if any legitimate messages are stored there. [source: Bigfoot Interactive, August 2005]
• Consumers Not Missing Blocked E-mail Actually, 72% of e-mail users don't miss legitimate e-mail that never arrives. Essentially, no one really cares if they received your e-mail messages or not and they certainly won't go out of their way to get them … even if they wanted them just a week ago. [source: PEW, February 2005]
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• Spam Between 70% and 80% of all e-mail sent is actually spam. Your legitimate marketing content is thus not only competing against other legitimate marketers, but against a prevailing percentage of e-mail spammers. Grabbing attention is more difficult than ever. [source: Postini Annual Report 2005]
Whichever way we look at it, e-mail is no longer the marketing tool it used to be. Although it's still the strongest content delivery channel it can no longer function as your only content delivery channel.
Marketing in the 21st century is all about being "multi-channel", and that goes especially for your outbound communications.
And on the other hand many influencers, such as journalists, bloggers and analysts, who can be transformed into prime sources of target traffic for you, today already use other channels than e-mail to be in the information loop and get their news.
Keep Bringing Your Stories to Your Target Audiences
If you're valuable enough to Jane she might actually want you to keep bringing her your story.
What a shame that you're still in the e-mail marketing jungle …
Even when you get your prospect to subscribe via e-mail and manage to send out the first couple of messages, you're still looking at long-term problems if you're only going to rely on e-mail.
Keeping your content being delivered will be one of your key challenges of the future.
Empowering Consumers to Give Feedback on Your Story
If you're really valuable or (in a worse case) if you're really horrible enough to Jane, she might now want to give you feedback on your story.
But you need to empower her to do so (well, in reality, if Jane wants to give feedback strongly enough, she'll give it anyway --- but it just might be through channels you'd rather avoid).
So Jane needs to be able to send her feedback, and you need to be able to properly receive it.
Keeping communicational channels with your target audiences open is the new marketing paradigm. It's up to you to make that as easy as possible, but also to make sure that you actually do receive the messages sent by your audiences.
E-mail is making that increasingly difficult and is also not appropriate for many types of feedback, such as simply linking to your content.
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Enriching Your Story to Give it More Lasting Appeal
There's one more step to making Jane a happy prospect or customer --- enriching your story for her with additional outside content and related stories, to help her further follow her interests.
As the old adage goes, content is king online. And this is the one fact that hasn't changed since the beginning of the internet.
If you can provide frequent relevant content to your target audiences they will come back for more, giving you more opportunities to make the first sale or an additional sale. If you can't, they won't. It's as simple as that.
While you can be the sole provider of this relevant content through your own channels, you will find that adequate content frequency is best achieved by integrating other content sources into your online offering.
For one, it makes things easier for you. Unless you have the capacity to create dozens of new content items every day.
And then it also makes your site more relevant to your visitors as you are providing them with relevant and related third-party insights and news as well, in addition to your own work.
It's all about enriching the user experience. The RSS Solution and What It Will Do For You
From making your story visible to enriching it, RSS is the solution that will help you get your story across to your audiences and help you overcome the key internet marketing challenges outlined with the "Jane Doe example".
Moving away from the "story" metaphor, RSS is the tool that has the potential to power most of your marketing mix and help you through all of the steps of communicating with your target audiences.
From direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, branding, internal communications and online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and customer relationship management, RSS will help you improve the key elements of your marketing mix.
Getting More Practical
Getting back to attention --- in very simple terms, RSS will
• aid you in better and easier capturing attention, by ensuring better visibility and findability for your story,
• and then aid you in actually using that attention to develop customer relationships and making sales, through constant contact and efficient delivery of your content.
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If you want to get even more practical about RSS this early into the book, here are some of the most practical things RSS will do for you:
• Help you continuously craft your content based on new market trends, your competition and what your target audiences are paying attention to, by helping you easily keep track of thousands and thousands of relevant "story" sources around the world; [crafting the story]
• get your content delivered without fail to all of your subscribers, unlike e-mail which is burdened by spam-infested inboxes, spam filters and decaying consumer trust; [bringing your story to your target audiences]
• make it easy to subscribe for those that don't want to subscribe to your content via e-mail or want to subscribe via their mobile phones, hand held devices or even their gaming devices --- helping you convert more prospects into subscribers; [making your story accessible]
• increase the frequency of visits from your subscribers, giving you more opportunities to develop relationships and generate the sale; [keep bringing your story to your target audiences]
• increase your web traffic and your online visibility by getting your content included in specialized search engines, generating more backlinks to your site thus aiding your natural traditional search engine rankings and helping your web content get indexed quicker by traditional search engines; [making your story visible and findable]
• enable you to easily get your content published on dozens and dozens of other sites, bringing new visitors from relevant sources to your site, generating additional backlinks to your site and increasing your brand visibility and reputation; [making the story visible]
• serve as an additional platform for your ad sales, naturally generating additional revenues for your business; [further monetizing your story]
• provide advertising opportunities to promote your own business to targeted consumers that will actually receive your promotional message; [bringing your story to your target audiences]
• and help you get more content for your site without you having to write a single word. [enriching your story]
Use RSS to Communicate With Your Target Audiences
Make no mistake, RSS is a communications channel.
You can use it to effectively communicate with a number of different target audiences:
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• Your subscribers
• Your prospects
• Your existing customers
• Your key account customers
• Your employees
• Your team members
• Your company investors or owners
• Industry analysts
• Press representatives and journalists
• Bloggers
• Search engines and directories
• Any web applications that can receive and interpret RSS content
And if you like, RSS will also help you communicate with your friends, family and basically everyone that matters to you.
All you need is to provide an RSS feed (many existing internet solutions or services you may already be using will provide this functionality out-of-the-box) and get them to subscribe … What You Will Learn
The purpose of this book is to demonstrate just how RSS can help you improve your bottom-line and show you how to integrate it within all of your internet marketing and publishing activities.
It aims to be the showcase of what you can do with RSS and to show you without dispute that there is in fact a strong business case behind the mystified word you’ve been hearing lately.
And it will give you precise and clear instructions on just how to take advantage of its business case. How This Book is Structured
The book will take you step-by-step through all the key aspects of RSS marketing you need to understand and show you how to implement them in praxis to reap all the benefits of RSS.
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• Section I: Know! What is RSS? Find out exactly what RSS is and how it works, to understand all the nuances needed to make it work for your business, from finding out how relevant your RSS content really needs to be; how RSS compares with e-mail, e-zines and blogging; to seeing how to take advantage of how RSS feeds are structured to achieve more impact with your readers, the search engines and more.
• Section II: Understand! The Business Case for RSS Understand the entire business case for RSS, with practical examples, from using it for business intelligence to increasing your traffic.
• Section III: Integrate! RSS Marketing Strategies We'll take you through various marketing functions, such as direct marketing and public relations, and give you concrete RSS marketing strategies that you can apply to your business and your work, and show you how you can directly integrate RSS with your different marketing initiatives. This is the strategy part.
• Section IV: Act! Your 9-Step RSS Marketing Plan Once you understand RSS and even more importantly RSS marketing strategies, we'll take you through all the steps needed to implement RSS marketing in your company, from planning your RSS strategy; measuring your RSS activities; to using RSS to increase your sales, all of it step-by-step with clear instructions. This is the practical implementation part. What You Need to Learn About RSS Marketing
Here's just a small glimpse of what you need to learn about RSS marketing to get the most from it … and of what you will know after finishing this book.
• How to integrate RSS into your business and marketing strategy to reap all the benefits of this comprehensive marketing channel?
• What content is appropriate for RSS delivery?
• How to successfully get people to subscribe to your RSS feeds?
• How to use RSS to increase your online visibility and traffic?
• How to properly promote your RSS feeds on your site and using external channels?
• How to use RSS to convert prospects into customers?
• How to use RSS to improve your customer relationships?
• How to use RSS to capture prospect data and populate your marketing database?
• How to use RSS in direct marketing, PR and other key marketing functions?
• And more …
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No worries. It's not nearly as difficult as it looks. There's a reason why RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication …
To your success!
Rok Hrastnik, MarketingStudies.net [email protected]
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I. Know! What is RSS?
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The Quick Introduction to RSS
What is RSS?
Brief Explanation for Marketers Brief Explanation for End-Users RSS is an amazingly simple technology RSS is a linear stream of content from a that allows you to easily get your new website or other electronic content online content updates delivered to provider that arrives directly into your your subscribers, other websites, RSS Reader, either letting you know that specialized search engines and one of your favorite content sources has directories and other online systems. new information for you or even giving you this new information in full, directly from your RSS Reader.
In somewhat more technical terms, RSS is a content delivery channel that easily gets almost any type of content delivered to all that subscribe to it, surpassing all types of spam filters that are so bothersome with e-mail marketing.
What is This "Content" We Are Talking About?
RSS can deliver almost any type of content you can imagine:
• News story Trivia: What RSS Stands For? • New blog post RSS stands for: • Sales letter • Really Simple Syndication - because • Product information it's a format that allows you to easily syndicate your online content to • Customer service update other internet users and websites
• Special offer for your customers • Rich Site Summary - an older version of RSS (RSS 0.91) • Article • RDF Site Summary - an older version • Ad of RSS (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
• Audio file Really nothing you have to worry about • Video file right now …
• PowerPoint presentation
• And so on …
Really, almost anything you can imagine wanting to deliver to someone online.
So when we say content we actually mean any information you might want to
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• deliver or send to your subscribers,
• publish on other websites,
• get included in specialized search engines and directories and
• deliver to any other kind of system that can consume RSS feeds.
But What is RSS Content and How is it Delivered?
Content itself is any kind of information in any form you want someone to receive and consume.
RSS content is information delivered through RSS feeds.
What Are RSS Feeds?
RSS content is delivered through RSS feeds --- simple files structured in a specific way [xml]. These simple files, which are generated by special software, actually carry your content to the recipient that subscribes to it.
RSS feeds (or files) include some basic information about the RSS feed, such as its title, description, logo and similar, and the actual content you want to deliver.
Screenshot: What an RSS file looks like
The actual content you are delivering, such as your news updates, articles, latest blog posts and others, resides in the so-called content items. Each individual content item represents an individual story --- either its summary with a link back to the full story on your website, or even the full-text of the story.
An RSS feed contains and presents these stories in a linear list, usually chronologically sorted. An RSS feed might contain any number of stories.
When you want to deliver a new story (content item) to your subscribers you simply add the story (content item) on top of the list of stories (content items) in the feed (actually, your RSS publishing tool will do that for you, so there's nothing to worry about).
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What is important to remember is that RSS content cannot be structured in any other way than a linear list. Period.
To easier understand how RSS feeds look in real-life, when viewed with an appropriate RSS Reader, take a look at the following screenshot.
RSS feed RSS logo feed title
Linear Individual list of content item content items
Content item title & link to full-text content on the feed publisher’s website
Content item summary
Content item time-published
Screenshot: CNET News Feed; displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader [desktop RSS Reader]
This is just one example of how RSS feeds can be consumed (via a personal RSS Reader) and displayed to the internet user.
What you actually need to take away from this screenshot is understanding how RSS feeds are structured (linear list) and what RSS content looks like in this structured list (individual content items).
When the internet user clicks on one of these headlines, she is taken to the publisher's website to then read the full-text version of this content item.
In the case of the CNET example from above, if the user were to click on the "Sun to acquire software patch specialist" content item she would be taken to the full- text version of that same article on the CNET website:
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Screenshot: a full-text version of the CNET article in a web browser Æ what the user gets after clicking on the headline in the RSS Reader
So, by clicking on the item in the RSS feed, from within the RSS Reader, the user would get to the actual website with the article in full. The process would be just the same if we were looking at a blog and its RSS feed instead of an RSS feed from a news website.
The important thing to understand here is the relation between the RSS feed and the website (any website, even a blog or a forum or any other type of website): the RSS feed is used to update subscribers of the new content on the website, which they then access in full on the actual website and not through the RSS feed. The RSS feed is simply an "update vehicle".
But, as noted earlier, the RSS feed can also contain the full-text content of the article. In this case the user reads the entire story directly from the RSS feed, using an RSS Reader, and without having to visit a website to find out more … no clicks necessary. Subscribing to RSS Feeds and Reading Them
In order to read your RSS content and subscribe to it, end-users need an RSS Reader, sometimes also called an RSS Aggregator (since it aggregates content from multiple sources and provides it to the end-user). Without an RSS Reader an internet user won't be able to make much sense of RSS. For example, opening a standard RSS feed in a standard non-RSS enabled internet browser will only display a lot of confusing code to the user (there are actually ways of getting around this --- keep reading).
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RSS Readers are special tools that can take an RSS feed and display it to the end- user. They come in many different forms and flavors, but the most popular are web-based RSS Readers, desktop RSS Readers and integrated RSS Readers that work from internet browsers or e-mail clients.
Content item title & link to full- text content on the feed publisher’s website
Content item summary
Screenshot: CNET News Feed; displayed in the web-based Windows Live RSS Reader • Web-based RSS Readers are basically websites where internet users need to create an account to then use those websites to subscribe to RSS feeds and read them. The good news is that the most popular portals today, such as MyYahoo! and MSN, already offer RSS capabilities, meaning that most consumers won't need to do any additional work to get your RSS feeds. Examples: MyYahoo!, MyMSN, Bloglines, Attensa, Windows Live, Google Reader, NewsGator Online, Pluck Web Edition • Desktop RSS Readers are applications that internet users need to download from the internet and then install on their computers. These users will usually be more "cutting-edge" and tech savvy than the "average" consumer and will also have more spending power. Examples: FeedDeemon, Awasu, Vox Lite • Integrated RSS Readers work directly from the most popular internet browsers and e-mail clients, bringing the whole RSS experience closer to the way consumers are interacting with the internet. Some browsers, such as Mozilla FireFox and Internet Explorer 7 already come with integrated RSS Readers, as well as e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express. Examples: NewsGator, Pluck, Attensa, FireFox, ThunderBird Since there are so many different RSS Reader categories and since there are dozens of different products available in each of the categories your RSS feed will be displayed somewhat differently in each of them, but the logic more or less always stays the same. But more on RSS Readers a little later on …
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The important point here is that once an internet user has an RSS Reader he needs to pro actively subscribe to your RSS feed with the reader, by adding the link to your RSS feed into his RSS Reader. What Happens to the RSS Feed Once They Subscribe
List of content items available in the currently active feed
A folder that contains RSS feeds
An actual RSS feed
Full contents of the RSS feed
Screenshot: A list of RSS feeds in the RSS Reader; displayed in the desktop Awasu RSS Reader
Once the internet user subscribes to your feed that feed is added to his RSS Reader and is available to him from his list of feeds.
To better imagine this just think of your different folders for your e-mail in your e- mail client. We usually create folders to better differentiate between different e- mail messages and to find them quicker.
In the case of RSS each RSS feed looks like a folder with several content items from the feed available in that folder. Most RSS Readers also allow their users to put different feeds in different "master" folders that simply contain the feeds the user has subscribed to and added to these folders.
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When a new content item is added to the RSS feed it appears as a new "message" on top of the list of content items available in the feed, just like a new e-mail message would appear on top of the e-mail inbox or one of the folders. Subscribing to RSS Feeds Step-by-Step
But what does the actual RSS subscription process look step-by-step?
The actual process will vary somewhat from RSS Reader to RSS Reader, especially when comparing desktop RSS Readers and Web-based RSS Readers, but the logic behind the process remains the same Æ it's all about adding a link to an application.
Traditionally, most RSS Readers will require the user to manually copy the link to the RSS feed from the publisher's website and then manually add it into the RSS Reader to subscribe to the feed.
There are however certain tools that actually make this process easier, into almost a one-click affair.
• If the link to the RSS feed is formed using a special command (more on this later) then users of most of the latest RSS Readers will be able to add the RSS feed to their Reader simply by clicking on the link and then confirming the operation in the Reader.
• Almost all popular RSS Readers today also offer publishers special Easy RSS Subscribe Buttons that are especially tailored to the RSS Reader and also allow for easy subscriptions. The problem with these is that there are just too many and most publishers will only use the most popular "Add to MyYahoo!" and "Add to MyMSN" buttons. Registered users of these two portals will then be able to subscribe to RSS feeds by simply clicking on the subscribe button and confirming the choice on the actual portal where they will be taken automatically.
• Browser-integrated RSS Readers take advantage of the RSS Reader being integrated in the internet browser, so no outside applications are needed. Users using these will usually get a notification from the browser that a site they're just visiting has an RSS feed available, asking them if they'd like to subscribe (of course only if you have your website properly setup for this), making the whole process completely intuitive and part of the internet browsing experience. Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer users already have this option.
Of course it's your job as the publisher/marketer to make this process as easy as possible for your subscribers. You just can't use all the options, because there are simply too many. But one of the reasons you're reading this book is to find out what the best way is anyway …
To make things just a little clearer let's take a look at the most common subscription processes step-by-step. Just so that you can understand how your visitors will experience subscribing to your feeds …
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The "Difficult" Desktop RSS Reader Subscription Process
[1] The internet user visits a website and searches for the RSS subscribe button.
[2] He then right- clicks (Windows) on the RSS button and copys the link (shortcut) to the RSS feed.
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[3] For the next step the internet user needs to launch his desktop RSS Reader
[4] He then needs to use the appropriate feature to add a new RSS subscription (often called a “channel”)
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[5] For the final step the user must now enter the RSS feed information, which is usually already available after copying the RSS feed link.
[6] The RSS feed is now available to him through his RSS Reader.
Quite a tedious process. There's really no wonder why RSS needed portals like MyYahoo! and MSN to really kick-off …
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The Easy Subscribe Web-Based RSS Reader Subscription Process
[1] The internet user visits a website and sees the “Add to MyYahoo!” button and clicks on it.
[2] The user is taken to his MyYahoo! page where he confirms his selection.
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[3] The feed has been added to his MyYahoo! RSS Reader and he may now go to his account.
[4] The user will now have constant access to the latest content from this publisher via his MyYahoo! account.
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The Browser-Integrated RSS Reader Subscription Process
[1] The user visits a website and a special icon in Firefox appears letting him know this site has an RSS feed. Clicking on the icon will start the subscription process.
[2] The user now has to confirm his choice and select which folder to add the RSS subscription to.
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[3] The user can now access his new RSS subscription directly from the browser, regardless of the website he is currently at.
You're Not in Control!
Wouldn't it be great if all internet users used just one type of RSS Reader to subscribe to RSS feeds, hopefully the one that's the easiest to use to subscribe?
Unfortunately, as you can imagine, the reality is somewhat different.
You're not in control and you usually don't get to choose what RSS Readers your audiences are using.
What you can do is correctly promote RSS feeds on your site to generate as many subscriptions as possible. Unsubscribing From RSS Feeds
The unsubscription process itself is about the easiest thing about RSS for internet end-users. Mostly a two-click affair.
Let's take a look at an example of unsubscribing from RSS feeds using the desktop Awasu RSS Reader …
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[1] To delete the RSS subscription the user only needs to rich- click (Windows) on the RSS feed and select the delete option
[2] … and then confirm his choice. That’s it!
Can you say "simple" quickly enough.
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RSS is not only a 100% opt-in channel where users need to proactively subscribe to your content to receive it, but also about the easiest channel around to opt-out from. Getting Back to Proactive Subscriptions …
Now read this again Æ in order to receive your RSS content, internet users need to pro actively subscribe to your RSS feed. It's the ultimate permission marketing model. There's absolutely no chance for you to send any RSS content to anyone that hasn't subscribed to your feed. And once they unsubscribe, they might be gone for good. Because once they unsubscribe you again don't have any possibility to send them any more of your content via RSS. But those that are subscribed will directly receive your content whenever you update your RSS feed with new information, by adding new content items to the RSS file. The good news is that once you get your RSS subscriber, your content will always reach him, without having to face any SPAM filters and other barricades on the way … as long as he stays subscribed. So while not being able to send your messages to those that aren't subscribed might be a hassle, it more than pays of once you do land the subscriber Æ because landing an RSS subscriber is just like establishing a direct and permanent link to that subscriber. Well, at least until he unsubscribes, which means that he doesn't want to hear from you again anyway. Proactive subscriptions also mean that you don't have to compete for attention with hundreds of spammers, increasing the chances that your content is actually read. Who Uses RSS Anyway?
Are you getting a feeling that RSS is something that's really only used by computer geeks, but no one that you'd actually want to market to?
The truth is that RSS was limited to computer geeks and webmaster for almost a decade before it really took off and started penetrating the mass market. First to follow were the cutting-edge early adopters and soon after them the internet savvy crowd (definitely a good target audience).
But today, due to the many benefits of RSS for the end-user, RSS is predominantly used by the "average" consumer that doesn't even know what RSS is --- but he or she still uses it.
According to Yahoo! (RSS Whitepaper, October 2005) a whopping 27% of all internet users consume RSS content through personalized start pages that provide easy RSS functionality, such as MyYahoo!, MyMSN and others. The total number of RSS users is 31% of the US online population.
But only 12% of internet users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
Yes, most people don't even know what RSS is, but they are still using it.
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And they don't need to, since most leading portals today do an adequate job of bringing RSS to them without them having to even know what RSS is.
So don't let the first impression of how technically complex RSS is fool you Æ RSS is alive, well and kicking.
But RSS is not only gaining traction in the U.S. According to TechNewsWorld 34.4% of the Chinese internet user population already uses RSS. Why Internet Users Love RSS
Right now you might be wondering why anyone would want to use RSS in the first place.
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 critical content updates as soon as they become available.
These points are not simple enhancements, but important advancements that can fundamentally change how internet content is consumed. Furthermore, these points themselves prove why marketers need to start implementing RSS now!
You see, RSS in fact does make life easier for those that use it, even if they don't know what RSS is in the first place.
To bring the point home take a look at just some of the services available to RSS users that do make life easier.
Library Elf: Making The Library Experience Easier
(http://libraryelf.com/)
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Library Elf helps you keep track of your library accounts in one place and received reminders, such as what library material is due, overdue and ready for pickup. Library Elf uses the power of RSS to help you forget about your library accounts and instead be directly notified of the changes you’re waiting for, directly to your desktop.
Indeed: Helping Your Find The Right Job
(http://www.indeed.com/)
Indeed.com provides its visitors with job seeking results from hundreds of sites and then makes the search results accessible via RSS feeds. Users can subscribe to individual search results, pertaining directly to their search keywords to be notified immediately new jobs are available.
Flickr: Sharing Your Life In Picture
(http://www.flickr.com/)
Flickr is the most popular photography management and sharing service on the web, enabling end-users to upload their photos and then make them available to their friends, associates and family through a wide assortment of content delivery channels, including RSS. By subscribing to individual Flickr feeds from their users, everyone can have direct access to the latest life experiences from their friends.
RSScalendar: Sharing Your Events
(http://www.rsscalendar.com/)
rssCalendar.com allows individuals and companies to share their personal or group calendars with the rest of the world, letting everyone that matters know of where and what they are doing next, delivering this information via individual RSS feeds.
Coupons.com: Savings To Your Desktop
(http://www.coupons.com/)
Coupons.com brings the best deals and coupons to internet end-users, helping them save money by discounted shopping. As of late, they also started delivering coupons through RSS feeds, giving their subscribers direct access to their latest offerings.
PubSub.com: Tracking The World
(http://www.pubsub.com)
PubSub.com is an amazing service that allows you to track practically everything going on around the world by matching your keywords with tens of thousands of online content sources, and enabling you to subscribe to your customized search results through customized RSS feeds.
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RSSauction.Com: Tracking Your Purchase Interests
(http://rssauction.com/)
If you’re a regular eBay user, you certainly want to keep track of new products available, which precisely match your interests. rssAuction.com helps users keep better track of eBay by giving them a tool to first create a comprehensive list of product requirements and then delivering the search result through an RSS feed. As soon as new products matching individual interests appear, the user is notified of that through his RSS aggregator, giving him the ability to start bidding immediately and without having to visit eBay every day to find the right products.
Upcoming.org: Keeping Track Of Local And Social Events
(http://upcoming.org/)
From the Upcoming.org website: "Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about."
FeedBeep: The Ultimate "Time-To-Information" Tool
(http://www.feedbeep.com/)
Depending on who you are and your current life situation, many content alerts are critical for you. If you’re looking for a job, you want to know immediately when a new one matching your precise interests is available, and so on. While RSS brings this information to your desktop, that might not be fast enough. Feedbeep.com takes internet content delivery one step further, by empowering users to have their critical content updates delivered from an RSS feed directly to their mobile phones via SMS.
The one thing all of these RSS-based or RSS-empowered services have in common is that they empower consumers.
They empower them by getting the content that matters to them delivered directly to their desktops or online content aggregators, but still giving them the power to unsubscribe within moments of not being satisfied with the content they are receiving.
Even more so, these services empower consumers to create social networks and easily share their information with their friends, family and associates on a large scale.
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Understanding How RSS Works & Comparing It With E-mail
To better understand the specifics of RSS as a marketing channel, let's take a look at the logistics of how it really works, especially in comparison to e-mail. The RSS Content Delivery Model
Internet end-users
Publisher creates the RSS file and places it online
Content consumers subscribe to the feed and retrieve its content whenever they want Other sites and systems Search engines and directories
1. The publisher creates his RSS feed (file) and places it on his web server.
a. To make the RSS feed available to internet end-users the publisher places the link to his RSS feed on his website, where internet end- users can see it and pro actively subscribe to it. Other websites can use this same RSS feed to display the publisher's content themselves.
b. To make the RSS feed available to the search engines, directories and websites that aggregate content from multiple source, the publisher usually just submits the link to his RSS feed to their database using their interface or RSS feed submission software. Some search engines will actually find the feed on the publishers website automatically.
2. To actually publish new content in the RSS feed, the publisher needs to add a new content item to the RSS file.
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a. Usually the publisher will first create and publish his content on his website, and then add a summary (or full-text content) of that content into the RSS feed to let his subscribers know that new content is available on the website. Each new content item published in the RSS feed will point to the full-text version of that same content on his website.
b. The publisher could also first publish new content in his RSS feed and then use special software to also display that content on his website. His subscribers would still get the content update in their RSS Readers and then click through to read the full-text content on the publisher's website.
c. The publisher could also only add the full-text content of a story to his RSS feed, without even publishing the full story on his website. This would usually be done if the feed is meant for more personal communications.
3. Content consumers (internet end-users, search engines …) that are subscribed to the publisher's feed will periodically download (retrieve) and check the RSS feed (file) to see if any new content items have been added to it. If new content has indeed been added it will be displayed to the content consumers via their RSS Reader.
Or if you want to remember this in even simpler terms …
1. Publisher: Creates RSS feed and starts adding content to the feed
2. Content consumer: Subscribes to the RSS feed by including the link to the feed in his RSS Reader
3. Publisher Æ content consumer: The publisher updates the feed with new content and the content consumer is notified of the new content available via his RSS Reader
The Important Points to Understand About The RSS Model
• No one that subscribes to an RSS feed gives the publisher anything, such as their e-mail addresses.
• An RSS subscription basically only means that the content consumer has added the RSS feed to his RSS feed list. To receive new content from the publisher he needs to retrieve the content from that feed, which is done automatically.
• The publisher cannot send any information via RSS to anyone that isn't subscribed to his RSS feed.
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[2] And is then taken to the [1] RSS subscriber clicks full-text content of the on the content item link in content item on the his RSS Reader … publisher’s site
Screenshot: Demonstrates how an end-user clicks on an RSS content item link/headline in the RSS feed and is then taken to the publisher's website to read the full-text content of that content item in his browser or in the integrated web browser in his RSS Reader The E-mail Model Turned Upside Down
To better understand how RSS content delivery works try thinking about it in e-mail terms.
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RSS E-mail
The publisher gives the content The consumer gives the publisher his e- consumer the link to the RSS feed mail address
The publisher updates the RSS feed and The publisher sends an e-mail message to the content consumers retrieve new the consumer whenever he wants to content from the RSS feed when they want to
The difference between RSS and e-mail is essentially in:
• Who gives his contact details. E-mail Æ the content consumer gives his e-mail address (contact details) to the publisher RSS Æ the publisher gives his RSS feed (contact details) to the content consumer
• Who is in control. E-mail Æ the publisher sends out the content whenever he wants to (the publisher is in control) RSS Æ the content consumer retrieves the content whenever he wants to (the content consumer is in control)
Content consumers / Internet Internet end-users End-users include the feed in their RSS Readers and then retrieve it
The RSS feed serves as a sort of “list”
End-users give their Publishers send e-mail e-mail addresses to messages to end-users the publishers
As you can see RSS is quite similar to e-mail, only that it's e-mail turned upside down.
In push & pull terms, with e-mail the publisher pushes the content to the content consumer and with RSS the content consumer pulls the content from the publisher.
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The List
With RSS delivery the RSS feed takes on the role of the "list" we know from e-mail marketing.
In theory, the e-mail publisher could only send out his e-mail content to the subscribers on his e-mail list.
With RSS, the publisher can only send out his RSS content to those that are subscribed to his RSS feed. In this case his pool of RSS subscriptions becomes some sort of "list".
When the subscriber opts-out from his RSS feed subscription he can no longer receive content from the RSS publisher and is so conversely removed from the list (from the publisher's pool of RSS subscriptions). RSS Demands More Relevance Than E-mail
Even though RSS does work like the e-mail model turned upside down these difference are anything but trivial.
RSS is the ultimate opt-in model. There is absolutely no way you can send anything to anyone that isn't subscribed.
And unsubscribing is as easy as a two-click operation.
In this regard RSS is a more difficult marketing channel to manage, but also a more rewarding one. No attention is paid by the consumer to those that he doesn't want to be in touch with (spammers). More attention is paid to you.
The only trick, after capturing the consumer's attention and converting it into an RSS subscription, is keeping the attention and the RSS subscription.
But keeping attention is not as easy as it sounds.
• You need to become more relevant to what your audiences want and need.
• You need to become more relevant than your competitors.
• You need to become more relevant than other content sources, even if they are not your direct competitors.
It's all about relevance.
Why is Relevance So Important and How It's Changing Your World
To better understand this let's first remember how content is traditionally delivered. People subscribe to e-mail newsletters or e-mail update services to get content delivered directly to their inboxes. It's (or better yet, was) convenient, easy and simple.
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But, in order to get content delivered to their inboxes, they must first reveal their e-mail addresses, which are basically ID numbers that allow anyone who knows them send whatever they like to these ID numbers. In a perfect world we would only receive the content that we requested and from the people that we wanted to hear from Æ the people that can provide us with relevant information, specific to our interests and current situation. Unfortunately we're not living in a perfect world. Since our "ID number" allows anyone to contact us, we have very little control over who actually does contact us and what information they send us. In a way, it's a "perfect democracy" that just doesn't work. Because, in reality, we don't want to hear from everyone that thinks they have something to say to us. In reality, we only want to hear from a very limited circle of people and receive very limited types of content categories. But, for the sake of the argument, let's presume that we are actually getting information only from people that we want to hear from. Unfortunately these people still have the power to send us whatever information they like, not just the information we want to receive from them. Basically, they have the power to push any kind of content to our e-mail inboxes. We can either unsubscribe from their e-mail service or continue to receive their content as it is. One of the problems with this is that unsubscribing can be a rather tedious process, definitely not a two-click affair, and some people even doubt that the unsubscribe feature will work. This is our reality. We are, more or less, forced to receive content we mostly don't want to receive, and for the content that we do want to receive, we also have to put up with much information we don't want to get. This is the "democratic" nature of e-mail and many marketers and publishers have been abusing it for a long time. It's not the medium's fault of course; it's just that people are who we are. And now enter RSS in to the picture, a "new" channel that users need to pro actively add to their content consumption mix, including pro actively "adding" content publishers they want to hear from, thus eliminating the "democracy" of e- mail (conversely, limiting our "content diet" only to the publishers we actually want to hear from). But there's more. One of this "strange" channel's characteristics is that it's extremely easy to remove content publishers you don't want to hear from.
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Now, all of us have very limited time for online content consumption. It's always been this way, but with e-mail content consumption we usually don't even bother ourselves with unsubscribing from the content we don't want to receive, since we already receive hundreds of SPAM e-mails per day anyway, so why bother with unsubscribing from a few e-mail lists and the few additional e-mails we receive per week. Most people don't even know anymore what they subscribe to since they have no unified view of all of their e-mail subscriptions. However, this new channel, RSS, is quite different. Here you have an exact view of what you "subscribe" to. You see exactly which content publishers are on your "list" and you can remove any of them immediately, without even a second thought. It's quick, easy and comfortable. Compare this with the relative difficulty of unsubscribing from e-mail lists, and even with the e-mail mindset where you just don't care to be bothered anymore with unsubscribing, since you don't have a view of what you subscribe to anyway. This new channel takes the democracy right out of content delivery for publishers and brings it back for end-users. If RSS content publishers want to keep and grow their readership, they cannot afford to do the things they could have easily been doing with e-mail. Instantly, all the content needs to be highly relevant. You can no longer afford to send out blatant advertising messages or too much content that is of little interest to your target audience. If you want to "survive" you need to tailor all of your content specifically to the needs of your target audience. Side-note: it is important to understand that e-mail publishers can get away with occasional irrelevant content (if most of their content is relevant) easier because e-mail subscribers are not as trigger happy. But it's just too easy to unsubscribe from an RSS feed that disappoints you. RSS content delivery must in nature be more relevant than content delivered by e-mail. RSS content publishers know this and most are providing exactly this, very relevant content, usually more relevant than what most e-mail publishers are doing, since they are taking in to consideration the specific characteristics of the channel. And there are more publishers like this every day. And eventually, even those that use both e-mail and RSS to deliver content change the way they are delivering content using e-mail. Their entire content production becomes more relevant to the user's needs. It's quite easy to imagine the larger-scale implications of this. Since more and more publishers are starting to offer more relevant content, that also raises the bar for other content publishers, even those not using RSS. Our expectations are increasing every day. We are no longer content with mediocre content, we actually expect and even demand more relevancy. And so the circle is completed.
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Early RSS publishers have started raising our expectations of what to expect from internet content and have thus affected our internet content consumption habits. Users, in effect, are starting to demand more, which in turn forces other publishers to comply with the increased demands. This process has just begun and still has a long way to go, but it has begun and will not stop. The RSS Difference
Of course, RSS isn't just about being e-mail turned upside down.
It's also about getting content delivered to the search engines, getting content delivered to other websites, and much more, all this using just one simple tool.
If you want to further compare RSS and e-mail take a look at this relatively old but still the most comprehensive comparison table.
Email v RSS, Email Marketer v Customer Matrix (last updated 25 May 2004) *Source: Alex Barnett, "Email v RSS, let us move on…", Alex Barnett Blog
Perspective Email Positive Email Negative RSS Positive RSS General Negative
Email Email is Once opted out, RSS provision is RSS is not Marketers Marketer intrusive contact is fully and intrusive, (should) suppressed / not automatically opt customers recognize, Email is contactable in – zero opt in / are in enable and trackable (open opt out control honor rates, CTR, etc) Opt out rates are governance and (although customer down to on the up compliance marketers preferences - individual level (normally due to overhead – zero should see medium – ROI is easily irrelevant risk of legal this as a (email, web, understood, communications) action by positive) RSS, DM, IM, mature channel customers etc), Response rates with industry RSS is frequency, are falling standard RSS content trackable, content metrics (through topic but there Email blocking / relevancy channels) has the are no filtering out is Email content potential to industry If marketers increasing can be highly deliver highly standard really want targeted Regulation relevant content metrics yet data (and/or tightening up on to subscribers money) from Email can be Customer opt out / opt in – customers highly cost RSS is able to does not governance and through the effective deliver designed expect to compliance is provision of / branded / rich provide any Email can be becoming harder RSS content content data in highly designed - risk of legal then exchange for marketers / branded / action by RSS does not get ability to need to rich content (if customers blocked / filtered subscribe to provide a HTML version) out so that Important/critical RSS (this will proposition important/critical Viral content / change – compelling / content is sure to (marketing) messages can get early valuable be ‘delivered’. effects well lost/blocked in websites enough for were free- known fog of spam Not just email- customers to to-view, type content can do so Email drives Spoof emails many are
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sales creating be provided by now require Marketers environment of RSS registration) have Email can be confusion / opportunity to to easy distrust about RSS content can Little innovate in to forward email be accessed evidence to provision of through many show RSS personalized Widespread use Total number of devices feeds drive single RSS and knowledge emails being sent sales, but feed of email is not sustainable RSS customer use early signs (products) (i.e. number of is growing are good Marketers emails sent out should RSS awareness by per year as a RSS reader is consider software ratio to the one more providing an developers is number of application RSS option on increasing, more recipients and to download current emails RSS integration numbers of and one and ease of use) emails received) more user RSS tracking interface to metrics need Strong evidence learn to be defined of ‘viral’ by marketing (marketing) industry (so effects marketers can RSS aggregation clearly becoming compare & common portal contrast feature against standard email metrics)
Email as a sales driver has had dramatic success over the years...the debate should move away from RSS v Email and move to how RSS can compliment email marketing. Email is here and ain’t going away, at least in the short-to- medium term)
Perspective Email Positive Email Negative RSS Positive RSS General Negative
Customer Once opted Email is intrusive RSS is not RSS is Customers out, not – that is why opt intrusive trackable – want choice of bothered again out rates (for potential medium (theoretically) irrelevant RSS subscriptions privacy (email, web, communications) can be easily concerns RSS, DM, IM, Email content is on the up stopped etc), can be highly RSS reader is
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relevant Email is trackable RSS (through one more frequency, (open rates, CTR, topic channels) application content Emails can be etc) down to gives easy access to download relevancy blocked to individual level – to highly relevant and one some degree potential privacy content, and lots more user Customers concerns of it interface to expect Increased learn content for power to Email inbox RSS subscription free, without customers to content is mostly process usually providing data report highly irrelevant requires no or money), spammers provision of but may be though Email additional PII willing to do increased subscription often data (including so if the regulation of requires the email) proposition opt out / opt in provision of has real value laws additional PII RSS content can data be designed / Increased branded rich power to Important/critical (although this customers to can get may be seen as a report lost/blocked in negative) spammers fog of spam though RSS channels can increased Spoof emails be managed, regulation of creating ensuring opt out / opt in environment of important/critical laws confusion / doesn’t get distrust about lost/blocked in Email can be email fog of spam to easy to forward Number of emails RSS is efficient - is increasing – not enables much Email can enough time (nor larger amounts of be easy to inclination) to content to be add/edit/delet open and read all viewed from e then forward more sources Email address Email can be obtained by RSS content can highly designed marketer, and be accessed / branded / once given can through many rich content (if never (or hard to) devices HTML version) be retrieved RSS content being Email can be provided by more filtered, sorted, and more and archived ‘providers’
RSS content can be more trusted (e.g. harder to phish)
RSS can be to easy to forward via email (standard feature in most readers)
RSS can be easy to add/edit/delete then forward via
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RSS can be filtered, sorted, and archived
RSS integration and add-ins into existing products is increasing (e.g. Outlook)
Should You Just Stop Using E-mail?
Is RSS really the solution to all of our problems?
Just throwing a quick glimpse at the E-mail VS RSS comparison matrix will tell you that these two channels are simply different, but not a replacement for one another.
By no means should you stop using e-mail. Rather enhance the power of your marketing with RSS. Understanding The Relations Between RSS, E-mail, E-zines and Blogs
The final stage in understanding how RSS works is actually understanding its practical relationship with e-mail, e-zines and blogs.
This is where most marketers get it wrong.
How What
RSS Blogs RSS is a content delivery channel that Blogs are a special type of online media, allows you to deliver content to those essentially simple websites with that subscribe to it by adding your RSS opinionated content linearly listed in a feed to their RSS Reader or by adding it chronological order. to their database of RSS sources.
E-mail E-zines E-mail is a content delivery channel that E-zines are a special type of online allows you to deliver content to those media, usually a selection of different that subscribe to it by giving you their content types presented in an online e-mail addresses. "magazine" format and in a more complex non-linear structure.
Let’s set the record straight in the simplest possible terms.
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Blogs and e-zines or newsletters are "the what" --- what you publish online ... the content creation side.
RSS and e-mail are "the how" --- how you get that content or information to the reader ... the content delivery side.
Comparing Apples and Oranges
The most common misconception is comparing blogs and e-mail, with many bloggers actually touting blogs as a replacement for e-mail. The truth is, there’s no comparison at all, just like comparing apples and oranges. Blogs are a type of online media, while RSS is a content delivery channels that enables the delivery of content from the content publisher to the content consumer.
The second misconception is believing that RSS and blogs are somehow strongly related or even that RSS is good only for delivering blog content. Yes, blogs and RSS are both linearly structured and often chronologically ordered, but that's about it as far as resemblances go.
RSS/e-mail and blogs/e-zines cannot be directly compared. Blog content and e-zine content can both be delivered via RSS and e-mail, and there is no direct business or logical relation between blogs and RSS.
Comparing E-zines and Blogs
What does make sense is comparing e-zines and blogs.
Blogs are "personal" conversations, opinions and news, delivered in a linear structure, usually written in a more personal style and limited to a specific content type (news, opinions, commentary …).
E-zines on the other hand are more similar to magazines or newspapers, carrying content presented in a complex non-linear content structure, and having the ability to carry many different content types that do not mix well together if provided through a linear content structure.
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Linear and chronologically ordered content structure of a blog
Screenshot: The Micro Persuasion blog, demonstrating the linear and chronologically ordered blog content structure
A typical e-zine might include:
• an editorial;
• a leading article, representing the prevailing topic of a specific e-zine issue;
• supporting articles, clearly structured to show they are secondary to the leading article;
• links to the most relevant forum topics and posts;
• a news section;
• different advertisements (banner ads, textual ads, advertorials etc.);
• a Q&A section;
• a featured whitepaper;
• latest blog entries;
• etc.
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E-zine issue table of contents (article summaries Letter from follow below the Editor
Sponsored advertiseme
…
Latest Forum / Q&A
Sponsored advertiseme
Screenshot: The Marketing Profs Today e-zine, demonstrating the complex e-zine structure
Providing all of this content demands a complex content structure.
The blog format simply does not provide the level of structure needed to effectively present such a complex content mix.
But that's not to say that blogs are in any way inferior to e-zines, they're just different.
And businesses need both, and they need to deliver both via RSS and e-mail.
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The Important Points to Remember
• Blogs and e-zines are a type of online media, essentially "the what" you publish.
• RSS and e-mail are content delivery channels, essentially "the how" you publish.
• E-zines can be delivered via both RSS and e-mail.
• Blog content can be delivered via both RSS and e-mail.
What Kind of Content Can You Publish via RSS? … Or How RSS Isn't Just About Delivering Blog Content and Getting News From The New York Times
By now we established that RSS can deliver almost any kind of content, and by no means just your latest blog posts.
Just to give you a quick taste of exactly what "any kind of content" really means here's just a short list of the different things you can deliver via RSS.
• MarketingVOX is using RSS to deliver internet marketing news to their readers as it becomes available. Instead of having to wait to receive all the news in a single e-mail newsletter, RSS users get them as soon as they are ready.
• Amazon.com is using RSS to announce their bestsellers and to help their users keep track of releases they are most interested in.
• Some affiliate managers already communicate with their affiliates using RSS.
• FindSavings.com uses RSS to deliver savings coupons and related information.
• Lockergnome uses RSS to provide visitors with the latest downloads and relevant software. Yet again other companies are using RSS to deliver product updates and patches directly to their customers, just as they become available.
• Thousands of content publishers are using RSS to deliver audio content, such as .mp3 interviews and even "radio" shows.
• Textamerica.com allows people to post pictures, videos & text from their mobile phones and then make this content available via RSS feeds.
• Other companies are using RSS to deliver whitepapers and other educational content.
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• One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation.
• Many internet publishers are using RSS to deliver their newsletters, as a supplement to their e-mail delivery.
• Publish living digital catalogs of your products and provide your customers with your latest product releases, broken down by the categories they're interested in, and make it easy for them to order.
• Provide your affiliates and marketing partners with RSS feeds they can promote to their visitors to better promote your products and still make a commission. Amazon.com is already doing it. When are you starting?
• Create RSS autoresponders with scheduled messages, to keep in constant "marketing" contact with your prospects and slowly get them to the point of purchase.
• Provide limited-access content to your customers, employees, team members and even investors, without fearing other unwanted eyes. Use RSS for internal communications, team working and other needs.
• Provide your customers with easy access to software updates, delivered to them exactly as they become available, without the fuss of having to visit your web site or deal with huge e-mail attachments, which would get blocked by spam filters anyway.
• News reporters are constantly bombarded with e-mail, so why not instead deliver your press releases via RSS? Or even better yet, why not deliver some of your releases as video comments, interviews or statements from your company managers or owners?
The Only Limit: Linear Structure
The one thing that all of these examples have in common is that each individual piece of content is delivered in a linear list in the RSS feed.
And that is also about the only limit to what you can do with RSS.
Seeing the Technical Side of RSS From the Business Perspective
To make the best possible use of a tool we sometimes need to actually know how the tool works.
We won't bore you with all the technical details, but with just enough to help you understand this channel somewhat better and put it to better use for your business.
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What's the Whole Deal With RSS and XML?
Imagine a standard business document, such as a contract.
The contract will have some standard sections, such as precise information about the parties involved (company name, address etc.), the contract clauses and so on.
In essence, it's a structured document with predefined sections.
Now imagine that in order for a company to be able to read or use your contract, it would have to follow the exact structure prescribed by that company.
For example your company name (ABC Inc.) would always have to be in a specific location of the document, as well as all the other specific pieces of information defining the contract.
Furthermore, the company name (ABC Inc.) and these other pieces of information would have to be marked Screenshot: If you really need to see this just yet, this is what an with a special marker, for example RSS structure looks like saying Company name, just so that whoever's reading the contract would know exactly what piece of information actually represents your company name.
Like this: Company name: ABC Inc.
And so on …
Well, this is what XML does.
XML is a special computer language that is used for documents containing structured information. Each specific type of information is marked in a special way, so that other applications using XML know exactly what each piece of information means and how to use it.
XML has become such a widespread standard that XML documents can be easily used throughout the web and the computer world for many purposes of sharing and using information. The real power of XML is that really anyone can define certain rules (such as the document structure, different markers and what they mean, what kind of information can be contained within them etc.) and create a new type of XML document, which can then be read by applications that know and understand these rules.
RSS is one of such XML document types.
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• RSS feeds are structured documents with a precise set of rules for what role each content element plays in the document.
• RSS Readers are designed to follow these rules, thus making it possible for them to interpret what role each content element plays.
• By being able to interpret different content element roles RSS Readers are easily able to display this content to the end-user.
RSS is XML with a specific set of rules, designed especially for RSS. Don't Care About Different RSS Versions
Well, in reality, there's more than just one version of RSS.
But there's really nothing for you to care about. The real standard right now, and it seems it will keep as a standard for many years from now, is RSS 2.0, and that's the one you should use.
Another similar format is Atom, but it's not nearly as widespread as RSS, so again another thing not to worry yourself about.
If you're wondering, everything from this point on will be about RSS 2.0 and may not apply to other RSS versions. How RSS Feeds Are Structured and What It Means For You?
An RSS feed contains the basic information about the RSS feed itself and the actual content items that carry the information you want to deliver to your target audiences.
When you start reading about all of the different elements in the RSS feed needed to actually get your content across to your audiences you might even get the feeling that this is all so very complicated that you'd just rather skip it all.
Don't worry, publishing RSS feeds is easy and simple.
Today you can choose from dozens of different applications and services, many of them free, that will do all the techie work for you, leaving you only to play with your content … the thing that really matters in your marketing.
But it's still good for you to know at least the basics, since this will help you better craft your content to achieve maximum marketing impact and at the same time help you understand what RSS is capable of doing for your business.
It will also tell you what you especially need to pay attention to, to get the most from RSS marketing.
If you're a developer that actually wants to develop this stuff by himself, then use this e-book as a guideline for what can actually be done, but consult in-depth tech manuals to actually see how to do it technically.
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RSS Feed Elements
RSS feed elements describe the RSS feed.
Each element encloses the actual descriptionary information, just like an HTML tag:
The most important elements are:
• RSS feed title
• RSS feed description
• RSS feed logo
• The URL of the website that provides the RSS feed
The reason you need to know all of this is not just because "it's good to know what your RSS publishing solution will generate for you in the RSS feed", but because properly using all of these will increase the results you'll be getting from your RSS marketing.
For example, properly writing your feed title and description will help you with getting better feed placement in the search engines for your most important keywords.
Including your logo in your feed will help differentiating your feed from other RSS publishers, giving you a better chance that it will actually be read, plus provide some additional branding for your business.
And so on …
Here's a full list of RSS feed elements and how you need to use them. We won't go into the technical details, just how to use them properly.
Table: List of RSS Feed Elements [the full and official specification can be found at the Technology at Harvard Law website]
Element [mandatory] Description and Use
title The name of the RSS feed, which will be displayed in the RSS Reader when someone accesses your feed, as well as the search engines and so on.
You need to craft your title so that it stands out among other feeds in your subscribers' RSS Readers and attracts them, and is at the same time rich with your most important keywords to assure you achieve better search engine placement for your feeds.
53 [Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing link The URL to the website that publishes the RSS feed.
At least this is the standard way to do it.
If you wanted you could, instead of using the URL to your website, use this element to enter your e-mail address or even a link to your FTP site. description A short sentence that describes the RSS feed. Just as with the title element, the description needs to attract your target audiences (in many RSS Readers the description is displayed just below the feed title) and at the same time assure better placement within the search engines.
So keep it user-attractive, conveying the main content points covered in your feed and the key benefits for your readers, as well as search-engine-friendly, with your most important keywords.
Element Description and Use [non mandatory, but important] copyright The copyright notice for your RSS feed, stating who the RSS feed content belongs to and may also include the license under which you are syndicating this RSS feed.
For example, if you wanted to let other publishers know they can in-part republish your content under special circumstances, you would use the appropriate copyright license notice.
Certainly something you need to address, especially if you want your RSS feeds to generate more traffic for you by allowing other websites to publish your summaries via your RSS feeds and provide backlinks to your site. pubDate The date and time when the content items in the feed have been published. Some RSS Readers will display this information next to the content items, and many will only display the content items in the last couple of days, so the pubDate element certainly is important. lastBuildDate The last time the content in the RSS feed changed. While pubDate tells the RSS Readers when new content items have been added, the lastBuildDate tells them when actual content of the content items changed. category In the category element you can enter the topic or topics covered in your RSS feed. This is a way to tag your RSS feed so
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that specialized RSS-powered search engines and directories will find it easier to find if someone searches for your topic.
So again, use your most important keywords, naturally those that people are using the most in the search engines, related to your business, and the keywords that are best at converting your visitors into customers.
In other instances, the category element may be used to link an RSS feed to a "cataloging" system. image The image element is used to display your logo on the RSS feed presentation in RSS Readers. The default width for the logo is 88 pix and the maximum width is 144 pix. Default image height is 31 pix and the maximum height is 400 pix
Including your logo in your feed will make your feed more memorable for your subscribers, thus helping you increase actual readership, as well as provide additional branding for your business.
Element Description and Use [non mandatory and less important] generator The name of the software used to generate the RSS feed. docs A link to information about the RSS 2.0 specification. cloud In some cases your RSS feed might include very time sensitive information, such as stock market updates, financial updates or basically any kind of information that is of a sensitive nature to a market that wants to receive that information directly as it becomes available, not an hour later for example.
But most RSS Readers will only fetch an RSS feed on a certain period, but never every second, because it's just consumes too many resources for the RSS Reader (server) and the provider of the RSS feed.
In such cases the cloud element can be used. The actual information that a publisher posts within the cloud element is used to notify the RSS Reader of changes made, so that the RSS Reader may then fetch the content as soon as it becomes available.
The actual implementation is not as simple, but any good programmer should be able to handle it, as long as you specify that your information needs to reach the recipient as soon as
55 [Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing
it is published.
For you the important thing to know is that this can actually be done, but the final implementation will depend on who you're sending the information to, the RSS Reader and your specific case. ttl ttl means "time to live" and defines the number of minutes RSS Readers can keep the RSS feed cached (keeping the content from the feed in their RSS feed) before refreshing it from the RSS feed.
For example, if information in your feed is time sensitive and changes very frequently, you would use this element to tell the RSS Reader when it needs to refresh the content to make sure that it's presenting the latest content to its user or users.
This is usually used by aggregation services that provide content from RSS feeds to multiple internet users. rating You would use this element if you wanted to mark this feed for parental guidance or even as a private feed. textinput This element could be used to display an input box in your RSS feed, which could for example be used as a search box. But since most RSS Readers ignore it it's not really worth using. skipHours This element could suggest to the RSS Reader which hours it doesn't have to fetch your RSS feed to check for new content. Can help with server bandwidth consumption problems, if the RSS Readers used by your subscribers actually pay attention to the element. skipDays This element could suggest to the RSS Reader which days it doesn't have to fetch your RSS feed to check for new content. Can help with server bandwidth consumption problems, if the RSS Readers used by your subscribers actually pay attention to the element. language The principal language in which the content in the RSS feed is available. Is useful for search engines, directories and aggregation sites that allow their users to search for feeds in specific languages or cloud feeds in specific languages together. managingEditor The e-mail address of the RSS feed editor. webMaster The e-mail address of the person responsible for technical
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issues.
RSS Content Item Elements
While the RSS feed elements define and describe an RSS feed on the level of the entire feed, individual content item elements describe and carry the actual information you want to deliver to your audiences.
And if there's any question about it, RSS content items are contained within an RSS feed.
As we already explained, content items are essentially individual stories you are delivering to your audiences. They can contain anything from news, product information, articles to songs, images, stock quotes and almost anything else you can imagine.
Each content item may then contain some or all of the elements that describe that content item and provide information. None of these elements are mandatory, but each content item must include at least one.
Table: List of RSS Content Item Elements [the full and official specification can be found at the Technology at Harvard Law website]
Element Description and Use
title The title of the specific content item that is of course displayed in the RSS Reader and everywhere else where your content appears.
Your content item titles are one of the most important things in your RSS feed, determining whether your readers will actually read the rest of the content or whether the search engines will rank it high enough for you.
Just think of the title as an e-mail message subject line and webpage title in one.
The e-mail subject line is what makes your recipient decide whether he's going to read the entire message or not. You need to keep it to the point and give just enough information to make it inviting to read on.
The webpage title has much weight with the search engines, helping you get higher rankings for your content for the keywords you're trying to optimize your webpage for.
The RSS content item title performs both of these functions for you at the same time.
57 [Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing link The URL pointing to a webpage on your website where the user can read the entire content of the content item, if you're publishing your RSS feeds in summary format. A "read more" type of destination.
If you're publishing your feeds in full-text format the link can serve for archiving purposes, for example if your customers would either want to click through to your site and then bookmark your content in their internet browser.
Of course, if you don't want to provide a backlink to your site, you don't have to, as the link element is optional. This could come useful if you're using your RSS feed merely as a direct communicational channel to send a quick message to your customers or anyone else, without also providing that content on your website.
But since most RSS users actually expect to be able to click through it's highly recommended that you always provide the link. description This is where the actual body content of the information you're trying to deliver comes in … the actual story you're trying to tell.
The description element can either be a short summary, or can contain full-text content of the story, with images and almost everything else (there are some restrictions).
Depending on who you ask, some will say that summary feeds are better, while others will vouch their head for full-text feeds. What you decide for actually depends completely on your business model and what you are trying to achieve with RSS. In short, there are no rules. Example of what works better in what case will be provided later on in the e-book.
Also, you might not even need a description.
• If you just want to deliver headlines of your latest content and have people click through to your site to find out more you could easily do that. This would usually be useful for syndicating your content to other websites, if you didn't want them to publish anything else but your headline.
• Or the content you are delivering might not even need a description. For example you could create an RSS feed with the latest stock-market updates where the update would be quickly delivered just using the title element. More on this in later chapters.
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What you do need to know right now is what kind of content can actually be included if you decide for full-text content.
For starters, if you do it right, standard text formatting, such as bolding, works just fine in most RSS Readers, although some may even ignore that. Links within the content and images are also not a problem, although again, some RSS Readers might just ignore them.
But still, most of the new ones won't, so adding some flavor to your full-text content should not be a problem.
If you want to go even further, even tables in content should work in most cases, actually enabling you to post a full e-zine issue right inside of a single RSS feed content item.
The worst problem is that different RSS Readers will display this content in different ways, some even not displaying tables at all.
And finally, if you want to syndicate your content to other websites, they might just want a summary instead of full-text content, so you might need to prepare a summary version of the feed as well.
These issues will be covered further on in the e-book. enclosure This is one of the most important things you need to know about RSS --- the enclosure element ---because it opens a whole new field of marketing and communications opportunities for you online.
Podcasting, a huge hit lately, is all about getting your audio content (interviews, radio show, audio press releases, customer updates etc.) delivered directly to your target audiences using RSS.
Videocasting, the next big hit, is about doing the same with video files.
And then there's also the opportunity to deliver PowerPoint presentations, PDF files and other file types you want to deliver.
All of this is made possible with the enclosure element.
The enclosure element contains a link and other descriptionary information about a file you want to attach to an RSS content item.
For example, if you wanted to deliver an audio message to your customers using RSS, you could briefly describe the
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message in the description of the content item and then also provide the actual file.
The important thing to know is that the file isn't really appended to the content item, but just a link to the file residing on your web server.
Some RSS Readers will only allow you to use the file once clicking on it. But development is currently moving in the direction where you could setup your RSS Reader in such a way that it downloads the file automatically once the Reader fetches the feed or only at certain times of the day, for example when you're not using the internet and don't need your internet bandwidth.
The whole point here is that now you finally have an easy way to deliver your files to your target audiences, without having to worry about attachment sizes and filters, such as with e- mail. category The category element is used for tagging purposes, making it easier for the search engines and directories to classify your individual content items and make them more findable within the topics you're covering with the specific item. Certainly something to use to boost your online visibility. comments If you allow your visitors to post comments to your content, like most bloggers for example do, you would use the comments element to direct your readers to the comments page for this content item. author You may include an e-mail address of the author of this specific content item. Especially useful if more than one author is providing content for your feed. guid guid stands for globally unique identifier and helps RSS Readers determine whether this is a new content item that they haven't previously downloaded or indexed. pubDate The date and time the content item was published. source The source element contains the title of the RSS feed and the link to it. If someone displayed just one content item from your feed, they could use this element to let their users know what source the content item came from.
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The Final Product
Let's now take a quick look at an example of an RSS feed code, just so that you get a better impression of how all of this looks when put into action (well, how all of this looks to the RSS Reader anyway).
http://www.website.com
http://www.website.com/content_item_title.php
Summary or full-text body content of the content item.
All of this should give you a good idea of the extent of what you can publish with RSS Æ essentially anything you can put into a linear list. Extending What RSS Has to Offer For Your Business
We're now almost done with the pure technical side of RSS.
What you also need to know is that the RSS 2.0 specification is set in stone. It can never be changed. Never. It is as it is.
But it still allows developers and businesses to add new functionalities to RSS, which are not part of the specification. The simple rule is that these extensions must be defined in a special way (namespaces), so that RSS Readers that do not support the new extensions can easily ignore them and still correctly display the feed, just without the added features made possible by the extension.
As a business person you need to know this for two reasons:
• Some extensions that are already available may help you get even more from RSS, depending on what you want to do with it.
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• You may also develop your own extensions, if they aren't already available and RSS doesn't do what you want it to do. The problem is that the RSS Readers that will be used by your target audiences will also have to support your extensions if they want to take advantage of the added functionalities. If you just want to extend RSS in a closed environment (such as your company) where you can actually prescribe what RSS Readers are used (like one developed by you in-house), this won't be a problem. If you want this extension to be picked up by the outside world as well you better be big enough and have enough clout to actually get the RSS Readers to support you. Not an easy thing to do of course.
Popular and Business-Relevant RSS Extensions
Here's a list of existing more popular and useful business-relevant RSS extensions you can decide to use for your RSS marketing, just so you know what's already available.
• Simple List Extensions Imagine that your RSS feed contains your latest products, where each individual content item represents and individual product. Using the Simple List Extensions you could enable your subscribers to sort different products in the feed (when displaying the feed in an RSS Reader) using the sorting parameters you define, such as sort by price, sort by recency, sort by popularity, sort by discount value and so on; and to group certain products together, for example group by product category.
• iTunes The iTunes extension will allow you to add certain information to your RSS feed that is required by iTunes to have your podcasts listed in the Apple iTunes Music Store. If you're podcasting and want to promote your podcasts to mass audiences, this is a must.
• Media RSS The Media RSS extension adds additional descriptionary information to media files carried in content items, useful for syndicating rich-media content via RSS to other websites, such as Yahoo, to achieve better online visibility for your content.
• blogChannel The blogChannel extension was designed to further enrich the content provided by an RSS feed to also include a link to a file (OPML) with related RSS feed URLs providing information on this topic; a link to a file (OPML) with the links to RSS feeds that the publisher of the feed subscribes to (helping his subscribers find more useful information, based on what he is subscribing to); the URL of the publisher's website being promoted by this RSS feed; and the URL of another RSS feed containing only the changes to the website. Useful if you want to provide additional resources on the topic to your subscribers. This was originally created for the purpose of blogs, but can also be used for standard websites.
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• creativeCommons Creative Commons license is a special way to copyright your content, giving other publishers permission to use your content, as long as they adhere to some basic rules, such as citing the source and so on. This extension simply lets them know that you are licensing your content under these rules. Very useful if you want your content to be syndicated to other websites.
• Google Base Google Base is quite a popular and huge "classifieds ads" directory by Google, where anyone can post basically anything, such as real estate ads, movie ads, people profiles, news and articles, mobile content, wanted ads, job ads, reviews and so on Æ really anything. Google allows you to post these in bulk using RSS, but you need to use their Google Base RSS extension, which gives detailed information about the content you're posting there, so that Google Base may properly classify it in the directory. An additional way of boosting your online visibility.
• GeoRSS The GeoRSS extension allows you to add geographic information to your content items, such as the geographical latitude and longitude that the content item refers to. For an example of this imagine doing an RSS feed on birdwatching, where you describe each bird you see and even provide a video of the bird, and then add geographical data on where you actually saw the bird. RSS Readers that can decipher this information will then be able to easily display it to their users, for example on a dynamic map. This can be useful for a wide variety of purposes, such as store locations, user support locations, and so on.
• TrackBack The TrackBack extension doesn't really have that much support, but certainly has the right idea. You would use this extension to add an URL to a special file on your web server, which can accept automatic notifications when your content has been syndicated to other websites, letting you know that someone else picked up your content.
• Dublin Core The Dublin Core extension is a popular way of adding additional descriptionary (meta) information to your RSS feed and content items, such as content genre, additional author information, intended audience and so on. Almost anything you can think of. A useful way of further classifying your information.
If you are interested in more RSS extensions a comprehensive list is available at rss- extensions.org.
Know! - The Key Points to Remember
63 [Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing
What is RSS?
• RSS is an amazingly simple technology that allows you to easily get your new online content updates delivered to your subscribers, other websites, specialized search engines and directories and other online systems.
• RSS can deliver almost any type of content you can imagine, from news and articles to product information.
• Publishing an RSS feed is extremely easy and can also be done for free.
• RSS is a communicational channel you can use to communicate with all of your target audiences, including your prospects, customers, employees, investors, journalists, bloggers and so on.
How RSS Works?
• RSS content is delivered via RSS feeds, which contain the actual content in the form of individual content items. Each individual content item is an individual "story". These content items or stories are linearly listed in the RSS feed. RSS content always comes in a linear list.
• In order to read your RSS content and subscribe to it, end-users need an RSS Reader, sometimes also called an RSS Aggregator. RSS Readers can be in the form of web-based services, desktop applications or integrated into internet browsers or e-mail clients.
RSS as the Ultimate Opt-in Model
• RSS is the ultimate opt-in model Æ internet end-users need to pro actively subscribe to your RSS feeds to receive your content, and unsubscribing is as easy as a two-click operation. You cannot deliver your content via RSS to anyone that isn't subscribed to it. RSS demands more relevance than e-mail from the marketer. It's also raising the bar in terms of what consumers expect from marketers even beyond RSS.
• RSS puts consumers back into control.
• Since it's so easy to unsubscribe and since you cannot deliver any content to anyone that isn't subscribed, you need to become more relevant to what your audiences want. If you stop being relevant they will unsubscribe. But if you can stay relevant, this is good news Æ less other content sources to complete with, and no spammers to compete with for the attention of your subscribers.
• No one that subscribes to an RSS feed gives the publisher anything, such as their e-mail addresses.
• An RSS subscription basically only means that the content consumer has added the RSS feed to his RSS feed list. To receive new content from the publisher he needs to retrieve the content from that feed, which is done automatically.
• Again! The publisher cannot send any information via RSS to anyone that isn't
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subscribed to his RSS feed.
Comparing RSS and E-mail
• An RSS feed essentially functions in a similar way to an e-mail list, serving you as a pool of your subscribers. In the case of RSS your pool of RSS subscriptions becomes some sort of "list".
• RSS it not a replacement for e-mail, but rather a supplement. You should use both.
Comparing RSS, E-mail, Blogs and E-zines
• Blogs and e-zines are a type of online media, essentially "the what" you publish.
• RSS and e-mail are content delivery channels, essentially "the how" you publish.
• E-zines can be delivered via both RSS and e-mail.
• Blog content can be delivered via both RSS and e-mail.
Who Uses RSS?
• RSS is used by approximately 31% of the U.S. online population, according to Yahoo. Most of them don't even know they're using RSS.
• Internet users love RSS because it makes their online content consumption easier and also improves their lives, for example by getting customized up-to-date new jobs information directly to their desktops or even their mobile phones.
The Technical Side of RSS
• Appropriate use of the RSS file structure will help you increase your RSS marketing success.
• RSS content can be in summary format or full-text format, and can even carry additional files, such as audio or video files.
• The RSS 2.0 specification is set in stone, but you can still extend the RSS functionality for special purposes. A number of extensions are already available, for example an extension that allows RSS users to easily sort and group products in feeds that offer product information, or extensions that allow your podcasts to be published in the Apple iTunes Music Store.
Know! - Your Action Plan
65 [Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing
1. Become an RSS End-User Get an RSS Reader of your choice, get to know it and become a regular RSS end- user yourself. This is the only way you will really understand how RSS works.
2. Start Subscribing to RSS Feeds Visit your favorite websites and actively search for their RSS feeds, then start subscribing to them.
3. Test Different RSS Readers and Their RSS Subscription and Unsubscription Processes It's highly recommended that you test all the different types of RSS Readers to see how content from different feeds is displayed in them and how their subscription and unsubscription process really works. This is the only way you will be able to understand how it all works from the end-user perspective, how they are going to interact with your content, how your content will be placed in relation to other RSS feeds in the RSS Readers and how your subscribers will actually be subscribing and unsubscribing from your content.
4. Compare RSS and E-mail and Consider Your Relevance Take a few minutes to really compare how RSS works with how e-mail works from the end-user perspective. This will help you to adopt a different viewpoint of how your content strategy may need to change to keep your future RSS subscribers happy with your RSS feeds. This is also a good time to consider how you can make your content even more relevant to your target audiences' needs.
5. Understand the Technical Side of Things Really take the time needed to better understand the technical side of RSS, especially how it is structured and what kind of information can be delivered through its different elements. Which may be important for your business?
6. Consider Your RSS Opportunity Take all of the knowledge you gained from this chapter to consider what types of information you will be able to deliver via RSS, from your news to your customer updates and employee communications. Also consider whether the various RSS extensions can in any way be relevant to your business to help you get more from RSS.
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II. Understand! The Business Case for RSS
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For marketers, the only real question about RSS marketing should be: "How can it help me generate more profits?"
This goes for public relations professionals, direct marketers, online publishers, e- commerce professionals, marketing managers and directors, brand managers, online promotion specialists and the list goes on and on …
No matter what kind of marketer you are, and we do use marketer in the broadest meaning of the word, you need to understand exactly how to make RSS profitable for you and your company.
Or as many cutting-edge explorers would put it: "How to monetize RSS?"
Start debating this question with other marketers and online professionals and you're sure to come across many different opinions, most either pro-RSS monetization or direct con-RSS monetization.
The fact of the matter is that RSS in fact does bring monetization to the table … but probably somewhat differently than most imagine.
Why RSS Really Matters for Marketers: The Business Case for RSS
The Truth About Monetizing RSS
Yes, RSS can be monetized.
But in most cases, unless you're an ad supported online publisher or an RSS vendor, monetization only comes indirectly.
The truth about monetizing RSS is that RSS won't make you rich, at least not directly.
RSS is not a strategy. RSS won't save your business. RSS isn't something you can sell or directly monetize.
And RSS is not a business model you could just take to the bank. It's not a business model at all and it's not even meant to work as a business model.
Direct monetization comes from your overall business and marketing strategy.
But if the business and marketing strategy just aren't there, they won't be there with RSS either.
Or in other words - if your marketing strategy doesn't work, it won't work with RSS either.
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But why then care about RSS at all? If it's not a business model or a marketing strategy, and if can't be directly monetized, what use is there for it in the world of marketing?
The Real "Secret" to Monetizing RSS
Quite simply put, RSS is a marketing tool just like any other marketing tool.
If your marketing strategy doesn't work, no marketing tool will save it. It's the same with RSS. It's just a tool.
But what RSS will do is help you increase your marketing effectiveness and marketing impact across the board, across all of your different marketing functions.
It will help you take your existing marketing strategy and then work on that strategy to enhance it with new marketing opportunities to deliver your content and even expand the strategy.
It will help you generate more revenues and profits, by helping you market and communicate more efficiently. From increasing your traffic and getting more of your content delivered to internet end-users, to improving your business intelligence processes and internal communications. And if you're in the ad space sales business, it will help you sell more by providing you with additional ad venues to sell to advertisers.
This is where the real secret to monetizing RSS really lies. It's about using RSS as a marketing tool, in conjunction with your existing or perhaps upgraded marketing strategy.
It's all about indirect monetization.
Discover the Business Case for RSS
And even though RSS is not a business model on its own, there is a strong business case for its use in marketing.
Indirect monetization and the business case for RSS are all about:
1. Conducting your market research and business intelligence faster, cheaper and more comprehensively than ever before. Business intelligence, if done correctly, and then acted upon quickly enough, is itself a powerful source of monetization. RSS just makes it a lot easier, cheaper and quicker to do.
2. Getting more online traffic. Turn them into subscribers, followers, customers, peers or friends. But without getting them first, all the rest is impossible. RSS won't become the largest source of your online traffic, but it will become an important source, especially from online sources that you're not reaching right now.
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3. Keeping your traffic and winning repetitive attention from your visitors, as well as the search and news engines. Once you get traffic, you need to keep it, and you need to make them come back for more as often as possible … at least if monetizing your efforts is your plan. Here, content is the name of the game. RSS will help you get more relevant content for your website, without you actually having to write it. It can in fact help you become the preferred source of information in your industry …
4. Getting your content delivered to your subscribers without fail, at least to those that are subscribed and keep being subscribed after you've sent them a few messages. Naturally, getting your messages, whatever they may be, delivered to your audiences is crucial. If you can't deliver, how can you communicate? If you can't communicate, how can you influence and sell? If you can't sell, how can you generate revenues? RSS will help you generate subscribers and will make sure that your content actually reaches them.
5. Better interact with your audiences. You have an audience, or are at least communicating with it, even if through other websites. Now, RSS will help you better interact with these audiences, through both RSS-powered online conversations and branded RSS Readers that will even further help you increase your pull with your audiences.
6. And finally, RSS will also help you monetize your traffic and content. If your business model is about ad sales, RSS will help you by providing you with more ad venues. If your business model is about selling content, RSS is a new channel that you can sell that content through. And if it's about product sales, RSS will help you sell your products directly to your audiences.
RSS and Your Marketing Flow
These six steps can quite easily be viewed as a general marketing flow that helps you get from market needs and situations to direct revenues, regardless of your marketing function, through a series of steps.
You may not need all the six steps, but at least most of them apply to almost any business on the planet and almost any marketing function, whether you're a PR pro, direct marketer, online publisher, online promotions specialist or webmaster.
And the best part Æ all of the six steps are easy to implement, once you know exactly how to do it. They don't require any large investments, just a little time and some planning.
To easier understand this general marketing flow and how RSS works within the flow, take a look at the following model.
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Conduct Generate Keep your market more online traffic and get Know what to research say to them to traffic it to come get them to back for more come
Get your visitors to come back by giving them Know what they value want and what they think and do Communicate with your audiences to develop and foster the Monetize your relationship traffic and content
Better interact with your audiences Improve Get your content relationships delivered Turn by better relationships interaction into revenues
To make things even clearer, let's take a look at some quick basic examples of these elements.
Just remember, there is much more to it than what you'll quickly see here, but it's certainly a good way to get you started to better understand how you can take advantage of RSS in real life business.
1. Conduct Market Research
News engines like news.google.com specialize in bringing you the latest news from around the world, and then allowing you to easily set-up keyword searches for the keywords that are relevant to your business.
Let's presume that you're interested in the RSS marketing industry and want to get the latest RSS marketing news as soon as it's made available. In part to keep your website constantly updated with the latest news from the industry. And in part to see what news is generating the most buzz and getting the most news coverage, so that you get ideas on what to write about to attract more people to your website.
Simply go to news.google.com, do a search for "RSS marketing" and then subscribe to the RSS feed for your search with your RSS Reader, to receive RSS marketing news as soon as it's made available through the Google news engine.
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Screenshot: A persistent Google news search for the "RSS marketing" keyword, bringing the latest RSS marketing news to your RSS Reader as soon as it is made available, giving you enough time to react properly; displayed in the Awasu RSS Reader
But there's more to doing business intelligence than just watching for news to publish on your site to attract more visitors.
Sometimes doing business intelligence is also about preventing the negative buzz about your company from growing and growing until it engulfs you and creates an avalanche of negative publicity from the consumers and the media.
The Dell Hell Example
In June 2005 blogger Jeff Jarvis, a relative unknown without any corporate clout, used his blog to complain about poor Dell customer service, not coming true to their promise and basically not lifting a finger to fix the issues pointed out by Jeff.
This single event, then followed by a series of blog posts, created an avalanche of Dell customer dissatisfaction publicity that became known as "Dell Hell". In a short period of time, a relative unknown became a spokesperson for dissatisfied Dell customers and stepped directly into the public spotlight, his story covered not only by the online community but by traditional press as well, expanding the negativity well beyond the online world.
To make a long story short, a study by Response Source that researched the "Dell Hell" incident found that the actions of Jeff Jarvis had a lasting negative impact of Dell's brand and even resulted in decreasing sales for Dell.
The moral of this story is simple: A relative unknown will see your miss-step, publicize it, get attention, rally a group of like-thinkers, bring the story into the spotlight and cause a public backslash against your company.
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But you can prevent this from happening to you --- by listening to the market, detecting dangers and then responding to them adequately.
Listening to the market to prevent such disasters has never been simpler.
For example, blog search engines, such as Technorati, will allow you to search the world of blogs for all the latest topics containing the keywords you're most interested in, such as your company name.
And just like Google News, Technorati will allow you to create a persistent search RSS feed, so that you receive the latest blog posts relating to your interests just as they are published and indexed.
Screenshot: A persistent Technorati blog search for the "Dell Hell" keyword, bringing the latest blog posts with the "Dell Hell" keyword to your RSS Reader as soon as they are published, giving you enough time to react properly; displayed in the Awasu RSS Reader
If Dell's customer service department or PR department setup persistent searches like this, watched them using an RSS Reader and then quickly resolved their issues with Jeff Jarvis, the whole "Dell Hell" story could have been avoided.
And watching all of this would had cost them absolutely nothing.
But you don't have to be Dell to take advantage of the business intelligence uses of RSS.
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Below is a screenshot of another Technorati search, which I received via my RSS Reader, telling me that a blogger was attacking my RSS work … giving me the opportunity to quickly respond via my own website and by commenting on his own blog. I never heard of this blogger before, but Technorati brought his post about me directly to my RSS Reader, simply because I took a couple of seconds to setup a persistent search with my own name and last name as the keywords.
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Screenshot: A persistent Technorati blog search for the "Rok Hrastnik" keyword; displayed in the Awasu RSS Reader
2. Generate More Online Traffic
RSS generates fresh traffic to your website in a number of ways, but let's just take a look at some of the basic ones right now.
Return to the "RSS marketing" Google News keyword search from the previous example, which we are now using to keep track of the latest news about RSS marketing.
By getting the latest news on time we were able to write an attractive new article on our own website, giving further insight into the story that is quickly gaining traction.
The article was also carried in our RSS feed, which has been previously submitted to the top RSS-powered search engines, such as Feedster … meaning that Feedster has also indexed that content and can now make it available to everyone using their search engine and looking for the latest content about RSS marketing.
Anyone searching through Feedster will now find our article, and if the article is interesting enough, click on to our website to get the full-text of the article.
We just generated a new visitor … a visitor we wouldn't have gotten if we did not also carry our content in an RSS feed and submitted the feed to the Feedster search engine.
Screenshot: Feedster search results for the keyword "RSS marketing", displaying the latest articles and news on the topic at the time of the search
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Moving to another example, generating more online traffic using RSS is also about syndicating your content to other web media that covers complimentary or same topics covered by your own website.
For an example, podcasting is about delivering audio content via RSS feeds to those that subscribe to it. Consequently, the topic of marketing with podcasts is closely related to RSS marketing, since podcasting depends on RSS to get delivered.
People interested in marketing with podcasts are highly probably to be interested in RSS marketing as well. The same goes for almost any other topic and its related topics you can think of.
It so only makes sense that we seek out similar websites that cover similar topics (such as in this case marketing with podcasts, if our website is about RSS marketing), and try to get our content published there as well.
RSS enables this kind of syndication and makes it easy for both the website owner and the publisher, that wants to publish his content on third-party websites.
The website owner profits because he gets more content for his visitors, to make his website more interesting, more relevant and stickier, perhaps even turning it into a prime source of information on his topic.
The publisher profits by getting additional exposure for his content and by using other websites to drive traffic to his own website, where he may work on converting that traffic into customers.
Screenshot: Content from the RSS Marketing Diary re-published, via syndication and an RSS feed, on the Podblaze blog
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This type of content syndication or content re-publication on other websites further helps the website owner by making his website more relevant to the search engines.
The reasoning is quite simple: search engines love websites with focused on-topic frequently updated content and will rank them higher than websites that are updated less frequently.
By republishing third-party RSS feeds on his website the website owner is creating a rich and frequently updated cloud of relevant content, making his website more attractive to the search engines.
The same will work for you, helping you increase your traditional search engine traffic, if you re-publish third-party content, via RSS feeds, on your own website.
Screenshot: The BTI Communications Group blog, which relied heavily on republishing third- party content via RSS feeds and so achieved remarkable search engine positions for their key industry terms
This is what Sally Falkow, a respected PR and online strategist, told us about this strategy back in December 2003:
Using RSS Feeds For Marketing And Branding
By Sally Falkow, http://falkow.blogsite.com
The IAB Nielsen/Net ratings report "Internet Search Brand Effectiveness" clearly shows that search results affect an array of brand metrics, including aided brand awareness, unaided brand awareness, brand image association and purchase intent.
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The researchers discovered that when test subjects were asked to name a brand they were 27% more likely to name a brand of a company that received the top spot in the search results, as opposed to the control group who did not see the search engine result page.
As a brand strategist I was extremely pleased to see these results – I had been advocating search results as an online brand building strategy for some time.
When I started blogging in 2003 I used several of the free and low cost blog platforms available. I was told that blogging and RSS feeds would get me increased search visibility, and as I was aware of these studies on the connection between search visibility and brand recognition, I was keen to create a ‘cloud’ of page one search results. But even after almost a year I was not thrilled with the results.
Then I made a connection with DVCO Technology and while I was collaborating with them on a project for online media rooms – www.onlinemediaroom.com - I met Bill French of MyST Technology Partners. Their platform works a little differently and their RSS feeds are set up specifically to create that cloud of content and increase search visibility dramatically.
Applying what I knew about writing content and optimizing content for search results, I started to blog in MyST in August 2003. In just under a month the blog was at #1 and #2 on Google for the term website content strategy.
I also managed to garner several other page one results and found that indeed my brand was getting more and more attention.
In late September I started another blog called Internet Marketing Strategy and set up the RSS feeds on related terms. The purpose was to go after a new set of search terms and get onto page one with those keywords and phrases as well
It is now late December and I have 75 page one positions and 57 #1 positions on terms like
• RSS, blogging and PR
• Optimized Press Releases
• The latest Internet Marketing Strategy
• Content strategy SEM
• Web Content Strategy
• Corporate PR and Branding
• Blogging PR and Marketing
• Internet PR and branding
• Web content is king
• Website content strategy
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My business has trebled in the last six months. I believe it is a combination of my understanding of how to develop good, on message, keyword rich content and the RSS feeds provided by MyST Technology Partners.
BTI Communication Group, Limited
BTI provides business telephone systems. They have been operating for 20 years Although they do traditional phone systems for businesses they have kept abreast of the technology changes.
In 2003 the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market really took off. The technology matured and became a viable option. The market (and the Internet) was flooded with marketing material from big players with big budgets.
A company with a limited budget could have been buried in this avalanche of content online. There is no way they could compete head–to-head with any of the big players like the Bells, Cisco or Avaya.
Using this system of a blog and RSS feeds aggregating and syndicating their content, they have increased their Internet footprint and visibility from zero results on the first three pages for any search term to do with business phone system or VoIP to 120 page one results on terms like
• VoIp solution provider #1 #3
• VoIP small business #5
• VoIP small business phone #7 #8
• VoIP business phone #7 #8
• VoIP benefits #2
• VoIP market demand #1 #2
Even the highly competitive term business phone system, which is competing against 24 million other web pages, is now at #23 on Google and moving up fast.
The RSS feeds have influenced journalists in this space too. As a result of finding their feeds and their blog, two journalists have interviewed BTI executives and clients for influential online newsletters aimed at CIOs and CFOs – BTI’s perfect target audience.
The traffic to their corporate website has increased by 50% and they are starting to get leads from the Internet.
Although this is still in the early stages, and the resulting increase in content and search results has yet to translate into a significant impact on their bottom line, there is no doubt that it has increased their visibility and brand value.
Other companies who are paying to appear on page one for these terms are shelling out over $5.00 a click for these top positions.
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3. Keep Your Traffic and Get it to Come Back for More
You now have your new visitors, but you still need to get them to come back for more … if you want to build a relationship with them and gradually covert them into customers.
One of the tactics to do so is to provide them with the most relevant and constantly updated content pertaining to their interests.
But sometimes your own content production efforts won't be enough. Who has enough time to write new articles and cover industry news every day, especially with a business to run or marketing campaigns to execute?
Or you might want to expand the content you offer to also include the most relevant content from other sources, in some way turning your website into a one- stop-shop for the latest news, resources, articles and tips on your chosen topic.
Just think back to the previous example of republishing syndicated content via RSS feeds to enrich the content of your websites to make the search engines love you more and reward you with higher rankings.
Well, internet users love the same thing as do the traditional search engines: highly relevant and frequently updated content. The same concept applies.
Use third-party syndicated content to enrich your own website and give your visitors more reasons to come back to you more often.
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Screenshot: The Kolabora.com website, covering the latest online collaboration and web conferencing news and other content, using third-party syndicated content to bring their visitors the latest from the world of online conferencing
The previous Podblaze blog example demonstrated a simple way of republishing syndicated RSS content Æ simply republishing an entire RSS feed on a single location.
The Kolabora.com example above goes one step further, aggregating multiple RSS feeds at once, taking from them only the latest news on the topic of online collaboration and web conferencing, and then offering this news to the website visitors, achieving even more relevancy and better update frequency.
4. Get Your Content Delivered
Once you get your visitors you need to establish a constant communicational channel with them Æ you need to get them to subscribe to your content.
RSS will assist you in two distinct ways:
• Not everyone wants to subscribe to even more e-mail newsletters. Most people are already subscribed to more than they can handle. On the other hand, RSS- aware users on the average don't subscribe to more than 6.6 RSS feeds [source: The Yahoo RSS White Paper, October 2005] and are so more receptive to subscribing to new RSS feeds instead of new e-mail newsletters.
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• As you already know, getting e-mail messages delivered and read is getting increasingly difficult due to e-mail spam filters and crowded e-mail inboxes. But RSS will get all of your content delivered, again enabling you to directly communicate with your audiences without fear of your content being stopped by spam filters on the way and without it having to compete with thousands of spam e-mail messages.
Results: What You Can Expect
Lockergnome.com, although serving a more tech savvy audience, is an excellent example of the results you can ultimately hope to achieve using RSS.
Being one of the most popular tech web sites in the world, Lockergnome.com is seeing a ration of 5:1 in favour of the number of RSS subscribers against e-mail subscribers, and the same ration for Click through rates.
They are in fact seeing a 500% better click through ratio with RSS than they did with e-mail, which proves that RSS feeds are not only being "opened", but read as well.
5. Better Interact With Your Audiences
You now have an audience, or are at least communicating with it, even if through other websites.
Now, RSS will help you better interact with these audiences …
The simplest level of interaction is watching what people are saying about your articles and then responding to them via your own website or by commenting directly on their websites, if they allow comments.
This is again where news search engines like Technorati come useful, enabling you to constantly watch, through your RSS Reade,r what people are saying. Someone subscribing to your RSS feed might for example read one of your articles and then comment on it on his own website, and websites like Technorati will tell you about that, so that you may respond and interact immediately.
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Screenshot: A persistent Technorati blog search for the "Rok Hrastnik" keyword; displayed in the Awasu RSS Reader; showing you among other things what people are saying online about the content you are publishing
But comments from your readers don't happen just on their own websites, but also on your own, if you allow them.
RSS makes this whole process even easier for the readers, since they can read the article in their RSS Readers, then click on it and immediately get access to your comments form, if you have it, giving them the opportunity of instant feedback, even directly from their RSS Reader.
You may now also setup your website comments to receive them as an RSS feed in your RSS Reader, making it easier to watch what people are saying about any of your articles on your website and making it easier for you to respond.
And not to mention that by getting your comments via RSS, instead of e-mail, you can at least be certain you won't lose any of them due to spam filters or simply because you accidentally deleted them, mistaking them for spam.
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Screenshot: A blog comment box below a selected article, allowing the user to immediately and easily provide feedback; displayed in the Awasu RSS Reader
And finally, interaction can also be about getting a direct link to your subscribers with a branded RSS Reader, equipped with your brand visuals, your preloaded RSS feeds and other possible features, such as a direct feedback form, polls and similar.
Branded RSS Readers provide marketers with the ultimate level of consumer interaction. If a consumer uses your branding tool to subscribe to and read content from different sources around the world, he is actually interacting with your brand. Not to mention other interactivity features you could pack into a branded RSS Reader …
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Screenshot: The branded MediReader RSS Reader, powered by RSSlVP
6. Monetize Your Traffic and Content
Your final task is monetizing your traffic and your content and generating direct revenues from them.
This is done either by selling ad space in RSS feeds, or more frequently by using your RSS feed to promote your own products and services and facilitate the purchase.
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Screenshot: An ad selling this RSS e-book, positioned directly below an article in an RSS feed; displayed in the Awasu RSS Reader
Taking a Structured View of the Business Case for RSS
All of the short examples we just took a look at were just the tip of the iceberg, there to give you a real-life impression of how specifically RSS will help you increase your marketing results.
It's now time to take a look at all of the details and a more structured view of the business case for RSS, explaining all of the different internet marketing functions RSS powers.
To get a better idea of the whole scope of RSS in marketing, take a look at the following model of the business case for RSS, looking at RSS from the viewpoint of different online marketing goals and invidual benefits that RSS brings to the table.
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Improve Power your Syndicate your your new content content to existing delivery other Get more content opportunities online media attention from delivery the influencers Advertise in RSS Feeds Get your online content delivered to Improve internet Online Visibility and end-users Generate Conduct Generate traffic from RSS market More search and research Traffic content and aggregation business sites intelligence The
Business Generate Case for traffic from traditional search RSS RSS as a Monetize "product" your Win traffic and Attention RSS Radars content by Enhancing Your Web Improve Presence Sell RSS audience Advertising interaction Republish Direct syndicated product content sales
RSS Increase Personal Conversations your Communication visit Branded frequency RSS Readers
Let's take a more detailed look …
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1. The Easy Way to Conduct Market Research and Business Intelligence
Doing market research and business intelligence today is more difficult than ever before, with thousands of new sources of information, news, trends and opinions constantly mushrooming all over the internet.
Blogs make it easy for anyone to have an opinion and voice it to the world … an opinion about your business, your industry, your company, your products, your service, your brand, his likes and dislikes etc. It may be good, it may be bad, it may contain valuable feedback and suggestions on how to improve your business, expand it, make it more profitable and make it better tailored to your audiences. Whichever it is, you need to know what the bloggers are saying.
The same goes for online communities and forums, traditional media online, your competitors with their corporate websites and corporate communications, portals with how-to information and latest news, e-zine publishers and practically just about anyone who uses any online tool to get their message to the public.
You simply need to listen to:
• see what your key audiences are saying about you, in order to learn and react before it's too late to fix a bad situation or too late to act on a new business opportunity to improve your business;
• discover key trends as they are emerging, enabling you to act on them;
• detect key industry issues to take advantage of in your marketing approaches and your further business development;
• watch what your competitors are doing to react while there's still time and to learn from them;
• learn new marketing approaches and tactics from key players, guerrilla companies and the educators;
• and more.
RSS makes this process easier in two distinct ways …
How RSS Makes Market Research and Business Intelligence Easier
Content Distribution
Most key sources of information today employ RSS to deliver content.
This content is then aggregated and re-distributed by different content aggregation sites, which use RSS to aggregate content from thousands of different sources, making the most relevant content easily available to you.
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Instead of having to watch thousands of websites to see what's happening online you now only have to watch a few.
The process is simple:
1. Bloggers, online publishers, corporate websites and others provide their latest content through RSS feeds.
2. These same content sources then often submit their RSS feeds to RSS search engines and aggregation sites, to make them more visible and findable. At the same time, several RSS search engines and aggregation sites automatically index RSS feeds, including their content in their databases.
3. RSS search engines and aggregation sites collect content from millions of these content sources, aggregate it and make it easily available to you. Instead of you needing to find these sources by yourself and having to watch all of them for all of their content, RSS search engines and directories collect their content and bring it directly to you, at the same time making it searchable.
4. You can now use these RSS search engines and aggregation websites to setup individual keyword searches that bring you the latest content from millions of content sources via a single content intermediary. You no longer have to watch thousands of sources, instead, you can search for the content that matters and then only receive the latest content that matters most to you, regardless of the source.
5. RSS search engines and aggregation sites provide you with RSS feeds of your own, which bring you streams of content for your selected keywords.
In addition to getting content from the RSS search engines and aggregation sites, you can also get content from other specialist online services that provide niche content, such as news wire services to get the latest press releases, job tracking services to find the latest job wanted or offered ads, classifieds services, real estate services, news engines and so on.
Much of this content won't be made available through the RSS search engines and aggregation sites, but nonetheless many of these sites provide RSS feeds of their own, to which you can subscribe manually.
And finally, for the content sources that still do not provide RSS feeds, such as many e-mail e-zine publishers, online communities and portals, and your competitors' corporate sites, there are tools available that will help you scrape their content and turn it into RSS feeds by yourself, just so that you can watch it more easily in one spot Æ your RSS Reader.
In essence, RSS is crucial in distributing content.
Content Aggregation
Now take a look at the "receiver" side … or in other words, your side.
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RSS is crucial in distributing content and it is also crucial in aggregating content on your side, making it more easily digestible and more useful.
On the distribution side RSS makes it easy for you to receive content from millions of content sources, without having to watch all of them individually. It even helps you filter that content using RSS search engines and content aggregation sites so that you only get the content that really matters.
But all this still leaves you with too many multiple sources you still need to watch.
This is where content aggregation steps in.
Several RSS filtering tools today enable you to aggregate multiple content sources of your own choosing and then filter the content from these sources based on the keywords that matter to you.
The difference between content distribution is that with these tools you can now subscribe to the actual filtered content you receive from RSS search engines and aggregation sites and further aggregate it to reduce the number of content sources you're watching and further filter it for relevance.
Why would you want to do that?
Simply because there is no one perfect RSS search engine or aggregation site and you need to watch more then one.
And second, the RSS search engines and aggregation sites don't cover all the different content sources you may want to watch, such as the news engines, e-mail newsletters and others. So you still need to subscribe to quite a few sources to get all of the relevant content.
But once you setup your filters, the RSS filtering tools will provide you with RSS feeds of their own, to which you then either subscribe via an RSS Reader or watch on the Web. These filtered sources will provide you with the gist of what you are looking for, all in the same place.
The final piece of the puzzle is the RSS Reader, which is the tool that helps you subscribe to RSS content and consume it in the most effective way.
Pulling Content Distribution and Content Aggregation Together
To understand easier how all this works and how important RSS is for the process of consuming online content just take a look at this simplified model that demonstrates the flow of content from multiple content sources to you.
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Bloggers, online publishers, corporate RSS Search Engines websites … and Content Aggregation Sites
RSS Filtering Tool RSS Reader You Wire Services
News Engines
E-mail E-zines, Websites without RSS RSS Scrapping Tools E- i In essence, RSS allows you to watch thousands of content sources at the same time, using just one tool to actually watch the content - the RSS Reader - and only getting you the most relevant latest information without overwhelming you.
The Process
The process itself consists of only three major steps, which will be further explained later in the book:
• Easily subscribe to thousands of content sources.
• Aggregate and filter your content sources to get only the most relevant information.
• Access all of the relevant information through one application Æ an RSS Reader.
Although it may not seem so from the first look, using RSS for market research and business intelligence is nothing short of revolutionary.
If these were once limited to larger companies with the budget to employ professional business intelligence services, such as media clipping, they are now available to every marketer in the world … depending on your needs even free of any charge.
Small business marketer or corporate marketer, you now have the tools to make at least part of market research and business intelligence easy, quick, incredibly comprehensive and above all cheap.
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2. Improve Your Online Visibility and Generate More Traffic
Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.
While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.
It will help you:
• increase your traditional search engine rankings;
• improve your online visibility by making your content available where people are increasingly searching for new content, such as RSS search engines and content aggregation sites;
• drive traffic from other websites covering your topic, by helping you make your content available at these websites more easily.
Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites
The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.
Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.
Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for … but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recency.
But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?
Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recency, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.
The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.
Google and Yahoo! know it too … their own news engines are among the top of breed.
But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?
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Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.
And so on …
Why this matters to you?
If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic … traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.
And the RSS connection?
Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.
In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.
And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are pro actively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.
Syndicate Your Content to Other Online Media
Yes, traditional search and news search will get you the visitors that are currently actively searching for specific content, no doubt about it. Those are the visitors that need something specific right now and will use the search engines to get it.
But chances are that your website won't be their first destination after their search, especially if you're not well ranked for the specific keywords these people are looking for. But, they might get to a website that at least partially covers the topic you're covering.
And not all online traffic comes from search.
Much traffic is generated by the e-zines that people subscribe to, by frequent visits to favorite online destinations for specific topics and so on.
The point is, every day online users are visiting websites that have something to do with your topics … but these websites are not your websites.
Now consider this fact: Content is best served when contextually relevant to the current online environment of the visitor.
How can you take advantage of this fact?
You can work towards getting your latest headlines, content summaries or even full-text content published on these websites, to increase your online exposure and receive targeted traffic from these websites.
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In short, online content syndication is all about delivering your content to other websites and having it re-published there.
Essentially, this is a concept adapted from TV syndication, where TV show producers and TV networks allow other TV networks to run their show for a price. The difference is that in the world of online syndication the coin isn't money, but rather the traffic and exposure you receive by syndicating your online content.
Here are some quick examples:
• A cooking website provides an abundance of cooking tips, recipes, reviews and other cooking related content. You on the other hand wrote a book on exotic Indian recipes you are now trying to sell online. It's a perfect match. The cooking website is (or should be) looking for new ways to get more credible content for its visitors for free, while you're looking for increased exposure. In this case you could provide that website with your latest selections of exotic Indian recipes, perhaps with a new recipe every day. The website would publish your headlines and short summaries of the recipes, and their visitors would need to click through to your site to read more … giving you the opportunity to make the sale. Or, the other way to do it, would be to allow the cooking website to display your syndicated content in full, but with an ad at the bottom of your recipes inviting readers to order the book, with a link to the order page.
• You're a direct marketing consultancy firm, specializing in direct marketing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Well, there are dozens of websites covering direct marketing, but none provide direct marketing tips on direct marketing in the CEE region. Although you're not in the publishing business, you could easily provide direct marketing portals with semi-daily commentary on direct marketing in the CEE, tips for marketing in the region, coverage of direct marketing events in the region, legal tips and so on. The portals would better satisfy its visitors by providing them with more unique content, while you could generate new leads from the people that visit your own website after clicking on your headlines.
• You're an e-commerce site selling low-priced laptops. What you could do in this case is seek out websites that cover and review low-priced laptops and offer them to re-publish your latest laptop deals and releases, to direct people to your webstore where they can make the order or simply find out more about the laptops promoted, and the website would in turn receive a commission for every product sold through them. This same concept works for any affiliate marketing powered business. If you have affiliates, you can help them generate more sales by providing them with ready made content about your products, such as a list of upcoming seminars and similar.
A practical example of this, which we already took a look at, is the latest content from the RSS Marketing Diary displayed in full on the Podblaze blog.
In this specific case the Podblaze blog displays full-text articles, with an add for this RSS e-book right at the bottom of each article. Readers of the Podblaze blog receive more valuable content directly on the blog, without having to visit another website, and the RSS Marketing Diary receives clicks from people interested in learning more by ordering the e-book.
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Screenshot: Content from the RSS Marketing Diary re-published, via syndication and an RSS feed, on the Podblaze blog
Another good example is the chris.pirillo.com website, a personal website, which displays only headlines to the websites in Chris Pirillo's network, such as Lockergnome.com.
Visitors to the chris.pirillo.com website see the headlines and may click through to read more on the Lockergnome.com website if they are interested.
This can also serve as a good example of how syndicated content can be used to display content from one of your websites on your other websites.
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Screenshot: Content headlines from Lockergnome.com displayed on the chris.pirillo.com website
The syndication opportunities are really countless.
No matter what industry you're in and what your goals online are, you are almost certain to have your own relevant content that you want re-published in whole or in part on other websites, and you will be sure to find websites that reach the same audience and cover the same or complimentary topics that could be interested in republishing your content.
The key, however, in making all of this work, is contextuallity and relevancy.
• The content you wish to distribute must be highly relevant to the audience your prospective syndication partners reach.
• The content must be in some context with the website you want it to be available at.
This tactic will not only generate new traffic for you and bring you highly relevant and targeted visitors, but will also help you increase your online credibility, increase your brand recognition and might even help you become established as a thought leader.
But what's the role of RSS in all of this?
RSS has become the de-facto standard for online content syndication.
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All you need is to provide an RSS feed with the exact content you want to syndicate, and all the other websites owners need is a way to consume your RSS feed and display its contents on their websites.
Once you update your RSS feed, for example when adding a new news piece, the content on your syndication partners' websites is updated too. If you're syndicating content to a thousand other websites, all of them will receive the same updated version at the same time you update your RSS feed. Easy, simple, cheap and streamlined.
And because this is a standard there are now countless tools available to make this process easy for everyone involved.
Feed the Search Engines With Third-Party Syndicated Content
As already noted, search engines love websites with on-topic and frequently updated content.
RSS will help you get that content, by syndicating third-party RSS feeds on your own website.
Basically the same model as using RSS to syndicate your content to other web media, just turned upside down.
Advertise in RSS Feeds
As ClickZ noted in their February 2006 article about RSS advertising, publishers have been quicker to adopt RSS than end-users, making RSS as so-so desirable online advertising channel.
With just about over 30% RSS penetration among the online US population, advertising in RSS feeds won't help you reach the masses, but it will help you reach specific niche audience segments and the early adopters.
The good news is that ads in RSS feeds are achieving a much higher average click through rate than traditional online ads. Standalone
Standalone RSS ads are achieving an average 7.99% click-through rate. Compare that with traditional and rich-media online ads with CTRs ranging from 0.20% to 1.17% CTR, according to a report by DoubleClick, and the opportunities of advertising in RSS feeds immediately become more inviting, although the reach is still only getting there. [source: Pheedo]
The other good piece of news is that there is really not that much competition for RSS advertising among advertisers, which is still keeping advertising prices civil.
According to a poll, conducted by MarketingSherpa on a sample of ad:tech attendees in January 2006, 21% of marketers are definitely planning on spending on RSS advertising in 2006, while 27% plan to spend more than a year out.
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So the time to start testing is now, before the competition wakes up and starts driving prices up.
RSS Advertising Case Study [source: Pheedo]
Pheedo reports that by integrating online advertising into an RSS feed, a new online advertising technique, it has achieved measurably better results than e-mail for its client.
The online campaign for a free IT evaluation was conducted through specialist publication InfoWorld, which could offer direct access to IT professionals.
Pheedo said the six-week effort outperformed the best click through rate in email by over 26% as compared to the industry average of 8.7% CTR reported in DoubleClick's Q4 2003 Email Trend Report. Furthermore, they were able to lower the effective CPM by three times of that over email, saving its client thousands of dollars.
Get Attention From the Influencers
Reaching out to the influencers, such as bloggers, journalists and analysts won't only get you backlinks from highly reputable online sources, if they think you have something worthwhile to say, but will also increase your reach through print and perhaps even TV and radio coverage.
And if you want to attention from the influencers, publishing RSS feeds is the way to go.
A survey of 200 individuals from a variety of online & offline media, conducted by Nooked, revealed that 87% of key influencers are using RSS to collect key information and are adopting RSS as an information gathering and tracking tool.
How All This Improves Traditional Search Engine Rankings?
Although the algorithms by which traditional search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN, rank websites higher are a closely guarded secret, just like the CocaCola recipe, some things are clear.
1. Inbound links to your site from relevant websites increase rankings
Inbound links from relevant websites, especially those pertaining to the same topics covered by your website, are arguably the most important element in getting higher traditional search engine rankings.
And as you've seen, RSS is an especially strong channel when it comes to getting inbound links:
• Getting your RSS feeds and content into RSS directories and search engines, content aggregation sites and news search will provide you with direct inbound links to your website and your content.
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• At the same time, these websites will drive browsers to your website. If what they find there is up to their standards and relevant to their audiences, they will link back to your site from their blogs, portals and so on, providing you with even more inbound links.
• Getting your content syndicated to other websites, using RSS, will provide you with direct backlinks to your content.
• The influencers, like bloggers, journalists and analysts, love RSS feeds and use RSS to get the content they are most interested in. Meet their content needs and they will write about you, providing you with more inbound links to your site. And online mentions at websites like the New York Times or the Scobleizer blog do carry a lot of weight with traditional search engines.
2. Frequent content updates, relevant to your website's topic, increase rankings
Traditional search engines love website with rich, focused and frequently updated content.
Employing RSS to publish additional focused content from other websites on your own website will help you meet the search engines' criteria of what they want from your site to award you with better rankings.
3. Other ways of how RSS increases traditional search engine rankings
While there is only anecdotal evidence available, it does seem that websites with RSS feeds are indexed by the search engines quicker and are given more relevance from them. 3. Win Repetitive Attention By Enhancing Your Online Presence
Getting attention from online users isn't nearly as difficult as keeping it. With millions of other websites to choose from, online users will be quick to find other online sources of information if your website doesn't provide them with enough relevant and frequently updated content to hold their interests.
To help you make your website more relevant and worthy of attention, RSS allows you to easily republish third-party content on your website to better satisfy the needs of your visitors and keep them coming back for more every day.
The simple point is that if you don't update your content frequently enough, preferrably on a daily basis, your first-time visitors won't have a reason to come back.
RSS helps you overcome this problem by supplying you with constant streams of relevant content, without you having to write a single word.
The ultimate goal is to become a focused high-value website, which internet users turn to when they are in need of the specific content that you provide access to.
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The results are more frequent visits, more loyal visitors and more opportunities to make the sale or build a lasting relationship.
This content "creation" strategy can prove especially valuable for websites that do not have the resources to produce their own content, but are in need of a tool to keep their visitors coming back. Providing relevant selections of content from other relevant sites is just the way to do that.
The Easy Way to Publish Content From Other Sources
RSS provides you with about the simplest way to enrich your website with more content, making it more relevant to your visitors.
The process is simple:
1. Find RSS feeds with quality and relevant content, pertaining to your topic
2. Check whether your selected RSS feed publishers allow other websites to republish their content and under what terms
3. Add a tool to your website that allows you to take an RSS feed and parse its contents to be displayed on your website
4. Decide in what format you are going to republish third-party feeds: only headlines; headlines with short summaries; or full-text content from the feeds
5. Place the feeds on your website, using your RSS parsing tool of choice
6. Whenever the RSS feed publishers update their feeds, the updated content will also be displayed on your website
As you will find out later, this really is a simple process that is easy to setup and requires almost no maintenance after implementation.
What you get are multiple streams of content, one for each feed, displayed directly on your website and made available to your website visitors.
Create Your RSS Radars and Become a Niche News Engine
RSS radars, conceptually pioneered by Robin Good of MasterNewMedia, go one step further than simply publishing RSS feeds from other sources as individual streams of content per RSS feed.
Instead of republishing individual third-party RSS feeds on your website, RSS radars allow you to
• aggregate content from multiple RSS feeds,
• filter their content based on certain keywords and then
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• display highly focused streams of content on your website, comprised of even hundreds of other sources, but limited only to the most relevant content for a certain niche topic. an off-spring of displaying syndicated content from other publishers on your own website.
The key word here is "highly-focused", meaning that a good RSS radar will only capture and display the most highly relevant content on a very specific topic, usually focused on a single phrase or a combination of related phrases.
For example, a website covering the topic of direct marketing might provide focused RSS radars for the following topics:
• Postal mail
• Direct Response Television Advertising
• E-mail marketing
• Using RSS for direct marketing
• Direct marketing measurement
• And so on …
Each RSS radar example is focused on just one sub-topic of direct marketing, providing the latest best of the best on that sub-topic.
Such radars will not only serve as valuable content sources for end-users interested in the sub-topic, but will also increase your search engine rankings for that specific phrase, since the search engines will consider your website a more valuable resource on those sub-topics.
The end result of this tactic, if implemented correctly, is your website becoming the preferred destination of online users interested in the topics covered, in essence becoming a niche news engine for your topics.
The actual process resembles the process of using RSS for market research and business intelligence.
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Bloggers, online publishers, RSS Search Engines corporate websites and Content … Aggregation Sites
RSS Filtering Your website Tool Wire Services
Individual RSS feeds News Engines serving as your RSS radars, for each of your E-mail E-zines, selected sub- Websites without topics RSS, … RSS Scrapping Tools
E- il
1. Aggregate content from a variety of different online content sources, such as RSS search engines and content aggregation sites, wire services, news engines and other sources that don't provide RSS feeds (via RSS scrapping tools).
2. Filter all of this content to generate individual focused streams of content, automatically selecting only the most relevant content from all of your content sources, based on the needed keyword combinations.
3. Display the filtered streams of content on your website.
4. Make these filtered streams of content further available to your visitors as RSS feeds carrying the same filtered content.
A good example of providing RSS radars is The Industry Radar, a website focusing on the Human Resources in Healthcare topic and providing RSS radars on the following sub-topics:
• Healthcare Trends Radar
• HR/HCM Radar
• Broker/Consultant Radar
• Healthcare Insurance Radar
• Employee Benefits Insurace Carriers
• HR Outsourcing Radar
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• HR Benefits Technology Radar
Screenshot: Displaying the various RSS Radars offered by The Industry Radar
Increase the Frequency of Visits to Your Website
In terms of helping you get your visitors back to your website, RSS also functions as a mechanism to get your visitors to subscribe to your content and then re-visit your website more frequently than other users, giving you more opportunities to build a stronger relationship with the user and covert him into a customer.
Nielsen/NetRatings reports that RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users.
RSS users visit news sites more frequently than non-users, meaning they are in fact more loyal. To continue this line of thought, implementing RSS and converting visitors to RSS subscriptions will ensure greater reader loyalty, as well as additional page impressions.
"RSS users visited the top 20 news Web sites nearly three times as often as non-users and all other news Web sites four times as often (see Table 2). This means that sites outside of the top 20 properties may be among the greatest beneficiaries of RSS." [source: Nielsen/NetRatings]
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4. Get Your Internet Content Delivered to End-Users
For most marketers, the fact that RSS delivers 100% of your content to end-users, as opposed to e-mail, is the prevailing factor of why go for RSS marketing.
Why Content Delivery Really Matters
Namely, getting your content delivered to end-users is the first requirement for communicating with them, selling to them and building lasting relationships with them. If your content is not getting delivered, as is often the case with e-mail, a large part of your internet publishing efforts is wasted.
Direct marketing, direct selling, relationship marketing, public relations through direct communication with the media, communicating with your business partners and employees, direct advertising of your products, customer announcements and updated, all these are made impossible if your content cannot be delivered to end- users; your prospects, customers, the media, business partners and employees.
RSS, however, assures for 100% content delivery, meaning that all of your content is actually delivered to the people that willingly subscribe to it.
Who Is Really Using RSS?
But, as opposed to most other marketing uses of RSS, the big question when it comes to getting content delivered to end-users, is who is really using RSS and whether there are enough people using it to warrant an investment in the channel.
Let's take a look at the numbers …
Actual RSS Penetration
Actual RSS penetration is up for much discussion, since almost all the different research reports provide different numbers.
• According to an October 2005 Yahoo! RSS Whitepaper, 27% of internet users consume RSS on personalized start pages like MyYahoo!, MyMSN and others, without knowing that they are in fact using RSS. Add to that the 4% that knowingly use RSS and you come to 31% penetration among internet users in the US.
• Forrester Research reported in September 2005 that RSS is being used by 6% of consumers, although this data does not included users not aware they are using RSS.
• In March 2005 Jupiter Research reported that 12% of consumers use a variety of RSS Readers.
• According to TechNewsWorld 34.4% of the Chinese internet user population already uses RSS.
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More or less conflicting data, but certainly demonstrating that RSS is growing quickly and has by now achieved enough penetration to warrant marketers to invest in RSS content delivery to end-users.
The Demographics
The Yahoo! RSS White Paper reveals the aware RSS user, who is knowingly using RSS, as an attractive demographic, surpassing the average demographics of RSS non-users on all counts. On the other hand unaware RSS users are actually falling behind by RSS non-users, making them less attractive.
Total RSS Usership Internet Users Aware RSS User Unaware RSS Non-User User Gender Male 48% 71% 45% 47% Female 52% 29% 55% 53% Age 18-34 37% 50% 38% 36% 35-49 32% 29% 34% 32% 50+ 31% 22% 29% 33% Education High school graduate or less 11% 3% 10% 11% Some college/technical 40% 29% 45% 39% school College graduate 28% 36% 27% 27% Some post-graduate or Post- 21% 31% 18% 22% graduate degree Household income Average household income $62,655 $74,116 $59,748 $63,095 [source: The Yahoo! RSS White Paper, October 2005]
On the other hand, the September 2005 survey by Nielsen/NetRatings paints a somewhat different picture, presenting both the aware RSS users and unaware RSS users are a more desirable demographic than non-RSS users.
User Type Male Online before College Income 18-34 years old 1994 graduate $100,000+ Aware RSS 78% 48% 46% 25% 17% users Unaware 54% 36% 53% 27% 25% RSS users Non-RSS 46% 34% 43% 22% 16% users [source: Nielsen/NetRatings, September 2005]
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Again somewhat conflicting reports, but certainly showing that RSS users are a desirable demographic.
Using RSS to Improve Your Content Delivery
Regardless of which numbers you trust, RSS, as a content delivery channel for reaching end-users, can be used to improve your existing content delivery efforts, as well as provide you with an abundance of new publishing & marketing opportunities, not previously available through other content delivery channels.
Use RSS to Power Your New Content Delivery Opportunities
RSS provides marketers with a multitude of new content delivery opportunities, not available with other content delivery channels.
High frequency content updates, even on a daily or hourly basis, are now finally possible with RSS. No more need to hold on your important messages, news and other content for a week or even a month to include it in your e-zine --- with RSS you can update your content as often as you want/need, and your subscribers won't mind.
Podcasting (delivering internet audio content) and Videocasting (delivering internet video content) allow you to communicate via rich media messages, not only making your content more attractive and powerful, but also enabling a more personal »conversation« with your audiences.
Up until know, the internet was predominantly a textual channel. Adding audio and video to the mix, delivering both via RSS, goes beyond the basic capabilities provided by »traditional« internet content delivery channels. Rich media personalizes the internet experience and gives your company a distinguishable face, while at the same time providing you with a media platform to convey your message so that it is easier to understand, see and feel.
Think about ...
• Delivering press releases in audio or video
• Sending your customers a personal video message from the CEO
• Doing audio interviews to expand your reach and provide more content to your visitors
• Delivering video demonstrations of your products
• Using video and audio to demonstrate how your customers and readers can easily resolve various issues that you are helping them with
• Delivering important messages to your readers, customers and business partners via a more personal audio experience, instead of using impersonal e-mail communications
• And so on ...
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In addition, Podcasting and Videocasting form the basis of new business models, giving you the opportunity to expand your product base to include these formats with higher perceived value.
Customer education & support are improved as well, since you can now demonstrate key product usage points via online video Æ providing customer support content in a format, which can easily demonstrate everything you need to convey to your customers.
Appcasting goes one step further, giving you the ability to deliver critical software updates and patches to your existing clients, without them having to visit your web site every week to see if the much needed update is already available or not.
Product news, releases and updates are now finally possible in an easy-to- consume way. Using RSS, you can provide your customers or prospects with simple tools to create their own »product feeds«, through which they'll be immediately notified when new products that precisely match their interests are available.
As soon as your product portfolio changes, so does the content in the RSS feeds that your customers are subscribed to.
Just think of the following possibilities ...
• The search tool is one of the most often used in larger web stores, giving your visitors an easy way to find the products they are interested. But the same search results can be delivered via RSS as well. Imagine your customer doing a search for one of your product categories, and then also receiving a link to the RSS feed for those very same search results, to find out immediately when a new product matching his terms is released or available for order.
• This works for complex searches as well. If your customers are in the habit of searching for specific product categories, but only in a specific price range, you can deliver those very same results to them via RSS, but with a small twist Æ as soon as a new product matching their terms, including the desired price, is launched, they are notified about it via RSS instantly. No need to visit your site again to do the time-consuming search; the release comes directly to them.
• Of course, the same approach that many are already using for e-mail alerts can be used for RSS. Give your visitors a simple form using which they enter their criteria, and then give them access to an RSS feed bringing them product updates based exactly on their criteria. Why not just use e-mail? Because no one really wants more e-mail messages in their inboxes and no one wants to give away their personal information, while RSS is anonymous, doesn't require an e-mail address and is read when the customer decides he has the time.
Personalized/customized database listings are quite similar to product updates, but relate to any kind of complex information you provide to your visitors.
• Job listings
• Dating
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• Real estate
• Etc.
Using RSS, your visitors can decide exactly what kind of »content« (in this case, an individual content item could be a new job listing) they are looking for and then have that content delivered directly to them, via their own personalized RSS feed.
And yet, all of these are just some examples of what you can do with RSS. The possibilities for new content delivery & business development models are quite endless.
For example, some companies are already giving their visitors the opportunity to track their FedEx, UPS and other packages via RSS feeds. Yet others are creating new services that allow you to receive critical information from an RSS feed to your mobile phone via SMS (such as getting an SMS notifying you that a new job matching your criteria is available). Yet again other sites enable you to keep track of when you need to return your library material, and even when your holds are ready and when they are about to expire, all this using RSS.
All of these are new content delivery opportunities made possible with RSS, and each of them in a way improves lives of end-users, without placing a larger burden (more e-mail messages) on them.
Use RSS to Improve Your Existing Content Delivery Efforts
However, RSS is not only about discovering the new, but also about improving your existing content delivery efforts, helping you get more of your existing content delivered.
The power of your e-zine and your other content delivery efforts can be easily expanded by providing RSS as a supplementary content delivery channel.
Since e-mail is having difficulties getting through to customers, RSS can help you reach the people that are either using too trigger-happy spam filters or people who no longer give out their e-mail addresses to internet publishers, but don't have a problem subscribing to an anonymous RSS feed.
• Give your subscribers the option of subscribing to your e-zine either via e-mail or RSS.
• Don't rely only on e-mail autoresponders, but provide an RSS option as well.
• Create a special RSS feed to announce your e-zine when it's available, in addition to sending it out via e-mail.
• Deliver your e-mail e-zine or newsletter just like you've been doing all this time, but also provide RSS feeds for certain e-zine sections, such as the news section. Why should your visitors wait for your regular e-zine issue to get important news, if they can have it immediately available through your RSS feed?
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Meeting the Needs of the Most Demanding Direct Marketer
If we are discussing using RSS as a content delivery channel, is it important to add right now that contrary to general opinion, RSS meets the needs of even the most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does. Most direct marketing reasons against RSS are in fact the result of inadequate understanding of RSS by most marketers.
• 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.
• RSS metrics RSS can in fact be tracked: track anything from the number of your subscribers, their reading habits, their reading frequency to your click-through rates and activities after clicking-through from your feed. This includes tracking which of your RSS feeds are performing better, are more interesting to your readers and drive more sales ... and the same for individual content items.
• Message targeting Since RSS feeds can be dynamically generated on a per-user basis, you can easily track the interests of your individual subscribers and then target marketing messages directly to them, making each message relevant to their needs and interests in order to increase your sales success.
• Message personalization If you generate your RSS feeds for each individual user, you can also personalize these feeds. Basic personalization includes elements such as the reader's first name, while more advanced personalization might include personalized content and product recommendations and so on.
• Data capture E-mail marketers have already become experts at using opt-in forms to get as much information from the prospect as possible; the prospect's name, his interests, the current products he is using, his current position in the purchase cycle and so on. RSS can be used in the same way, giving your visitors access to the RSS feed only after they've filled in a simple or complex opt-in form. This can work with e-zine subscriptions, as well as forms you require your visitors to fill in to either register on your website or download your free report or whitepaper.
Good news for direct marketers is that these capabilities are already available in many RSS publishing/marketing solutions, available at very acceptable prices, accessible even to the smallest companies.
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5. Better Interact With Your Audiences
Audience interaction leads to improved customer relationships, increased sales and even customer evangelism, if you are completely on track.
RSS is another interaction tool to add to your relationship development arsenal, particularly through branded RSS Readers, RSS conversations and using RSS to easier generate feedback from your audiences.
Branded RSS Readers
The swift RSS penetration has recently spawned many new advanced RSS marketing tactics, which are for the most part still unknown to the majority of marketers. Marketing with branded RSS Readers is one of these more recent RSS marketing trends.
To better grasp the marketing opportunities involved in this market, imagine your prospects and customers using an e-mail client branded by your company, interacting with it every day and using it as part of their lives and daily activities. Complete brand experience on one side, and unprecedented communicational and marketing access to the customer on the other. The branded RSS Reader becomes not only a daily used tool, keeping your brand constantly in front of your customer, but also a one-touch interaction tool between the customer and your company.
Naturally, early branded RSS Reader applications are really not going very far, but the potential is by all means here, especially considering the large number of RSS unaware users and RSS non-users, who can be converted to RSS usage by your company, using your branded RSS Reader.
The opportunities of what can be done with a branded RSS Reader are quite endless, but all go towards better interaction with your target audiences:
• A visually branded software interface.
• Pre-installed company RSS feeds, presumably spotlighted in the reading list; personalized if possible.
• An RSS feed customization module, if the company offers RSS feed customization.
• Ad serving module, capable of serving targeted company ads to users through the reader, based on their browsing/content consumption habits.
• Notification module, capable of serving special notifications from the company, to facilitate prospect/customer/partner communications.
• Communications module, basically a form that the user can use to send messages to the company, and even receive feedback; could even include a customer support system.
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• Web store module that would allow the user to browse the company’s product line through the actual RSS reader and even conduct orders.
• Direct access to product information, such as product manuals, FAQs, product forums etc.
• An option for the user to customize his aggregator with his own affiliate links (for the company’s products, or even his own) and then re-distribute it to his own visitors.
• Direct access to other information; a publishing company could perhaps give its users the opportunity to read its book excerpts directly from the RSS reader.
• Integrated forum, to enable the user to communicate with our company customers/partners and perhaps even discuss possible business cooperation with them.
• Etc.
The key is in achieving concrete relationship and sales oriented interactivity between the user and the company, based on the RSS reader as a one-stop interaction point.
RSS Conversations
Markets are conversations. And this is still true today.
Using the combination of RSS content delivery to end-users and syndicating your content to other web media, RSS can be used as an excellent tool to power marketing conversations.
RSS conversations start with a new content item on your website, usually a blog, distributed via RSS to end-users and other websites. The whole point is to spread the dialogue from the originating point (the publisher) to multiple starting points, where the dialogue itself takes a life of its own and further spreads through multiple online media.
Each new website that mentions your content item is a new starting point for the dialogue.
On one side, the dialogue is powered by people that comment on the story on the actual website. On the other, the dialogue is further spread when other RSS end- users, which are subscribed to the RSS feeds published by new dialogue starting points, further spread your content or comment on it on their own websites.
RSS conversations are additionally powered by "automatic dialogue facilitation", which takes place when your RSS content is automatically syndicated by RSS directories and content aggregators, spreading your idea even further and making it available to even more people.
The end result are multiple conversations going on around the internet surrounding your product or idea, all generating feedback, traffic and prospects for you.
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While RSS conversations can be powered simply by getting your content syndicated on as many websites as possible, via RSS, best results can be achieved through active "dialogue facilitation".
Dialogue Facilitators, a new marketing function that specializes in facilitating online dialogue, watch the internet space and are on a constant look-out for any news, opinions and other content about your topic or about your products and services … using RSS to aggregate and filter the information that matters most to them.
They keep track of this content and constantly respond to all conversations, trying to further facilitate them. They respond either in the form of blog comments or blog postings in their own blogs, even writing articles and other content (such as audio interviews) and distributing it throughout the internet.
But, they also start conversations. They watch the pulse of the market and then input new stories that match that pulse in to the market, trying to upgrade conversations and prolong them.
They engage in private conversations with other bloggers and seek-out new note- worthy stories, engaging more and more people in them.
On the "automatic front", they make sure that their content is spread throughout the internet through the power of RSS, thus generating new conversation locations.
We could define the role of a Dialogue Facilitator as someone who watches (researches), responds to (comment or new content), enables (RSS content syndication), starts and powers online conversations about a certain topic, industry, product or company.
A complete union of market research, PR and direct marketing.
Personal Communications via RSS
Personal communication, or perhaps even better called one-to-one communication, is in a way delivering content, but to a known and specific individual or individuals, with an easy option of providing feedback and starting a dialog. Conducting a dialog requires to things: • The ability to send your message to the recipient. • The ability for the recipient to easily respond to your message. E-mail was the perfect tool for this … with the emphasis on "was". Unfortunately, we can no longer be certain that our e-mail messages will reach the intended recipients or that we in fact will receive their responses. It's even gotten to a point where some will phone you to check if you received their e-mail. Doesn't that somehow defeat the basic purpose of e-mail? It can become even more time consuming and disorganized than using only the telephone. Is RSS the solution?
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It's certain not best suited for this role, since: • It doesn't provide an easy feedback loop.
• It doesn't allow you to communicate with just anyone, and the communication itself isn't exactly organized.
• People are just used to using e-mail, and that's not about to change any time soon.
You can just about forget using RSS for your general one-to-one communications.
It's taking RSS to the limits of what it was first meant to do, but it actually can work, at least on a limited scope. Just consider the following possibilities. Ever since spam started becoming a real problem many web site owners started replacing their on-site e-mail addresses with web forms that their visitors can fill-in to send them an e-mail, without actually revealing the web site owner's e-mail address. Now, imagine replacing the delivery channel behind the web form from e-mail to RSS. Instead of receiving these messages to your e-mail address, fearing some of them won't reach you, they are instead delivered through your RSS feed directly to you or more precisely to your RSS aggregator. Since you are using a secure RSS feed only you or the people you trust can access it, which even provides more security and privacy than e-mail. The greatest benefit of doing it this way is the conviction you and your visitors can have that you will actually receive their messages. This can also work the other way around, utilizing RSS for dialog among known participants. But it does require a uniform communicational system.
Example: Quikonnex Quikonnex is one of the cutting-edge RSS publishing technology providers on the market today, serving mostly the lower-end market. While their technical solutions are still quite basic, they are still managing to push the limits of what can be done with RSS, especially with their implementation of RSS for communicational purposes. Everyone that registers with them, even the free members, also gets access to their RSS communicational service, which works especially well from their internet browser-based RSS aggregator. Through this service, you can send private messages to other Quikonnex users Æ to their own private RSS feeds, intended especially for personal communication. This is how it works: • You launch your internet browser-based RSS aggregator and log-on.
• Select the "Send a Private Message" option.
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• Enter the Quikonnex username of the person you want to send your message to and your message of course.
• The message is then "published" on that user's personal messages RSS feed.
• If you want to view your messages, use the "Messages" option, which launches a web page with your current messages, which you can also delete.
It doesn't provide most of the functionality that we got used to with e-mail and is not very practical for communicational purposes, but it is a beginning. It is using RSS for communicational purposes and it is pushing the limits of RSS, so the people at Quikonnex can only be congratulated.
Basically, an RSS communicational system would work like some sort of forum. Every participant in the discussion would have his own RSS feed, and whenever someone posted a message for him in the "forum", that message would appear in his RSS feed, and vica verca. As noted before, not terribly practical, but useful if you want to be certain that your content will be delivered and if you want more secure communications via secure RSS feeds. But there are more practical ways of using RSS for personal communications, although not entirely in the realm of real one-to-one messaging, but more for generating feedback. • You publish an RSS feed, where each content item has a direct backlink to your comments form for that article. • By clicking on the link your subscribers immediately get to the comment form, where they can easily submit their feedback. • The comment can either be displayed on the website, or if you setup your system differently, could be published to an RSS feed you use to watch comments. • If you then wanted to start a real dialog with the commentator, you would need to use e-mail. Like we said, not perfect, but it is a start. 6. Directly Monetize Your Content via RSS Feeds
You've now went through all of the benefits and functions performed by RSS to:
• get better insight into what content interests your audiences the most, giving you the knowledge you need to publish the content with the highest probability of making a big impact;
• increase the traffic to your website, by tapping into new sources of traffic online, as well as increasing your traditional search engine rankings;
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• get more of your visitors to come back more often, by enriching your website with relevant content, giving you more opportunities to develop the relationship and make the sale;
• get your visitors to subscribe to your content and actually get your content delivered to them, without fail;
• establish improved user interaction processes, to generate more feedback and bring your visitors closer to your brand;
• and more.
All of this is indirect monetization of RSS. In short, you've used RSS to increase your marketing effectiveness and impact.
You achieved attention from your audiences and kept it.
But how can RSS now help you monetize this attention?
Transforming Attention Into Revenues
There are several strategies for directly monetizing the attention you achieved with the help of RSS:
• Monetize RSS by driving more people more frequently to your on-site advertising, increasing the number of ad impressions, ad clicks or commission- based sales.
• Monetize RSS by placing paid advertisements in your RSS feeds.
• Monetize RSS by using it to sell your own products
• Monetize RSS by selling subscriptions to your RSS feeds
Monetize RSS by Driving People to Your On-Site Advertising
If your business is an ad-supported model and most of your ad sales revenues come from selling ad space on your website, either by selling ad impressions, clicks, leads or products on a commission-basis, you need to get more visitors to come to your website more frequently.
RSS in this case performs as a vehicle that helps you get your RSS subscribers to your website more often, where they are exposed to the advertising that you're making money from.
This tactic requires publishing summary RSS feeds, where subscribers are compelled to visit your website to get all the information they are looking for.
The whole point is getting RSS subscribers from the RSS feed to your website, which makes it unwise to publish full-text articles of your content in your RSS feeds, since subscribers get all of the content from the feed and are not motivated strongly enough to visit your website.
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Screenshot: The MasterNewMedia RSS feed (displayed in an RSS Reader) with content summaries, as opposed to full-text content, motivating subscribers to visit the website, where they are exposed to on-site advertising
Screenshot: An article at the MasterNewMedia website with on-site advertising, where visitors from the RSS feed are exposed to on-site advertising, allowing the publisher to monetize his RSS feed by driving people to advertising
Monetize RSS by Placing Paid Advertising in Your RSS Feeds
But, if on-site advertising is not your primary source of revenues and you prefer publishing full-text content in your RSS feeds, you can still monetize RSS by placing paid advertisements within your full-text content items in your RSS feeds.
This way you can afford to keep your subscribers in the RSS Reader, where they read your full articles, without driving them to your website, and still expose them to paid advertising in the feed.
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Screenshot: A full-text article in an RSS feed (displayed in an RSS Reader) with an advertisement at the bottom (inline advertisement, displayed as part of an individual content item in the feed)
The reason it is recommended to publish full-text feeds if you intend to place ads within individual content items is that with summary feeds your subscribers might feel as if being taken advantage of by having to see your ads. With full-text articles they usually see the ads as the price they need to pay for getting a full-text RSS feed.
But either way, this is still quite a gray area with not enough data to make it absolutely certain whether full-text feeds are requirement for placing ads within RSS feed content items.
On the other hand, if you still want to use RSS to primarily drive subscribers to your website with summary feeds, but also want to monetize your RSS feeds with RSS advertising, you can also publish infrequent stand-alone or ads in the feed, which are published as individual content items instead of being published as inline ads within individual content items.
Screenshot: A stand-alone ad as an individual content item in an RSS feed (displayed in an RSS Reader); screenshot courtesy of Pheedo
You can use this approach with either summary or full-text feeds, but be warned not to turn your RSS feeds into billboards. If there is not enough valuable content and too much advertising, people will simply unsubscribe.
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Monetize RSS by Using it to Sell Your Own Products
The same approaches that can be used for placing paid advertisements in RSS feeds, such as inline or stand-alone RSS ads, or driving people to your website as the prevailing RSS monetization model, also work if you want to monetize RSS to promote and sell your own products and services. The same principles apply.
But, in the case of using RSS to sell your own products, you may also implement RSS feeds that are in and of themselves pure advertising for your products Æ product RSS feeds.
Simply put, whole RSS feeds that carry only your product information, with each content item representing one product. Think in terms of RSS feeds for your latest products, top products, top discounted products and so on.
However, the only way this will work is if your subscribers actually want to receive constant product information from you, either because you are their preferred online shopping destination, or because they want to take advantage of the latest deals and similar.
Screenshot: An Amazon.com product feed (displayed in an RSS Reader), featuring bestelling Business & Investing books
Monetize RSS by Selling Subscriptions to Your RSS Feeds
Before you start thinking that RSS feeds are such a valuable content delivery channel for the end-user that you can just start selling subscriptions to them, think again.
As we said before, RSS is not a business model.
And people won't pay for RSS feed subscriptions.
What people do pay for is valuable content.
You can't sell them RSS feed subscriptions just because it's RSS, but you can sell access to your content and offer RSS as an additional channel through which your paid subscribers may access the content they are really paying to subscribe to.
Just remember, RSS is not the "product" in this case, the content is. But RSS is a way for you to get this content to the subscriber in a reliable and secure fashion.
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Seeing the Big Picture
If up until now you've been under the impression that RSS is only good for getting content delivered to end-users, you can now appreciate the big picture of all that RSS really has to offer.
It is not a singular channel that can do only one thing. Instead, it provides marketers with an abundance of way and methods to improve their marketing effectiveness.
The more thorough you are implementing it in your organization and in your marketing, the more benefits you will reap.
It should now also be clear how RSS is monetized Æ mostly indirectly, by improving your marketing effectiveness and impact … with additional direct monetization opportunities.
The Disadvantages of RSS
Although there is a strong business case for RSS, as was just demonstrated, RSS is far from being a perfect marketing channel, especially on the content delivery side.
• Internet users need an RSS Reader to subscribe to your RSS feeds and read them. This is the greatest obstacle to using RSS, and definitely one that makes it difficult to use RSS exclusively to deliver your content. This will change as RSS is available by default in the most popular internet browsers and e-mail clients. Mozilla FireFox and Thunderbird already supported it by default since 2005, and by the end of 2006 that expanded to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, and in 2007 to Outlook and Outlook Express, making RSS more readily available to the general online population.
• While subscribing to RSS feeds is easy, it is far from being completely intuitive. Just take the RSS word as an example. While everyone knows that e- mail is you'll be hard pressed to find more than a few people that know what RSS is. Popular web-based portals, such as MyYahoo! and MyMSN, with their integrated RSS Reader features that allow users to subscribe to feeds and read them without knowing what RSS is, have made an incredible breakthrough. But for most, RSS is still something geeky and something they're not particularly interested in.
• Getting subscribers is difficult and requires much market education. Even with the strong "fear factor" involved with getting e-mail subscribers, it's still much easier doing that than getting people to add your RSS feed to their readers if they don't even know what RSS is.
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• RSS penetration is still nowhere near the penetration of e-mail, making RSS an important supplementary content delivery channel, but by no means the primary content delivery channel for marketers.
• Unsubscribing from your feed is quick and easy, which means that you have to invest special care to provide only very high quality and relevant content with a high perceived value for your audience.
• Delivering direct marketing campaigns through your own RSS feed is, taking in to consideration the low "acceptance" margin of RSS end-users, difficult and dangerous at best. RSS is in no way a "perfect" or even outstanding direct marketing channel.
• Introducing RSS in to your communicational mix requires different marketing approaches, which may, from case to case, even require a fundamental change in the way you market and prepare your content.
• The lack of "push" can also become a disadvantage for your subscribers, since people at times and with specific content types in mind actually want to be pushed with content, for instance receiving financial market updates as soon as they become available.
• RSS is still difficult to precisely track and measure, although RSS metrics are already available.
All in all, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but you should still be clearly aware of them.
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III. Integrate! RSS Marketing Strategies
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Transforming the benefits of RSS marketing into actual business results and the bottom line first depends on:
• Your RSS marketing integration model Æ integrating RSS with your overall marketing strategy
• Your RSS content strategy Æ what content you publish
• Your RSS publishing model Æ how you deliver this content to your audiences using RSS
These three elements form the core of your RSS marketing strategy and are in the first line of success to making RSS marketing work for your company.
RSS Marketing Mix Integration
RSS marketing can only work if it is fully integrated in your existing marketing mix, at the same time feeding from it and enhancing it.
The Businesses Case for RSS chapter already demonstrated the key benefits of using RSS from the overall marketing perspective.
But how can RSS be made to work for the different marketing functions we can find under the overall marketing umbrella, helping each marketing function to better achieve its goals?
The stages of the overall marketing process can best be explained as Acquire, Retain, Convert and Learn.
Acquire
Learn
Convert Retain
• Acquire Acquire new leads (prospects), customers, visitors, influencers, business partners, employees etc. Regardless of how your marketing function defines or names the acquisition stage, the goal is always to get a new contact to develop a certain business relationship through the other stages of the marketing process.
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• Retain If acquisition is about acquiring a new contact, regardless of the purpose, retention is about keeping "contact alive", or better put, keeping the dialog active.
• Convert Conversion is about reaching your ultimate goal with your target audience, according to your marketing function.
• Learn Learning is about all the aspects of knowing, learning about and keeping up with your market.
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RSS Marketing Mix Integration: Goals by Marketing Function
Direct Online Customer Public Marketing & Online Promotion & Website Relationship Internal Relations E-commerce Publishing Advertising Marketing Management Communications
Acquire •Reach the •Generate •Generate •Generate •Generate •Establish •Establish constant influencers leads Æ subscribers Æ website visitors website visitors constant contact with existing (journalists; subscribe to subscribe to Æ visit the Æ visit the contact with employees Æ analysts; RSS feeds & RSS feeds website website existing subscribe to RSS bloggers) Æ submit •Reach target •Branding Æ customers Æ feeds; force RSS subscribe to qualification subscribe to feed subscriptions audiences Æ access RSS feeds data RSS feeds access content branded •Acquire new •Reach the •Reach target through other content through employees Æ general public consumers Æ online media other online access employment Æ subscribe to find relevant media; interact content through RSS feeds; product with the brand other online media; read company information & subscribe to RSS content on content through feeds other sites other sites
Retain •Keep the •Keep new •Keep •Keep visitors •Keep visitors •Keep •Keep existing influencers leads subscribers by offering by offering customers employess subscribed by subscribed, them a strong •Make sure that them a strong subscribed, interested in providing while at the on-site user content is on-site user while leading receiving more valuable same time experience experience them to the company content & actually content, while building the delivered next purchase, facilitate interaction at the same relationship capturing more •Keep new potential time making towards the data and employees sure the sale facilitating relationship interested in the •Make sure that interaction leads towards company & keep content is •Make sure that them subscribed press coverage actually content is •Make sure that •Make sure that delivered actually content is actually content is delivered actually delivered delivered
Convert •Get positive •Turn a lead •Support all •Support all •Support all •Turn a one- •Increase employee “press” into a customer other company other company other company time buyer into satisfaction and coverage marketing marketing marketing a repeat interaction goals goals goals customer •Convert a potential •Facilitate employee into a real further repeat employee purchases
Learn •Keep track of •Keep track of •Get material •Keep track of •Get material •Keep track of •Keep track of all company competition for your stories competition for your content competition potential new mentions and news •Find new •Find new development employees across various coverage •Keep track of marketing online media marketing your •Keep track of ideas ideas customers’ competition •Evaluate •Keep track of businesses company •Keep track of all all brand reputation •Keep track of company mentions mentions all company & across various across various product online media online media mentions across varous online media
This simplified model represents the different goals of different marketing functions, according to the actual stage of the marketing process.
As you can see, certain goals repeat themselves across various marketing functions, although they are often differentiated by the target audiences they are trying to reach and by what they are trying to do with these target audiences.
However, the important point right now is that you understand that RSS can support all the different goals set by different marketing functions through different stages of their marketing processes.
RSS has something to offer to all the different marketing functions.
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Now, for a while, put your own marketing function out of your mind and consider RSS from the overall possibilities it offers to your company and your marketing. We will return to concrete RSS uses for various marketing functions later in the book ... and show you how to put them into practice for yourself.
RSS Content Strategies
Your RSS content strategy plays a pivotal role in your RSS marketing success. The good news is that good RSS content strategies are not about reinventing your existing content strategy, but instead building upon it.
Your RSS content strategy will revolve around:
• Planning your RSS content with your target audiences in mind
• Taking advantage of how RSS content items are structured
• Determining the right types of RSS content for you
• Determining what media formats are best suited for your types of RSS content Planning Your Content With Your Target Audiences in Mind
Every content strategy begins with the reader Æ the target audiences you want to deliver your content to, and their specific online content consumption needs and interests, related to your business model of course.
Consider the different target audiences you might need to communicate with online:
• Business prospects, segmented by prevailing product category or business segment interest. The more complex your business and your business offerings, the more different groups of business prospects you need to accommodate with your online marketing communications. Direct marketing 101 teaches us that all communications should be highly targeted and relevant to each invidual recipient. RSS is no different. Consider each group of prospects, based on the segmentation merits that matter for you, as an individual target audience.
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• Existing clients, segmented by prevailing interest, product category, business segment, existing products or existing relationship. Just like with your business prospects, your existing clients need to be broken-down into relevant subsets based on the segmentation merits you use to differentiate between different existing client groups. Specific existing client groups may either be interested only in specific topics, specific product categories, may belong into specific business segments, may have already purchased your existing products or may be in different levels of relationship with your company, or a mix'n'match of all of these. Depending on your segmentation model, each individual existing client group may represent an individual target audience to focus your content delivery efforts on.
• Business partners, segmented by partner type, such as suppliers, or by relationship level. Again, different business partner groups or in the case of larger business partners, will require different communications strategies, making it necessary to consider each business partner group as an individual target audience.
• Internal audiences, such as employees, owners and investors, and different subsets of these. For example, you may want to communicate with your employees regionally (by office location), or based on the different departments they are working in, or by project group and so on. Each of these needs to be treated as an individual target audience.
• The media, which can further be broken-down into smaller groups of target audiences, such as by media type, existing relationship or the business segment different groups of media representatives cover.
• Institutional audiences, such as the government.
• Website syndication partners, segmented by the content they publish, which has bearing on the actual content you may want to provide to them for republishing purposes via RSS.
• Search engines and directories that you want to syndicate your content to. Yes, even the search engines and directories may be understood as an individual target audience, with its own subset of communicational rules.
The secrets to keeping your target audiences in mind and for providing the best RSS experience when mapping out your RSS content strategy are:
• RSS doesn't change your business model, it simply enhances it and builds on it. The different target audiences that you communicate with differently as part of your overall communications strategy must also be individually accommodated for through your RSS communications.
• Each individual target audience has its own content needs and its own subset of content types and topics they want to hear from you about.
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• Your goals differ from target audience to target audience. You may want to sell a specific front-end product to a specific groups of prospects, increase the buying frequency of a specific product category of another existing client group, and get more media coverage for a specific product from a specific media audience group. The point is, your goals may differ from specific group to group, and your RSS content strategy needs to reflect this.
The deeper you go with segmenting your target audiences the more complex your RSS content strategy becomes. In the end, your RSS marketing results, as your overall marketing results as well, will in large part depend on how successful you are in communicating with each individual target audience.
Your Content Strategy Action Plan
1. Your first task is to create a map of the different target audiences you need to communicate with online.
2. Your second task is to prepare a quick overview of your communicational strategy and goals for these individual target audiences.
3. Your third task is to map out all the different content categories of interest to these individual target audiences.
4. Your fourth task is to list all the different types of content you may want to deliver to these target audiences.
5. Your fifth task is to plan the CTAs (Calls-to-Action) that will create a bridge between the content your audiences want and the actions you want them to take, directly related with your RSS content.
6. Your sixth task is to plan out your feeds and determine exactly how you will deliver this content to your target audiences using RSS.
7. And your final task in the content planning phase is to create actual editorial plans for your different RSS feeds.
But before you become overwhelmed with the scope of content planning first understand that you do not need to go this deep to get started.
You can even elect to group all of your different target audiences into major groups and create simple strategies for all of them together, and then expand on that later on.
Or your business may not even be complex enough to warrant this kind of digging into specific audiences.
Or the potential cost/benefit ratio might not be favorable enough to support such a complex content strategy.
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Whichever the case, before you start considering exactly what content you are going to publish via RSS you need to understand your target audiences and what you need to publish to reach your goals with them.
Move Away From the Product
A common mistake you might do at this point is simply consider your target audiences and your content strategy for them from your own "product view" or the solutions you offer.
But in reality you need to move away from the product and rather move towards what your target audiences are really interested in and only then connect that with your products.
While your final goal may be to make the sale, you will need intermediate goals to help you come to that point, and the most important intermediate goals when marketing via RSS are:
• keep your audiences interested in your feeds;
• keep your subscribers subscribed to your feeds;
• keep your subscribers actually reading your feeds.
The only way to achieve these is not only to be relevant, but also to provide content that deeply resonates with what your audiences need and want. It's not just about your products, but rather about the learning or amusement experience you can offer to your audiences.
Your products come later.
Building a bridge between the content your audiences want and the actions you want them to take requires that you first think of the content needs of your audiences, and only then of how you are going to sell your products to them.
To help bring the point home, here are some quick insights from Debbie Weil, the corporate blogging expert (although her advice applies to all content types):
How to uncover your "story" by Debbie Weil
Hint: it's not about your widgets
When organic yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm launched their first set of blogs two years ago, they titled one of them "The Daily Scoop."
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Yes, it was about the process of manufacturing yogurt. You can guess what happened.
As Stonyfield's chief blogger Chris Halvorson told me in several interviews for the book, "We discovered there was only so much you can say about making yogurt." So that blog was dropped. The company, one of the pioneer corporate bloggers, continues to blog about organic farming as well as babies & parenting issues. [This is a snippet from Chapter 7.]
Do you see a pattern? Blog about stuff your customers are interested in, need to know or are passionate about
This applies whether you're B2C or B2B. Here are two examples to get you thinking:
B2B Example
You're a B2B company that manufactures barcode labelmakers for Fortune 500 companies. Start a blog about RFID (radio frequency identification), the hottest thing in supply chain logistics.
Doesn't matter if you sell RFID-enabled devices yourself (although it wouldn't hurt if you do). Position yourself on the bleeding edge.
There are already lots of blogs out there about RFID. So perhaps yours will be a "useful resource blog" that points to other blogs, sites, articles, etc. about RFID.
B2C Example
You're Patagonia and you make all those cool fleece pullovers and other mountain climbing gear that the rest of us wear around town. (Hey guys, why in heck aren't you blogging? Your branding is superb but don't you want to hear more from your customers?)
Launch a blog about the problem of discarded oxygen tanks on the slopes of Mt. Everest. Seriously.
In other words, choose a topic that is very specific and that is congruent with the psycho demographics of your customers. Slice your topic as finely as you can. Then yours will be the key online destination (and will get the highest Google rankings) for those keywords.
Of course, once visitors arrive at your blog, they'll see the links back to your main site. And they'll likely click on over to check you out.
How RSS Content Items Are Structured: The Marketing Perspective
Before we venture into the world of specific RSS content opportunities, we need to understand how individual RSS content items are structured from the marketing perspective.
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First, just to recap from Section I.:
• RSS content items are presented as a linear list of individual content items within an RSS feed.
Individual content item
Content item title & link to full-text content on the feed publisher’s website
Content item summary
Content item time-published
Screenshot: CNET News Feed; displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader [desktop RSS Reader]
• RSS content items contain the actual content you deliver to your subscribers and other audiences, such as the RSS search engines and directories.
• Each RSS content item usually represents one individual story or piece of content, such as a news item or individual article.
• Each RSS content item comprises of several elements. From the technical perspective, the most important elements are the title, the link and the description.
Taking a Marketing Perspective on RSS Content Items
As a marketer preparing an RSS content strategy you need to first understand how the RSS content item elements should be translated to the marketing language to take best advantage of them and second, how each of these content items must best be used to achieve the most impact.
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Let's take another look at the key RSS feed content items, but this time from the marketing perspective:
RSS Content Item Title & Link
RSS Content Item Description
corporate news item, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
The RSS Content Item Title
The RSS content item title serves the same function as:
• An e-mail subject line The e-mail subject line decides whether someone is going to open your e- mail message or not. It's the same with the RSS content item title. It needs to capture the subscriber's attention and convince him to read the entire content item. As such, it needs to provide enough value for the reader, needs to have a strong integrated motivational element to get the reader to want more, and it needs to be short enough to actually be visible in whole.
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• A sales letter headline or article title In direct marketing, a good sales letter headline is 80% of the game. If the headline pulls, the reader will go on and start reading the entire sales letter. If it doesn't, she won't. Write your RSS content item titles the same way you would write a sales letter headline, or a compelling article title. Remember, the function of the content item title is to get the reader to read more.
• A webpage META title When your RSS feeds are indexed by RSS-enabled search engines and directories, the content item title is what they display in their search results. From this perspective, the RSS content item title needs to convince the search engine user to click on the title to read more. But they also look for the keywords used in the title and give them additional weight when ranking your content, meaning that the content item title also needs to be "search engine friendly", containing the keywords that are most important for the placement of this one content item.
The RSS feed content item title carries out both of the three functions simultaneously.
The Link
The RSS content item link is hidden behind the content item title. Its job, when clicked on, is to bring the visitor from the content item to full-text version of the content item on your website, or if you're already publishing in full-text, to the webpage that carries the same full-text version of the article on your website.
This link is relevant for two distinct purposes:
• How you format the link affects whether you are going to get more search engine relevance or better RSS metrics.
• The landing page needs to lead your visitors to take the action you want them to take.
Formating the Link When formating your RSS feed content item links you have two choices:
• making the link "search engine friendly" or
• making the link "metrics friendly".
Usually, if we want to completely track all of the different sources of our visitors, and even more importantly, of our customers, we add special identifier parameters to all of our links that are used outside of our website.
For example, if we wanted to precisely track which of the visitors to a specific webpage on our website came through our RSS feed, or if we wanted to precisely track which of our RSS feed content items are generating the most sales, we would need to add a tracking URL parameter to the RSS content item link.
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Let's presume that a normal link from an RSS feed item to the full-text version of that content item on our webpage looks like this: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?article=2456
If we now wanted to precisely track how many people come from this specific RSS content item to our website, and what they do after they visit this specific webpage, we would add a tracking parameter to the link: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?article=2456&src=feed1
In this case, we added the src=feed1 parameter to the link.
When using our web analytics package to analyze our website, this parameter would tell us how many people came from the feed to the site and what they did, for example whether they purchased something or not, and a host of other data.
However, adding tracking parameters to our links also means that they become less "search engine friendly", meaning that they won't have as big an impact on our rankings.
In the end you need to decide which is more important for you, better search engine rankings or better metrics, and then based on this decide whether to use tracking parameters or not.
The Landing Page Landing pages are one of the key elements of search engine marketing campaigns, e-mail marketing campaigns, online advertising campaigns and even offline advertising campaigns. They are used to capture the prospect from an ad campaign and provide him with the information directly pertaining with that ad campaign.
For example, if we advertised widget ABC through an online ad campaign, we would always direct all the prospects, after clicking on the ad, to a landing page designed specifically for that campaign. We wouldn't drive them to our corporate site, or to a different product page. We would bring them directly to what the ad is advertising, and make sure that we do everything possible to get them to take our desired action on the landing page.
In the world of RSS, the webpage that we link to from an individual RSS content item has the function of the landing page.
• It always needs to contain the full-text version of the content item.
• It needs to lead the visitors to the action we want them to take.
The first one is easy, but the second one does require some consideration.
What do you want your visitors to do, once they come to the full-text version of the content item on your website. Sure, you want them to read the content item.
But once they are there, you also have the opportunity to lead them to a more profitable action for you, such as the purchase, whitepaper download, coupon download and similar.
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Keep this in mind when creating the templates for the webpages that carry the full- text content of your content items, and structure them accordingly.
The Description
The description element usually carries the actual content you want to deliver, either a paragraph, a full-text article with text-only, or a full-text article with graphics.
The important thing to remember, from the marketing perspective, is that the description element carries all the information you would for example send in a direct sales e-mail, except for the letter headline.
That includes:
• The message body
• Your signature
• The PS line (if you're ever using it)
This is where you tell your story and where you get your readers to take action.
The CTA
The CTA or the Call-to-Action is the part of your sales message (or any other piece of content) that specifically asks the reader to take a specific action.
The challenge with RSS feeds is getting subscribers to take relevant and measurable action, such as submitting their business information (lead generation), making an offline or online purchase, submitting an enquiry or writing about you.
This is what the CTA does for you.
The other approach is simply providing your content via RSS, without any strategic Calls-to-Action (CTAs), and only benefiting from your content being read, but not leading visitors to any actions.
This of course not only applies to your RSS content, but also to how you take advantage of your on-site content to better achieve your business goals.
The important thing to understand is that the CTA is not any kind of technical element of RSS or a part of the RSS specification. Instead, you need to integrate the CTA into existing RSS content item elements.
Your RSS feed content item CTAs depend on:
• What is the most important action you want your subscribers to take after reading a specific content item in the corporate news feed?
• Who the prevailing target audience for the corporate news feed is?
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Furthermore, if you are publishing your RSS feeds in summary format, your CTAs will need to be on the page where subscribers land after clicking on the content item title in their feed Reader.
In that case, the clicking-through activity to read the full content item on the website is the CTA in the feed, but other CTAs need to be strategically placed within that same content on the website.
If however you are publishing full-text RSS feeds, your CTAs need to be strategically placed within the RSS feed itself.
You also need to take into account that your RSS feed is bound to be syndicated to RSS search engines & directories, where it will be made available to the mass audience, and might even be syndicated to other media sites.
Since the feed will drive more attention towards your related webpages, you need to make sure that you can actually lead your readers from those webpages to taking the action you want them to take … unless your only goal is getting your content read.
Let's take a look at the possibilities …
Action Type Target Audience Possible CTAs CTA Type & Position Submit business Business prospects • Download a free • RSS content item information (lead whitepaper title Æ click to site generation) • Register to receive • Inline advertisement more information at the bottom of the • Register for a free content item demo • Links within the • Subscribe to 10 tips content item on solving this problem • Submit an inquiry • Request a free catalog • Request consultant contact • View free demo Make an online Business prospects / • Special discount • RSS content item purchase consumers offer for the title Æ click to site mentioned product • Inline advertisement • Order the product at the bottom of the from our webstore content item • Locate online • Links within the retailers carrying content item this product • Trial offer Make an offline Business prospects / • Locate retailers • RSS content item purchase consumers carrying this title Æ click to site product / Store • Inline advertisement locator at the bottom of the • Receive a special content item
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discount coupon for • Links within the purchase of this content item product in your local store • Order free catalog • Request sales call for more information Submit an inquiry / Media representatives • Request an • RSS content item write about you interview with our title Æ click to site experts • Inline advertisement • Request a free at the bottom of the media whitepaper content item • Request an • Links within the evaluation copy content item • Request additional information Make a purchase & Business prospects / • Consumers: subtle • RSS content item write about you consumers & Media purchasing title Æ click to site representatives information (all • Consumers: subtle (most corporate news is options from links within the targeted at both so it above) content item may need to perform • Media • Media double duty) representatives (all representatives: options from inline advertisement above) at the bottom of the content item
As it's evident from the chart above, there are three key CTA locations within RSS content items:
• RSS content item title The RSS content item title is the alpha-and-omega RSS CTA, which is always present in each content item Æ clicking on the item title will bring the visitor to a web version of that same content on your website, giving you an opportunity to get the visitor to take specific action when landing on your page. Once this happens, it’s the website's mission to get the visitor to take an action, the RSS feed simply brought the visitor to the website.
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• Inline advertisement in the content item Inline advertisements in the content item are usually placed at the bottom of the content item and especially marked as an advertisement, often displayed with a border separating the advertisement from the rest of the content. They can either be graphical or pure text. The point with these is that you can use them to get your subscribers to take specific action after reading the full content item. For example, if your content item discusses a new technology introduced by your company, the inline advertisement at the bottom could entice visitors to download a free whitepaper about this new technology, also giving you their business information (lead generation) you need to follow-up with them and turn them into customers. The inline advertisement at the bottom can also be part of the actual text of the content item, with no special indication that it's a CTA. In the case above, the invitation to download the whitepaper would simply be a closing paragraph in the content item, an integral element of the news item.
• Links within the content item Finally, individual links strategically placed inside the text can lead visitors to take specific actions on your website, directly related with the text. If your news is covering your latest technology, a link within the text might lead to a list of products already equipped with the technology, a list of industry expert interviews on the topic and more.
To make this easier to imagine let's take a look at an example of an RSS feed content item that might be published in a MarketingStudies.net RSS feed to promote this book:
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CTA #1: RSS Content Item Headline
CTAs #2: Links within the content item, leading to individual pages on the website where a conversion might happen
CTAs #3: Inline advertisement in the content item
Screenshot: A possible example of a corporate news item, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
In this example we took the combined approach, trying to entice prospects to buy and media representatives to write about this story:
• CTA #1: RSS content item headline The RSS content item headline leads the visitor back to the webpage with exactly the same content as in the RSS feed content item, since this is a full-text content item. Once at the website, the visitor is introduced to more on-site CTAs to entice the desired action.
• CTAs #2: Links within the content item Strategically placed links within the content item, which lead to specific additional content on the webpage that provides additional information and also builds on that additional information to generate the sale.
• CTAs #3: Inline advertisement in the content item The inline advertisement at the bottom of the content item is targeted at media representatives, inviting them to either request a free evaluation copy or schedule an interview.
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This approach may not seem terribly typical at first, but once you consider that it allows you to better take advantage of your RSS content to get your readers to take action, it immediately becomes more inviting.
Much of your RSS feed sales success might actually depend on how well you position your CTAs in your RSS feed content.
Example: MarketingProfs http://www.marketingprofs.com Web site type: Specialized content site MarketingProfs.com uses a paid subscription model to generate most of its revenues, meaning that most of their top notch content is available only to paid subscribers. As such, their most important CTA is getting their RSS subscribers to opt for a paid content subscription. The articles related to their premium membership reports include inline notices in the content item that this content is available to paid members only, with a direct link to sign-up information, as well as downloads buttons that take the visitors to a download landing page with purchasing information. Clicking on the article title will on the other hand bring the subscriber to a full-text version of the article, with an additional on-site CTA to register as a paid member.
Screenshot: MarketingProfs RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
RSS Media Types and RSS Publishing Models
Before we venture into the different types of content you can publish using RSS, you also need to understand the various types of media that can be delivered via RSS and the different publishing models available for publishing RSS feeds.
Both of these main influence your dedicisions regarding your RSS content strategy.
RSS Media Types
RSS can be used to deliver a wide array of different media types of content.
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Text & Images Summaries
Still the most used media content type for RSS is delivering short text summaries, possibly with images, of full-text articles placed on the website. The user needs to click through from the RSS feed content item to the website to read the full-text article.
Full-text
Full-text feeds go beyond the basic text & images summaries, offering the full-text content of the articles in the RSS feeds themselves, enabling subscribers to read all the content from their RSS Readers.
Whitepapers, PowerPoint etc,
RSS also supports delivering various other files types, such as PDF whitepapers or PowerPoint presentations. In this case, these files are added to indvidiual RSS content items as attachments, called enclosures in the RSS language, which users can directly download to their computers and use from the application that supports these different file formats.
File attachments are usually published in connection with text & image summaries or full-text articles, simply adding to the user experience.
Podcasting & Videocasting
Podcasting & videocasting are all about delivering audio and video files to subscribers using RSS feeds. Individual audio or video files are attached to individual content items, where users can access them using their preferred media players or directly from the RSS Readers that provide this functionality.
As with other file attachments, audio and video files are usually delivered in combination with summaries or full-text content in the content item, contextually supporting the attached audio or video file.
RSS Publishing Models
In addition to a choice of different media formats, another consideration that needs to be made is how you actually deliver your content through RSS feeds.
There are several possibilities available, and all of them will impact your RSS marketing strategy and integration with your overall marketing strategy.
One-Size-Fits-All and Topical RSS Feeds
This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your target audiences at once or publishing multiple topical RSS feeds, which always remain the same. The easiest to do, can be done with any RSS publishing tool on the market …
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A small upgrade to this model, still used by the majority of RSS publishers today, is providing topical feeds that bring the same content to all subscribers, but giving subscribers a choice of which feeds they subscribe to.
Customizable RSS Feeds
The more and more complex you get with the different feeds you're offering, the more difficult it is for your visitors to select what exactly they want, simply because an individual subscriber might be interested in 10 of your 100 feeds, but he doesn't want to be subscribed to that many feeds by your company.
In this case the best way to go is to also offer your visitors the opportunity to customize your RSS feed Æ they decide exactly what content type and content topics they want to receive in one or a few RSS feeds they'll be subscribing from you.
The opportunities here are quite endless, as you can allow them to customize their feeds based on topics, content types, authors and more.
If this is the way you need to go because you are offering so much content via your RSS feeds that it makes it difficult for someone to subscribe to only one or a few feeds from you, you will need your RSS publishing solution to support feed customization.
Search-Based RSS Feeds
Search-based RSS feeds are a subset of customizable RSS feeds, and they work just like a search engine. You type in a certain keyword or keyword combinations and the search engine gives you the most relevant or the latest results for that keyword combination.
You can do the same with RSS, allowing your visitors to enter specific keywords and then get the content from you only based on those keywords.
Personalized RSS Feeds
Giving users the choice to customize the content they are receiving from you is one thing, but certain content may actually demand you to personalize the feed using your subscribers personal information.
The most basic variation, used to lift response, is addressing your subscribers by name or using other data about the customer from your database, such as his address, previous purchases etc.
In other cases a bank might want to deliver information directly relating to your bank account, directly via RSS, such as your latest credit card transactions, and so on.
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RSS Feeds With Content Targeting
Now imagine that you want to create individualized campaigns to individual subscribers, based on the information you already have in your database about their activities, demographics and so on, for example to send a promotion for product A only to those subscribers that might be most interested in product A.
In this case you will need an RSS solution that can pull this data from your database and then segment your subscribers based on the actual data.
Autoresponder RSS Feeds
Since their introduction, e-mail autoresponders have become a relatively mainstream internet direct marketing tool, although they haven't really made their way to the world of public relations.
The concept is simple Æ a certain action by your visitors on your website triggers a sequence of e-mail messages, delivered to that visitor, provided you have his e-mail address, over a period of several days.
Direct marketers use this to automatically communicate with the prospect after a certain action, trying to get him to do what they want.
The most common application is offering your visitors a free report, delivered to them via e-mail. After subscribing they start receiving consequtive parts of the report day after day or a every few days, receiving both new information as well as being exposed to the marketer's promotional message.
Other applications include autoresponder messages in relation to transactional e- mail:
• Subscribe to a free e-mail newsletter. The first autoresponder message thanks you for the subscription and also gives you access to one of the newsletter issues. A couple of days later, while you're still "hot as a lead", you receive another e-mail, pertaining to the newsletter topic, giving you more advice or information on the topic and trying achieve a sales conversion. And so on.
• Complete a webstore order. The first message thanks you for the purchase and recommends an additional product at a lower price. The second message tells you more about the product you purchased. The third messages makes a special additional purchase offer. The fourths message gives you some great additional tips, and so on.
• Start an online order, but don't finish it. The first message reminds you that there are still products in your shopping cart. The second message reminds you again, giving you added inscentive to complete the order. And so on …
The opportunities are practically limitless, but you get the picture.
This same approach can also be used by public relations professionals:
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• A journalist subscribes to your industry news newsletter. The thank you message brings him the latest issue, the second message invites him to send in questions, the third message provides valuable links to various industry content on your website and the fourth message delivers some amazing interviews with your team.
• You're trying to build public awareness of your expertise by establishing your company as a thought-leader in the industry. You start by offering a free whitepaper on a hot industry topic, but in order to download it your visitors needs to give you their e-mail addresses. When they do download, you send them a thank you e-mail with more interesting information. A couple of days later you send them a link to your thought-leadership blog and invite them to comment. Yet again a few days later you send them a great interview with your resident experts, and so on. Essentially, you're using autoresponders to facilitate direct interaction with your new prospect and continue building your thought-leadership position.
Now simply transform this concept into the realm of RSS.
Someone subscribes to your RSS feed. The first couple of content items, spread-out through the first week, serve as a series of welcome messages giving the new subscriber access to your top content and inviting him to actively participate. Your latest feed updates come through as well, but your new subscriber also gets the extra treatment (content) in the same feed.
And now apply this to anything you're doing with RSS, where it makes sense to follow-up with additional information to your new subscribers once they subscribe, of course depending on the feed topic and target audience.
Very few RSS tools today offer autoresponder capabilities, but some do.
Secure Feeds
RSS feeds can also be made secure, requesting the users to enter their credentials before being able to access the RSS feed content. Secure feeds can work with all the other RSS publishing models and can either use a single set of credentials for all the users or individual sets of access credentials for all users individually.
To Recap …
Think of your RSS publishing strategy and try to establish which of the these publishing models your RSS publishing tool should support:
• Topical or Target Audience Oriented RSS Feeds
• Customizable RSS Feeds
• Search-Based RSS Feeds
• Personalized RSS Feeds
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• RSS Feeds With Content Targeting
• Autoresponder RSS Feeds Types of RSS Content and How to Create It
Once you determine who your target audiences are, you need to start planning your RSS content.
The two key questions that first come to mind when mapping out your RSS feed content plan are:
• Exactly what kind of content do we publish in our RSS feeds?
• How do we create this content without having to hire an entire staff of online writers?
Both questions can be easily answered:
• What: RSS, being such a versatile content delivery channel, accommodates for publishing of almost any kind or type of content. It depends mostly on the types of content that your specific target audiences are interested in receiving from you, and on the content types needed to support your overall business model and content strategy.
• How: RSS content does not have to be created from scratch simply for the purpose of RSS publishing, but can rather be repurposed from your existing content creation efforts.
To answer these two questions in more detail, let's take a look at the actual content types you can publish via RSS.
Content Types Overview
Since there is almost no limit to the types of content you can publish via RSS, as long as it can be published in a linear list, it is near impossible to clearly define the boundaries between different content types.
As you start thinking about your own RSS feeds you will see that many of these types may in fact overlap, so mostly use this list to get a better idea of the various content you can publish, and then mix it according to what makes best sense for your company.
While most of the content types presented below could be published as standalone RSS feeds, many of them can be combined within single RSS feeds, depending on your content strategy.
It is also important to understand that the content types overviewed below do not represent the entire universe of possible content types for RSS delivery, but rather a limited selection of the most frequent content types published by companies.
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Content Type Overview How to Create It News Corporate News Different news about your • Your existing website company, ranging from various corporate news via RSS awards you receive, to • Your existing press releases management changes and your via RSS earnings statements Press Releases The press releases you issue • Your existing press releases using wire services and send via RSS directly to media representatives, broken-down into individual topics Editorial News Key industry news, coverage, • Your existing editorial news, events, tips and case studies if you are publishing it on covered by your in-house your website or in an e-mail specialists and editorial team, newsletter to generate wider industry • [OR] A new editorial team interest in your content and to write editorial news for company your entire online operation, not just for RSS publishing Third-Party News Republishing and aggregation of • Aggregate content from third-party news on what's new third-party RSS feeds and in your industry, to establish sites and filter it using an your website as a primary news RSS filtering service or a source for your industry full-scope RSS NewsMastering tool Latest Downloads Your latest downloads, such as • Your existing sales collateral whitepapers, PDF documents, (presentations, brochures, PowerPoint presentations, demo whitepapers, e-reports, …) software, audio and video • Preparing new marketing content and more, broken-down collateral to be used for by content topic your entire online operation, not just for RSS publishing • Creating specific downloads just for RSS distribution, such as podcasts Latest Website Updates Latest content from your • The latest content added to website in any website section, your website via RSS broken-down by topic Articles How-to Articles Educational and how-to articles • Your existing articles, if you on hot industry topics that are publishing them on your establish your credibility, website or in an e-mail provide real value to your newsletter subscribers and establish you as • Preparing new articles to be a knowledgeable leader in your used for your entire online industry operation, not just for RSS publishing Columns Opinion-based commentary or • Your existing articles, if you thought-leadership content, are publishing them on your where you comment on current website or in an e-mail
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industry happenings, criticize newsletter certain developments and offer • Preparing new articles to be your biased views of the state used for your entire online and future of the industry operation, not just for RSS publishing Interviews Interviews with your internal • Your existing interviews, if specialists, giving valuable you are publishing them on professional tips and increasing your website or in an e-mail your brand credibility, or newsletter interviews with outside experts • Preparing new interviews to to increase the interest in your be used for your entire online publications online operation, not just for RSS publishing Product Reviews Reviews of third-party products, • Your existing product if they are related with your reviews, if you are industry and provide an publishing them on your additional value or topic of website or in an e-mail interest to your customers, or if newsletter you are an affiliate marketer • Preparing new product reviews to be used for your entire online operation, not just for RSS publishing • Republishing (with permission) product reviews from other sources or even getting them from product suppliers Other Article Types Essentially any kind of content • Either your existing articles, in the form of an article, writing new articles or including different research republishing third-party studies, your company case articles studies, industry statistical packages, etc. Blog Content Blog Updates Latest posts from your blog or • Your existing blog from your different corporate operations blogs, broken-down by authors or content topics Blog Comments Comments to your blog posts, • Your existing blog either made available for operations individual blog posts or in the form of total latest blog comments E-zine Publishing E-zine Notifications Notifications or short summaries • Writing a short notification of your e-mail e-zine, delivered or summary of your latest e- via RSS, with a backlink to a mail e-zine Web version of the e-mail e-zine Forum Updates Forum Updates Latest posts or topics from your • Your existing online forums online forum, delivered via RSS Promotional Content
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Product Lists List of your latest, most • Your existing product popular, most discounted etc. database products from different product categories, delivered in an RSS feed, with each product delivered as an individual RSS feed content item Coupons Savings coupons or savings • Your existing coupon coupons codes or notifications database delivered via RSS Follow-up Letters Follow-up letters to your new • Your existing follow-up subscribers or follow-up letters letter sequences delivered on-demand, to either • Writing new RSS-based build interest, build a follow-up sequences relationship or slowly ease the prospect into a buying decision Product Reviews Your own or third-party reviews • Product reviews on your site of your products, delivered via (such as product RSS commentary) • Your own product reviews already available in your company • Your product reviews from other websites or publishers • Your product reviews from other media, such as the print media Testimonials Testimonials given to you about • Testimonials received from your products from your your existing customers customers Advertising Inline Ads Advertisements delivered as • Your existing part of individual content items, advertisements, repurposed next to editorial content in from other media those items • RSS-specific advertisements • Third-party advertisements, for example from Google AdSense Standalone Ads Standalone ads delivered as • Your existing standalone RSS content items, advertisements, repurposed next to editorial content items from other media in the RSS feed • RSS-specific advertisements • Third-party advertisements, for example from Google AdSense Ad Feeds Full advertisement-based RSS • Your existing feeds, where each content item advertisements, repurposed is an advertisement from other media • RSS-specific advertisements • Third-party advertisements, for example from Google AdSense
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Customer Relationship Management Content Product Support Updates Various support updates for a • Your existing product products purchased by an support updates individual customer, such as • New product support additional instructions, updates, to be used for your additional documentation, entire online operation, not latest additions to the product just for RSS or service, answers to customer questions etc. Discounts & Announcements Special discount offerings for • Your existing customer your existing clients; new communications service announcements and • New customer similar communications, to be used for your entire online operation, not just for RSS Product Tips & Other Content Added value content for your • Your existing customer existing customers, such as communications high-value tips on using your • New customer products or other tips for communications, to be used improving their success in the for your entire online chosen field operation, not just for RSS Affiliate Updates New instructions, marketing • Your existing affiliate collateral, tactics, special communications promotions and more for your marketing affiliate partners Direct Communications to Any type of direct • Your existing customer Anyone communications to anyone, with communications the goal of improving customer relationships Internal Communications Third-Party News & Content Republishing and aggregation of • Aggregate content from third-party news on what's new third-party RSS feeds and in your industry, to better sites and filter it using an educate and inform your RSS filtering service or a employees or team members full-scope RSS NewsMastering tool Internal Announcements Internal announcements for • Your existing internal different teams, broken-down announcements, usually by announcement topic sent via e-mail or provided through your intranet Collaboration and Team Working Project updates, team member • Your existing internal notifications, team requests and collaboration and team similar working content Shared Calendars Team or individual calendars • Your existing shared that other team members or calendars service teams can subscribe to to better • Implementing an RSS-based coordinate activities shared calendar service Latest Intranet Content All the latest updates to your • Your existing intranet intranet content, broken-down content by topic Other Any other content you may want • Your existing internal to deliver to your internal communications
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audiences, such as balance sheets delivered to your investors Alternative RSS Content Ad Serving RSS can be utilized to serve • Your existing banner or advertisements to many other ads websites at the same time and make sure that all of them are running the latest ad or ad combination at the same time in any given time Ad Content Serving RSS can be utilized to serve • Your existing website content to dynamic ads in such content a way that a dynamic ad always • Writing new content for the displays the latest content from purpose of ad serving an RSS feed Personal Messaging One-on-one communications / between people with RSS- enabled one-on-one communications tools Other Database Content Items Other Database Content Items Essentially any content stored in • Your existing database your database, such as content items employment ads, personal ads etc., where RSS is either used to deliver these content items to other media or subscribers or is provided as a value-added service Mixed Content Types Mixed Content Types Mixing different content types • All of the above in a single RSS feed
If anything, this list should make it clear that RSS is not a separate internet marketing strategy, but rather an additional tool to deliver your content to your relevant target audiences.
Almost none of the content listed here is purely RSS based, but should instead be fully incorporated in your overall internet marketing strategy. RSS is just an additional part of the content delivery side of that strategy.
If you haven't started publishing a wider array of content for your entire online operation, this might be a good time to start. For example, if you're not publishing how-to articles on your website and in your e-zine yet, don't start publishing them just for the sake of RSS Æ start publishing them now for the sake of your entire internet marketing strategy, because it is going to improve your overall internet marketing results.
But in most cases you will find that most of the content that is appropriate for RSS delivery already exists in your company, you simply need to repurpose it, and not use RSS as a basis of a whole new content strategy.
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Now, let us take a look at these content types one by one.
News
News is often the most frequently updated web site content type, which is perfect for RSS content delivery. As soon as the latest news piece has been added to the website, it can immediately be delivered to your RSS subscribers. • No need to visit the website to see what's new, instead the news comes to your subscribers.
• No need to wait for a news item to be published in a weekly or monthly e- mail e-zine issue.
The importance of RSS for news delivery can hardly be disputed. In a world where everyone evades receiving more e-mail, RSS brings news to the table exactly when it is published and most relevant, while at the same time not polluting subscribers' e-mail inboxes.
However, it is nearly impossible to simply decide you want to publish a "news" RSS feed, since there are many different types of "news" and they generally do not mix well together.
Corporate News
Your corporate news is important to you, your employees, perhaps the press and maybe to some of your customers. But not to the majority of your target audiences. • In most cases, corporate news is of little interest to your general e-mail e- zine subscribers, making it counterproductive to actually publish corporate news in an e-mail newsletter where click through-rates and conversion rates need to be high. But on the opposite, giving visitors that come as far as the corporate news section on your website an opportunity to subscribe to your corporate news makes perfect sense.
• The keyphrase here is "giving visitors that come as far as the corporate news section on your website ...", meaning that because corporate news is probably of little interest to most of your target audiences, it should not be a part of your main RSS feed or promoted heavily on other website sections.
In most cases, corporate news should be delivered as a separate RSS feed, or via many topical corporate news RSS feeds if your company is active in many industries or uses corporate news to communicate with different target audiences.
Examples of corporate news feeds might include:
• Social responsibility corporate news
• Awards
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• Investor relations
• Corporate news for the technology sector
• Corporate news for the medical sector
• Etc.
Example: Edelman http://www.edelman.com [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site Example: General corporate news The Edelman PR agency provides a most typical corporate news feed, writing mostly about their new hires and their strategy.
Screenshot: Edelman's corporate news feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader In terms of corporate news, Edelman offers only one general corporate news RSS feed.
Example: Intel http://www.intel.com [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site Example: Investor relations corporate news feed
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Among other RSS feeds, Intel offers a news feed for investor relations, delivering the latest corporate news of interest to current and potential investors in the company.
Screenshot: Intel's Investor Relations RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader As it's evident from the screenshot and from taking an actual look at the feed, Intel's investor relations feed falls nicely under the corporate news umbrella, providing only the news of interest to a limited corporate communications audience. Intel's approach can also be taken as an example of providing individual RSS feeds for their respective topics or target audiences, giving their visitors a choice of what content to specifically subscribe to.
Example: McDonald's http://www.mcdonalds.com [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site Example: Investor relations corporate news feed & Public relations feed While McDonald's aren't offering purely text-based feeds, they are taking a rather unique approach to corporate news by instead providing audio and video recordings of their news and delivering them via RSS (podcasting/videocasting).
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On their corporate site, McDonald's offer an RSS feed with all of their public relations podcasts/videocasts and an RSS feed indented only for their investor relations communications. The first provides social responsibility corporate news, such as how McDonald's assures food safety and other content, intended to increase the public image of McDonald's, while the latter provides summary information from their shareholders' meetings.
Screenshot: McDonald's social responsibility & investor relations feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader Clicking on any of their content items will bring you directly to their audio or video files. The McDonald's approach is similar to Intel, although they offer one RSS feed that includes both social responsibility content and investor relations content and one just for investor relations content.
Example: Cisco http://www.cisco.com/ [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site Cisco takes a special approach to delivering their corporate news via RSS. For a corporation the size of Cisco that caters to end corporate customers as well as business partners, corporate news itself has to be broken-down into more than one category.
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As such Cisco provides RSS feed customization where visitors can select whether they are interested in news for customers and/or news for business partners, the content topics they are interested in and their regions. The RSS feed is then customized for each visitor (actually, Cisco created a few different feeds that cater to these different interests and simply provides access to the right one based on the user's interests), giving him access only to the corporate news he is interested in. Cisco's corporate news focuses very much on the corporation itself and as such isn't that interesting to the general public or to Cisco customers not very deeply involved with Cisco.
Screenshot: The Cisco RSS customization interface, as displayed on their website
Screenshot: Cisco's news releases feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
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Press Releases
Press releases are usually the first thing that comes to mind to most corporations when considering their RSS strategy: they're easily implemented, readily available and don't cause any headaches.
The only problem with delivering press releases via RSS is that few parties will actually want to subscribe to a press release feed, since they rarely offer any real value, and at the same time, getting press releases from press release clearing houses is usually easier and provides for much better results in terms of receiving only the content you care about.
But, if you already have a press release section on your site, you should still deliver those press releases via an invidual RSS feed or many RSS feeds for different press release topics, if you cover more than one business segment.
Example: Intel http://www.intel.com [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site Example: Press releases feed Intel also provides a dedicated press releases feed, carrying only their latest press releases. Although supplying a large and highly segmented market, Intel offers only one press releases feed to cover all of their various business segments.
Screenshot: Intel's Press Room RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Making Press Releases Work The first order of business is understanding that with the power of online syndication, press releases can no longer only be aimed at media representatives.
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• A press release, delivered via an RSS feed, will be syndicated to various RSS search engines and directories, where all of your target audiences may find them, including your prospects. Getting the most from your releases will require you to write them not only for the press, but also for your prospects. As such, press releases should also carry purchase information or other information to help you reach your goals.
• A press release, submitted via press release wire services, will not only find its way to various media representatives, but will also be published on mainstream news portals such as Yahoo! News and Google News, making it accessible to the largest possible audience.
In terms of content, this simply means you have to make your press releases:
• more valuable to the reader, giving her concrete and useful information;
• easy to read, understand and skim through.
To help you craft better press releases that are suitable for online syndication, here are some quick tips from a PR professional, Sally Falkow:
Key Aspects of Optimized Press Releases by Sally Falkow, expansion+
The news engine algorithm is different from the web search algorithm. Three aspects of the release will determine how successful your placement, readership and response will be.
1. The release must still be a newsworthy item.
Make sure that the release is written like a news story. People do not want to read thinly disguised advertisements in a News Engine. Even though you may get the number one placement on the page of search results, when the reader clicks through to your release, the content must grab their attention and be of value, or they won't read it.
2. Your release must be optimized according to the algorithms of Google and Yahoo! News.
Recency, news value and editor trust feature strongly in this equation. It takes some study to become familiar with the News Engine parameters.
Quick optimization tips
• Do keyword research before you write the release. Remember that search engines index content by keyword and relevance. Identify at least two relevant search terms that your target audiences are likely to use for a news search. Bear in mind that news keywords differ from web search keywords.
• Use the main keyword in the headline
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• Keep you headline short and to the point. Search engines are not like editors – they are not looking for an attention-grabbing, clever headline. They are looking for keywords.
• Add a sub-head that has keywords in it
• Keep the release to under 500 words
• Tie your news release into a current news term that is drawing traffic.
• Put the keywords in the first paragraph and the last paragraph
• Use variations and synonyms for the word or phrase in the body of the release, don’t always use the exact same phrase
• Build anchor text links in the news release that links back to related content on your web site. But ensure that your website is set up to receive these visitors. Most websites lose over 60 percent of their traffic off the first page due to usability and content issues.
• Insert an image into the news release, ensuring your photo gets picked up and displayed in Google News
• Track the results and conversion so that you know whether you online PR is working.
Editorial News
Editorial news, in contrast to corporate news and press releases, is about providing coverage of various industry developments, events and other news, with the intent of providing your website visitors with added value and additional incentive for visiting your website. Simply put, traditional corporate sites and webstores do not provide much incentive for return visits, unless the prospect is actively browsing for your products or is in the purchasing mode. Editorial news bridges this gap, by creating incentive for frequent return visits, as well as for pulling the visitor deeper into the website on the first visit. For the company the benefit are: • increased visitor stickiness, • enhancing the company brand name by further positioning the brand as a thought-leader in the subject matter or industry, • turning the website into a hub for relevant industry news in the chosen industry, • increasing search engine rankings and traffic from other sources. RSS delivery introduces additional positives to the mix:
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• frequent content updates, immediately when the content becomes available, to increase content relevancy without burdening subscribers with daily e-mail blasts; • increased content reach and distribution through RSS search engines and directories.
Example: Peppers & Rogers Group http://www.1to1media.com [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site The Peppers & Rogers Group is one of the world's premium Customer Relationship Management consulting companies. Their 1to1.com website offers an extremely rich content database of CRM related articles and industry news. Peppers & Rogers base much of their strategy on educating the public on CRM, which is why delivering CRM industry news makes perfect sense for them. Although e-mail is their primary content delivery channel, they also allow their users to subscribe to their RSS feed, which delivers mostly editorial industry news and some updates on their upcoming events and webinars, which as well could be considered as industry news.
Example: Aspenbloom WellPet http://www.aspenbloom-wellpet.com Web site type: Corporate site Aspenbloom WellPett is a small business offering health-care and well-being products for pets. The company generates revenues from its product sales, but also builds its recognition and reach by providing relevant tips and advice for taking care of your pet, using RSS. "Aspenbloom WellPet will bring you loads of resources, tips, and advice to the pet owner to care for your pet in a natural, holistic, proactive approach to pet wellness." This niche business shows us how small businesses as well, not only larger corporations, can provide relevant educational content as a part of their marketing strategy, and deliver it at a low operating costs to its prospects and customers using RSS.
Example: Fly Away Simulation http://flyawaysimulation.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized news site The Fly Away Simulation is one of the most popular flight simulation portals on the web, offering news and information on flight simulators.
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As such most of their content is editorial content, and they use their RSS feed to deliver editorial flight simulation news to their visitors.
Example: BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk [RSS] Web site type: General news site Traditional media companies are among those that can take the greatest advantage of RSS, as they need to deliver large amounts of content to their users every day. They are also the companies that publish the most really editorial content that is, at least in most cases, unbiased and objective. The BBC web site is no exception, offering its visitors a variety of RSS feeds that deliver BBC's latest news to their RSS aggregators.
Example: Fiery-Foods.com http://www.fiery-foods.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized news site The Fiery-Foods.com web site is a great example that proves that RSS isn't reserved only for corporations and traditional media, but is especially of great use to small businesses. The web site found a very interesting niche, covering news, events, recipes and practically everything else you can imagine on the topic of fiery foods and barbecue. They use RSS to deliver the most interesting industry news on their topic. A great resource for everyone interested in fiery foods and barbecue. And they even publish a bi-monthly print magazine on the topic.
Third-Party News
Third-party news is all about republishing news headlines and short summaries of relevant industry news on your site, with backlinks to the original source and the entire story, and then delivering this same content via RSS feeds.
Why would you want to do this?
• You want to enrich the visitor experience by offering more of the latest relevant content and news from your industry, turning your website into a hub for your specific field.
• You want to increase your website relevance for the search engines, by providing more relevant and frequently updated content.
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• You don't have the resources to prepare your own editorial news, or you don't have the resources to prepare your own editorial news with satisfactory frequency. Additional third-party news will add value for your visitors, making them more prone to come back later.
Whatever your reasons for publishing third-party news, RSS will make it easy and fluid:
• RSS NewsMastering tools will help you watch the internet for the latest most relevant news for re-publication and may even filter-out the best content and automatically republish it on your site.
• RSS will help you deliver this content to your visitors, adding value and helping you generate more traffic to your site.
However, there are several issues you need to keep in mind:
• When republishing third-party news you will generally not be allowed to place full-text content on your site and in your feed, but rather provide only summaries with backlinks to original news stories.
• You are advised to ask the author for permission prior to republishing his or her content, even if you're only republishing content summaries.
• For third-party news publishing to work, you need to select only the most relevant content and then further categorize that in highly niche topics.
Example: Kolabora http://www.kolabora.com Web site type: Niche news site Kolabora.com, part of the MasterNewMedia.org network, offers the latest third- party news from the online collaboration and web conferencing industry and is considered as one of the top resources in the field.
The website uses a third-party RSS aggregation & filtering tool to aggregate the latest content in the field, filter it, feed it to the website engine and provide it as an RSS feed.
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Screenshot: The Kolabora.com website, covering the latest online collaboration and web conferencing news and other content, using third-party syndicated content to bring their visitors the latest from the world of online conferencing
Making Third-Party News Publishing Work For You Since you are publishing third-party news and not your own, different rules for "monetizing" this content apply:
• Most publishers and authors will not allow you to place advertisements or CTAs next to their content, especially inline within the content items carrying their news. When this is the case, place your CTAs or advertisements as standalone ads within the RSS feeds, within their own content items.
• If your publishers don't object, point your RSS content items, carrying their news summaries, to your website and only provide backlinks to their original content form there. That will give you the opportunity to present your subscribers with your CTAs directly on your site, since you cannot do it from the actual content items in your feed.
Latest Downloads
If you frequently add new documents, such as PDF files (whitepapers, free reports, product presentations etc.), PowerPoint presentations, software downloads or other download files to your web site, you might want to consider publishing an individual "downloads" RSS feed or several "downloads" RSS feeds by topic, carrying only your latest downloads. The more frequently you make such files available, the more sense it makes to provide a special RSS feed for them.
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These feeds may either only notify subscribers of the latest downloads and then make the downloads available through a link in the content item, or even better provide the downloads as attachments (enclosures) to individual content items. Either way, this approach is perfect for marketers relying on whitepapers to generate relevant leads, or as a support vehicle for software producers, enabling them to deliver software updates and latest downloads directly to their subscribers.
Example: Oracle http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/index.html Web site type: Corporate site Oracle provides an RSS feed with new software downloads, as well as an RSS feed with critical software patches. Their approach is using the feed to lead the visitors to the website and offer them the download option, as well as more information, there.
Screenshot: Oracle's New Downloads RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Latest Website Updates
Latest website update feeds would deliver all of the latest content on a specific website within an RSS feed, making it easy for anyone to track any new content additions to the site.
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Considering all the other approaches to delivering the latest content from your site, such as specific news or article feeds, this approach seems quite outdated, not offering enough relevant value, simply because no one is really interested in all of the latest content from your site, but rather in specific sections of your site. For example, most of your visitors will never be interested in an update to your About Us page, and so on.
But even latest website update feeds might be useful for some organizations, especially internally, being used as an update system that would allow the website editor to see what content has been recently changed on the website by anyone on his team, allowing him to quickly glance at it and if necessary further edit it.
Articles
News items are usually very short and provide summarized information that can be digested quickly. Articles on the other hand usually provide more in-depth information and solutions to specific problems. Most internet marketers today are publishing their own articles to educate their target audiences, prove their credibility, disclose their approach to certain problems and share their case studies and results. The point of all of this, naturally, is to maximize your business results, by: • establishing your company as a thought leader in your industry or niche;
• educating your prospects and preparing them for the business relationship;
• providing evidence of why it's a good decision to do business with you;
• adding value to the business relationship with your existing clients;
• increasing loyalty.
These articles usually form a "knowledge base" that the company provides for its target audiences, including: • How-to articles • Columns • Interviews • Product reviews • And other article types Most companies will publish such articles either only on their website or even more frequently in their e-mail newsletters. Publishing this same content via RSS adds additional benefits:
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• Additional search engine and other online visibility for the articles you are already writing. • The ability for your subscribers to receive the articles just as they become available, instead of having to wait for the next e-zine issue to receive them. • The ability for your subscribers to receive the articles without further crowding their e-mail inboxes.
Example: MarketingProfs.com http://www.marketingprofs.com Web site type: Specialized information site MarketingProfs.com specializes in providing in-depth articles on various marketing topics. While they do use their e-mail newsletters as their primary channel for delivering their content, they also provide their visitors with an RSS feed. The MarketingProfs.com web site is a typical example of providing recently added articles via RSS. In contrast to providing short news via RSS, these content updates provide access to longer articles, which require quite some time to digest.
Blog Content
Blogs were one of the first website media types to utilize the power of RSS, most often completely evading e-mail delivery and opting only for RSS content delivery.
Blog Updates
Blog updates deliver the latest posts to an individual blog, most often as a single RSS feed for the entire blog, with each blog post carried in an individual content item, and sometimes also through multiple RSS feeds delivering content for their respective blog topics.
Example: Seth's Blog http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ Web site type: Individual blog Seth Godin's blog is a classical example of a blog by an individual expert, sharing his thoughts and ideas on a journal style web site. Well, actually it's not really only a journal style web site, since the blog is only part of Seth's "corporate" web site (hard to call it corporate, since Seth really isn't a corporation, but it is a "company" web site or an "individual professional" web site). Seth calls this type of blog a "writer's blog":
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"Writer's blogs. You're reading one. These are blogs that while they occasionally riff about today's news, are mostly an opportunity for the writer to engage in an extended monologue. The monologue is influenced by reader feedback and new happenings, so it's a lot more interactive than a book, but it certainly isn't a conversation. I think this is a very new form of media (it's a process, not a batch)." As such it's very straight forward. Seth "simply" (simple is not exactly the right word, since most of his posts are very thinking pieces) posts his marketing views on the world and occasionally some reports on happenings revolving his work, such as his new projects. The RSS feed is the same Æ delivering latest content updates for the blog. Who can write such a blog? Practically everyone that has a relevant opinion on a specific theme that is interesting enough for people to read. But individual blogs will mostly benefit authors, consultants and professionals building a brand of themselves. On the other hand, we are seeing increasing numbers of company CEOs publishing their own blogs, which also, if written appropriately, positively impact the entire company image. Such CEOs are using their blogs as a way of communicating personally with their public, generating a more personal and friendly image of the company and generating feedback.
Example: MarketingVOX|News http://www.marketingvox.com Web site type: Specialized news site (news blog) MarketingVOX|News covers different internet marketing news with an emphasis on internet advertising … and it could also be defined as a "news blog", using Seth Godin's definition. They provide daily news coverage on internet marketing, which is basically the "best of today's net" on the subject. They collect this news from around the web, posts links to the original news article and provide additional commentary and opinion … or simply summarize lengthy articles. Their content is delivered using e-mail and RSS Æ each content item leads to the short news article on their web site, which summarizes the news and provides a link to the full story on the originating web site. This type of blog format is especially appropriate for companies that want to provide additional value to their visitors by giving them access to relevant industry news, adding their own editorial comments and expertise (to increase their credibility and establish themselves as experts in the field) to the mix.
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Of course, there's nothing easy about this approach, because your editors need to keep a constant eye on what's happening in the industry every day and provide relevant commentary that will improve your position on the market, not hurt it.
Example: Jupiter Research http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/ Web site type: Corporate site "JupiterResearch provides unbiased research, analysis and advice, backed by proprietary data, to help companies profit from the impact of the Internet and emerging technologies on their business." Jupiter Research took a very proactive approach to integrating blogging in to their marketing strategy. Just consider this simple fact: Jupiter Research is a company that bases its reputation on knowledge and expertise. But knowledge and expertise come from real people. The experts are at the forefront. This has two important implications: • A company's position is improved as the position of its experts improves. As the company's experts become known as thought leaders, that rubs off on the company as well Æ it too becomes respected as a thought leading company, a true expert in the field.
• If such experts become well respected, people want to hear more from them. They want to read their opinions and find out what they think about "hot" industry issues. They want their insights and advice. And what better place to get that than through blogs written by these experts, with the blogs naturally being published on the company's web site? The natural consequence of this is increased traffic to the corporate web site.
As you can see, blogs written by your experts have an important place in your marketing strategy. And not to forget, since blogs mostly contain short news or opinion content pieces, they are much easier to write than regular in-depth articles, which makes it easier for the experts to write them and for you to convince them to do so. Jupiter Research must have recognized this fact, as they currently host 12 blogs by their experts, which all cover different analytical topics. Each blog links back to the corporate site and especially emphasizes "getting information about becoming a Jupiter Research client". And each blog provides its own RSS feed.
Top Tips to Make Your Blog Work
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In their highly popular book on blogging, Naked Conversations, authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel give 11 key tips to make blogging work for you:
1. Get found easily
2. Read and comment on blogs before starting your own
3. Keep if simple and focused
4. Show passion
5. Demonstrate authority
6. Allow comments
7. Be accessible
8. Tell a compelling personal story
9.. "Be linky"
10. Build real world relationships
11. Use your referrer log
Blog Comment Updates
Allowing comments on your blog is one of the blogging best practices, although many bloggers decide not to do it either due to fear of being flamed, not having the time or the resources to deal with blog comments or due to ever increasing blog comment spam.
But if you do decide to allow blog comments, delivering these as RSS feeds is an important element of keeping the conversation going.
There are two approaches available:
• Providing one RSS feed for all the recent blog comments, with each comment as an individual content item
• Providing individual comments RSS feeds for individual blog posts, with each comment as an individual content item
The Blog Comments CTA If you are going to provide a blog comment RSS feed, it is advised you make the comments available in full-text in the feed and provide direct links for follow-up comments.
If you decide to provide one RSS feed for all the recent blog comments, make sure that each comment also contains a direct link to the commentary form for that specific post.
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E-zine Publishing
For many marketers, e-mail e-zine or e-mail newsletter publishing is still the predominant form of mass online communication with their subscribers.
Quick Action Tips: Increasing the Relationship Value of Your e-Zine
• Give your subscribers the opportunity to ask you questions from your field of expertise and provide answers to those questions in your e-zine. Kick-off the service by coming up with some of the opening questions by yourself. Once you start receiving similar questions transform them in to a single question and answer that.
• Enlist other experts from different fields that compliment yours to offer expert answers through your e-publication. Outside sources will give you more credibility, provide your readers with a larger array of solutions from different fields and generate your outside experts' additional publicity and recognition.
• Help your subscribers, customers and business partners to additional publicity by presenting one of them in each issue of the e-zine. People love to read about other people. You'll show your entire subscriber base that you care about who you do business with and the presented people will love you more because of the ego-boost you'll give them through the e-zine … and perhaps even help them attain new business.
• Ask your subscribers to give suggestions and opinions about the e-zine and how they would like to have it improved and then act on that information. Surveys are a great way of doing this.
• Answer the most common customer service questions and problems in the e-zine itself.
• Hold regular prize games --- but give the winners something of real value, preferably a real "hard" product. Integrate this with your surveys to get more respondents.
• Make it a company policy to give better deals on your offerings to your subscribers than to the general public.
• Customize the content of your e-zine to various needs of your individual subscribers. Allow them to select which areas your e-zine covers are of most interest to them and then send them only the information relevant to the chosen areas.
• Publicly congratulate your subscribers, customers and partners for their special achievements and key events. When a subscriber gives a good suggestion or comment publicly mention his name and thank him.
Even though e-zine publishing provides excellent long-term results and is not only a profitable sales tool, but even more so a relationship development tool, it is burdened with several issues that continue diminishing its profitability:
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• E-zines are traditionally delivered using e-mail and as such cannot escape e- mail deliverability issues. Either not delivered due to e-mail spam filters, or not read due to overflown e-mail inboxes, much of the potential impact of your e-mail newsletters is completely lost, and with that a large part of your investment.
• "Everyone" is already subscribed to dozens or even hundreds of e-mail e- zines, and unless your content is of especial importance to them, they won't be too happy about adding another e-zine to their subscription roster.
• If you're publishing a monthly or even a weekly newsletter, you might be sending out just too much content for someone to read in the short time they have available. Even those most quality e-zines provide high value, few subscribers have the time to read entire issues in full in one sitting … and when they don't they rarely get back to an old issue, unless you are among the top 1% that gets their undivided attention.
• While e-zines are an excellent direct communications tool, nothing happens for your search engine rankings when you send out your e-zine issue via e- mail.
Adding RSS as a supplementary content delivery channel for your e-zine will help you overcome these shortcomings and enable you to achieve a higher return on investment from the same level of e-zine preparation workload.
There are two distinct opportunities available:
• Using RSS to announce your latest e-zine to your RSS subscribers and make the full issue available on your website
• Using RSS to deliver individual content items from your e-zine
E-zine Notifications
What’s the use of an excellent e-mail e-zine if it’s blocked by spam filters or lost in the recipient’s mailbox? No matter how high quality content you prepare, if it’s not received it can’t be read and then acted upon to drive sales your way.
Namely, you need to stop thinking of your e-zine in terms of e-mail delivery, but rather consider it as a vehicle to present relevant and related content in a specific context of an individual e-zine issue, which can then be delivered to your recipients in multiple ways.
Just consider newspapers, which are delivered in print format, on the Web, via e- mail and RSS as well, all this to assure optimum delivery according to end-user preferences.
While most e-zine publishers will never consider presenting their e-zine in print format and delivering it via traditional delivery services, you need to explore all available means of online delivery. After e-mail, RSS is the first that comes to mind.
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Using RSS to announce your e-zine via RSS is the simplest and least expensive way to get started with RSS and it will help you make sure that your valuable content in fact does get delivered, at least to the audience using RSS.
In addition, the new e-zine issue will also be syndicated to the RSS search engines and directories and to the news engines, further increasing its reach, potential and traffic.
The Process: E-mail E-zines What is the process behind traditional e-zine publishing?
1. The publisher provides an e-mail e-zine subscription box, in which visitors enter their e-mail addresses, thus giving consent to the publisher to receive his communications and at the same time building his subscriber database.
2. The e-mail address is saved in the publisher’s subscriber database.
3. The publisher prepares an e-zine issue, usually creating an HTML document with either full-text e-zine issue articles and news or summaries of articles with links to full-text articles on his website.
4. The HTML document is packaged as an e-mail message by the publishers’ e- mail publishing solution and then sent to his subscriber database using e- mail as the delivery channel.
5. E-mail messages "travel through the internet" and are either stopped on the way by various spam filters and other "barricades" and are then either deleted automatically or delivered to the subscribers’ e-mail accounts.
6. Subscribers download these e-mail messages when they log-on to their e- mail account and can then manipulate them, either deleting them, moving them to another folder or reading them.
7. How can we now transfer this process to publishing your e-zine via RSS as well?
The Process: RSS content Delivery Now, let's quickly refresh the RSS content delivery process.
1. The publisher creates an RSS feed, basically just a simple XML file structured in a specific way, and provides a link to that XML file on his website and through other sites, search engines and directories. The file needs to first be created and then uploaded to the server, before a link to it can be provided. Fortunately, there are many tools available that will do this for you easily.
2. The visitor to the website subscribes to this RSS feed, by easily importing the link to the RSS feed in to his RSS Reader/Aggregator, instead of giving the publisher his e-mail address. In terms of subscriptions, the process is reversed. Instead of the visitor giving his e-mail address to the publisher, the publisher rather provides the visitor with a single URL, which then the visitor "puts" in his aggregator.
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3. The publisher now prepares a new story or article to include in the RSS feed. Usually, he first publishes this new story on his website and then simply prepares a summary and puts it in to the RSS feed/file. In this case, the summary in the feed simply notifies the reader of new full-text content being made available and pulls him to click-through to the full-text article on the website. Alternatively, the publisher could also provide full-text content of the story in the feed.
4. As soon as the publisher updates the RSS feed with the new story, the subscriber can retrieve it and read its content. The feed content is immediately available to the subscriber, without having to face any spam filters on the way.
The Process: RSS E-zine Delivery Let's now join the two models together and see what the RSS E-zine Delivery process looks like for using RSS to deliver new e-zine issue notifications.
1. The publisher creates an RSS feed intended to specifically notify subscribers of new e-zine issues and promotes it on the website. The feed should be promoted directly below the e-mail subscription box, serving simply as an alternative to e-mail delivery. Visitors have the choice of subscribing either via e-mail or RSS.
2. The publisher now takes the HTML document he already prepared for the e- mail version of the e-zine, and puts it online like any other webpage. What you basically need to do is practically take the same presentation and format that you already prepared for the e-mail e-zine and place it online for anyone to see.
3. The publisher then creates a new story or content item in the RSS feed, which is basically just a short summary of the e-zine and links it to the webpage he prepared earlier.
4. Once subscribers retrieve the feed, they see a new content item with the e- zine title and its description. After clicking on the title they are taken to the web version of the same e-zine that was also delivered via e-mail.
Example: The RSS & infoMarketing E-zine http://www.marketingstudies.net Web site type: Specialized content site MarketingStudies.net publishes a monthly e-mail e-zine on RSS marketing, which is also made available through an RSS notification feed. Each content item in the feed provides a brief overview of the content covered in an individual e-zine issue, and provides a link to that issue on the website.
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Screenshot: The RSS & infoMarketing E-zine RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader After clicking on the content item title or the inline link in the content item, the subscriber is taken to the Web version of the full newsletter, which was also sent to subscribers via e-mail.
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Screenshot: The RSS & infoMarketing E-zine Web version, as displayed in a Web browser
E-zine Content Feeds
The second available opportunity for delivering your e-zine via RSS is breaking it down into individual articles and then delivering these as individual content items within your RSS feeds.
Three general approaches are available:
• Breaking-down your e-mail e-zine into several content types and providing an individual RSS feed for each of the content types. Whenever a new article, which would eventually be published in your e-zine, is prepared, you immediately publish it in the feed, so that your subscribers don't have to wait to receive the entire e-zine issue to read it.
• Gradually releasing your e-zine content when it becomes available in a single RSS feed or in multiple topical RSS feeds.
• Releasing all of your e-zine content at the same time in a single RSS feed, regardless of the content topic or content type.
What you need to remember is that E-zine Content Feeds are essentially the same thing as all the other content types discussed in this chapter. The only difference is in the viewpoint:
• Other content types mentioned here in this form take the viewpoint of taking your website content sections and delivering them via RSS.
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• The E-zine Content Feeds viewpoint is about looking at your content from the e-zine perspective, and repackaging the e-zine content into RSS feeds.
The difference is in how you approach the problem, and not in the final "product" offered to your visitors.
RSS Feeds for Content Types This approach will generally work better when the articles and other content in your e-zine issues are not highly contextual to each other, meaning they can easily stand on their own and individual e-zine issues work just as well if individual content items are delivered separately; and when your e-zine provides multiple content types that generally wouldn't mix well together.
To give this a real-world perspective, just imagine a traditional print magazine or newspaper Æ most articles and stories can in most cases easily stand by themselves.
In this case you could provide your readers with several different RSS feeds:
• Latest news
• Latest blog posts
• How-to articles
• Latest product releases
• Latest forum conversations
• Latest downloads
• And so on …
You would use this approach when your e-zine actually does carry many different content types that do not mix well together.
Example: DMNews http://www.dmnews.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized content site The DMNews example actually falls into both categories: RSS Feeds for Content Types and Single RSS Feed or Topical Feeds for All the E-zine Content. In terms of content types, DMNews breaks-down their content into News, Opinion/Editorial and Sectors, and then each of these further down into several topics. Whenever a new article is added to the website, even prior to being published in the e-zine, their RSS subscribers receive it in their RSS feed.
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Screenshot: The DMNews RSS subscription page, as displayed in a Web browser, demonstrating their break-down of RSS content types and topics The interesting part with DMNews, although we are talking about the same content, is that they in fact provide multiple e-zine options that differ from the RSS feed options, instead rather focusing on specific major topics, such as internet marketing news, whitepaper of the day and so on. Essentially, their RSS feeds deliver the same content as their e-zine, only that they are much more segmented, giving their visitors more choice.
Example: ClickZ http://www.clickz.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized content site ClickZ is a typical example of providing multiple RSS feeds for multiple content types. On their website, they give you the option of subscribing to: • ClickZ News [latest internet marketing news] • ClickZ News Blog [latest posts from their blog] • ClickZ Experts [how-to articles] • ClickZ Stats [latest internet marketing stats] • ClickZ Features [interviews and case studies] • Search Engine Watch [the master feed for their Search Engine Watch portal] While ClickZ Features, ClickZ Stats and ClickZ News e-mail newsletters carry the same content as their RSS feed counterparts, ClickZ goes further with their e-mail newsletters for their ClickZ Experts section, enabling their visitors to subscribe to different ClickZ Experts topics. However, their Search Engine Watch portal is a different thing altogether.
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That portal offers only three different e-zines, while they offer a host of different RSS feeds: • Search Engine Watch Feed, which duplicates the content form their daily SearchDay e-mail e-zine • Search Engine Watch Blog Feed, which provides the same content as the Search Engine Watch Feed, but with additional content from their blog • Search Engine Watch Forums Feed notifies subscribers whenever a new thread is opened in their forum • Daily SearchCast Podcast Feed brings their latest podcasts • Search Engine Strategies Feed delivers the latest news on their search engine conferences
Single RSS Feed or Topical Feeds for All the E-zine Content When your e-zine contains mostly the same content type, such as articles, news or your latest blog posts, it makes sense to deliver these individual articles in a single RSS feed or topical RSS feeds just as they become available.
If your e-zine covers mostly the same topic, just go with a single RSS feed for all of the content.
If your e-zine covers multiple different topics or you publish different e-zines for each of your topics, go with the multiple topical feeds option.
Example: The RSS & infoMarketing E-zine http://www.marketingstudies.net Web site type: Specialized content site In addition to providing a single e-mail e-zine notification RSS feed, MarketingStudies.net also provides an RSS feed with all of the latest content from the website, which is then also published in the newsletter. Since the website is based on the "blog" website structure, this model lends itself especially well to their specific example. Whenever a new article is added to the MarketingStudies.net website, it immediately appears in the RSS feed. The best articles are then selected for the e- zine and delivered to subscribers via e-mail. Every article is simultaneously published on the website …
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Screenshot: The MarketingStudies.net website, as displayed in a Web browser … and in the RSS feed.
Screenshot: The MarketingStudies.net RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader And the best articles are then chosen to be published in the e-mail e-zine as well.
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Screenshot: The RSS & infoMarketing E-zin, as displayed in an e-mail client
Example: MarketingProfs.com http://www.marketingprofs.com Web site type: Specialized content site While the MarketingProfs.com e-zine offers several different content types, their single RSS feed carries only their latest articles, which are also currently displayed on the website. As soon as an article is published on the website, it's also published in the RSS feed. However, their RSS feed maintains the same article structure as the website, with the top website article also being placed first in the RSS feed.
Screenshot: The MarketingProfs.com website, as displayed in a Web browser
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Screenshot: The MarketingProfs.com RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Single RSS Feed with Simultaneous Release and Multiple Content Types
However, if your e-zine articles and other content work especially well together, for example if each e-zine issue covers a specific topic, you might be better off releasing all of your e-zine content in a single RSS feed at the same time when the e-zine is published.
The caveat is that this approach will generally work only for e-zines with daily or weekly publishing frequency, since updating your RSS feed less frequently than every week is too little.
Also, mixing different content types does require a strong editorial hand and the ability to make your feed as relevant as possible to an individual subscriber. Each content item has to work toward enriching the whole "issue".
Example: BabyCenter.com http://www.babycenter.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized content site & webstore BabyCenter.com has become a household name in the baby supplies & content segment, providing both the best selection of products and the best information, regardless of what stage the development of your baby is, from preconception to toddler and further.
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Their unique strength is in their approach to delivering information. On your first visit the website asks you to enter the date of birth or expected date of birth of your baby, so that they can then automatically customize all of the website content for you, as well as the weekly e-mail newsletter. Just recently added RSS feeds provide you with the same level of customization, delivering only the information that is right now, depending on the development stage of your baby, the most relevant for you. After your registration you are given access to one RSS feed only, which is updated daily and brings you a mix of the best content from BabyCenter.com that day, depending on your baby's development stage. The different content types that are mixed include: • Expert articles • Opinion polls • Babyname polls • Community content • Special product offers The feed content is updated daily, with all of the relevant content appearing simultaneously, and is most often the mix of the above content. This is a unique approach to using RSS as a supplementary content delivery channel to the e-mail newsletter, which builds on the same principle as the e-mail newsletter, only that fresh content is delivered daily and through a different channel, RSS. The e-mail newsletter and the RSS feed contain mostly the same content, with the only difference that the e-mail newsletter is delivered weekly and includes a week's worth of content, while the RSS feed is updated daily and as such includes less content. This is offering visitors "choice" at its best. It's the same information, but you decide how you want to receive it.
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Screenshot: The BabyCenter.com weekly e-mail e-zine, as displayed in the Microsoft Outlook Express e-mail client
Screenshot: The customized BabyCenter.com RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
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Forum Updates
Don't you just hate it when you have to visit a number of forums you like daily just to see if there are any new interesting discussions going on? And don't you hate it even more when you find out that there aren't at the moment, or even worse, that you missed a discussion that really interests you? Not surprisingly this is a matter of content delivery as well. We need to regularly check forums because their content is not delivered directly to us. A content delivery issue. Some web sites do provide e-mail notifications, but for most people, considering the content overload problem, that's not terribly inviting. And even as such, forum e-mail notifications usually only include replies to your own posts or topics. That's not enough if you want to be up to date on what's going on, but still too much to be consumed through e-mail. RSS comes as a natural choice Æ you can provide RSS feeds, based on what your forum users want, that deliver forum updates directly to their desktops, such as: • Delivering latest forum topics.
• Delivering latest forum posts.
• Delivering replies to an individual's topics.
• Delivering replies to an individual's posts.
The additional benefit, adding to the increased usability and easier participation for the users, is syndicating your forum content to various RSS search engines and directories.
Example: SitePoint http://www.sitepoint.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized information site Sitepoint offers articles, blogs and forums for web developers. Among other RSS feeds they also provide RSS feeds for the forums. Forum content updates are delivered through three individual RSS feeds: • Featured Forum Threads (the new forum threads or discussions that the Sitepoint editorial team chose as the most interesting);
• Recent Forum Threads (all new forum threads or discussions); and
• Recent Forum Posts (an RSS feed with the latest posts from all of the forum threads or discussions).
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Screenshot: SitePoint Recent Posts RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Screenshot: SitePoint Recent Threads RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: Oracle http://www.oracle.com [RSS] Web site type: Corporate site Oracle, somewhat similar to SitePoint, provides RSS feeds with the latest posts from their various discussion forums.
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Screenshot: Oracle Database discussion RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: SitePoint http://www.sitepoint.com [RSS] Web site type: Specialized information site Sitepoint offers articles, blogs and forums for web developers. Among other RSS feeds they also provide RSS feeds for the forums. Forum content updates are delivered through three individual RSS feeds: • Featured Forum Threads (the new forum threads or discussions that the Sitepoint editorial team chose as the most interesting);
• Recent Forum Threads (all new forum threads or discussions); and
• Recent Forum Posts (an RSS feed with the latest posts from all of the forum threads or discussions).
Making Forum Feeds Work As you will quickly see from subscribing to the SitePoint Recent Forum Posts feed or any of the Oracle discussion feeds, the key to making forum feeds work is making them highly usable.
This is certainly the case with SitePoint Recent Threads feed, but not so much with Recent Forum Posts feed, since publishing all of the latest forum posts, from different threads, in a linear structure, simply creates too much confusion.
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It's the same with Oracle, where the individual posts, represented in a linear list, simply do not work well, since it's impossible to follow only the threads you are interested in.
If you are considering forum feeds, think especially in the direction of:
• Latest or features or most popular forum threads
• The ability for individual users to subscribe to RSS feeds for individual threads
• The ability for individual users to subscribe to an RSS feed with all the comments to their posts
Remember, RSS marketing is not about grabbing all you have and republishing it as an RSS feed, but rather carefully considering which RSS applications increase your website usability and overall online communications effectiveness.
Promotional Content
Promotional content in terms of RSS content types is any content type with the sole purpose of making the sale, either online, offline or through lead generation, with the offer being made in an individual content item.
Not as an inline advertisement, which is a part of an "informative" content item, but as full content items with the purpose of making the sale.
These can either be delivered in fully promotional RSS feeds, or as promotional content items (standalone RSS ads) within "informative" RSS feeds.
When delivering strictly promotional content via RSS, winning the game is all about achieving maximum relevancy for the subscriber Æ providing such promotional content that the subscriber actually wants to receive it and wants to read it. As you can imagine, this is far more difficult than providing a strictly "informative" RSS feed, where the valuable information is what keeps the subscriber. With promotional content feeds, it's all about making your promotional content valuable enough for your subscribers to want.
The general content types within the overall umbrella of promotional content include:
• Product lists
• Coupons
• Follow-up letters
• Product reviews
• Testimonials
• Standalone RSS Ads
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• CTAs in other content types
Product Lists
The product catalog is the central ingredient to any webstore or any website selling multiple products, for that matter.
On a website, the catalog is transformed into different lists of products under specific product categories, such as Apparel, Household, Electronics and similar, and under specific filters, such as Most Popular Products, Most Discounted Products, Lowest Price Products and so on.
The challenge for e-tailers, or other marketers selling products online, is notifying prospects and customers when new products are added to any of the lists, or when a specific product is given a special status, such as a discount product.
E-mail could be the perfect tool for this … if people were still open to receiving even more e-mail. But few still are, and most are not terribly thrilled to receive product notifications to their e-mail addresses.
For those that are, the problem is frequency. How often should you e-mail a change to a product list or a special discount offer to your list? Weekly, monthly? Certainly not daily?
This is where RSS steps into the picture, giving you the ability to notify interested prospects and customers of new products or new product statuses whenever these are added to the product catalog, without any fear of pushing the limit with your frequency. The only real limit to the sensible frequency is the reading frequency of your subscribers Æ how often they check your RSS feed for new updates … which is something you can analyze to find the optimum frequency.
Simply put, product lists by RSS enable you to deliver your latest product information directly to your subscribers and syndicate your latest product information to the RSS search engines and directories, whenever new products are added to your product catalog.
And when we say product, we don't necessarily mean only physical products, but also:
• E-products, such as e-books, reports, software etc.
• Travel offers
• Real estate offers
• And anything else you might call a product in your company
The difficult part is making your product lists compelling enough for your visitors to take notice and actually subscribe:
• Do you carry so many products, that online users first think of you when thinking of new purchases? Are you a favorite online shopping destination?
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• Or are you a category leader that owns the customer mindset in your category? Do online users look to you for new product recommendations in the categories you cover?
• Do your products meet highly specific needs of individuals?
• Are your products so valuable that people want to be notified when new items become available?
• Do you offer such low prices that your audience wants to hear about your special deals as soon as they are made available?
• Is your product information so fun that people want to receive it just for entertainment value?
• Are your users and customers opinion leaders in their circles, making their product opinions valuable for their own audience?
• Does your webstore offer unique features that make the buying experience easier and more rewarding?
If you meet any of these criteria, you might in fact have what it takes to deliver your product lists as RSS feeds and actually get enough takers to make it worthwhile.
If so, these are the different types of product lists you can consider:
• Standard product lists via RSS, delivering selected products from your various product categories
• Discounted product lists, delivering special discounts
• Community product lists, generated by your website community, such as recommended products or wish lists
• Video product list, delivering your latest video product presentations or advertisements
Standard Product Lists Standard product lists deliver product information from your product catalog, usually segmented by product category and often also by product status, and can be used to notify your prospects and customers of any relevant changes to your product inventory.
Example: Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com [RSS] Web site type: Web store Amazon.com's most basic implementation of delivering product lists are its segmented RSS feeds for their most popular product categories, available from Amazon.com Syndicated Content.
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These categories include various sub-categories from "Books", such as "Entertainment", "History" etc., the "Electronics", "DVD" and many other categories. The total number of pre-made RSS feeds actually exceeds the number hundred, meaning that most Amazon.com users can be notified by RSS of most new titles they might be interested in.
Screenshot: Amazon.com Books: Arts & Photography feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader The feeds deliver the latest product additions to the chosen product category, with a short description, the price and the link to the product page where the product can be ordered. The logic for providing product lists via RSS for Amazon is quite simple … Most people that purchase through Amazon really want these products and are quite thankful to Amazon for providing them. Consequently, readers want to know what products, as long as they match their interests, which is generically achieved by providing segmented RSS feeds, are available to them, and especially which are the most popular, since that's a good way of telling which products are the best choice. And since most people really can't handle more e-mail, using a service like this just might be the ticket. It's less obtrusive, it's "on-demand" and it gives them what they want. It brings Amazon.com closer to its customers in a way that generates loyalty and accelerates sales. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, and only a small fraction of what Amazon.com is doing with its RSS product lists. They are, through their Web Services platform, giving their associates and other developers the opportunity to develop their own services, making it easier for their visitors to access Amazon.com products, which also includes providing them with advanced RSS feeds.
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Some developers, such as Yaywastaken.com and Lockergnome, have already provided their visitors with customizable Amazon.com RSS feeds Æ their visitors can actually customize what product contents they want to receive from Amazon, using their web service. Truly customizable product lists. It gets even better. These developers can even set-up these services in such a way that they receive a commission every time someone purchases a product from Amazon, if they got to it through the RSS feeds provided by their service. The point here is not only that developers can create RSS feeds to easily syndicate Amazon.com product announcements through their own site, but that they actually create RSS feeds that their visitors subscribe to through their aggregators. Amazon.com is basically giving them the power to create and distribute their own product lists, tailored to their specific visitors and their demands Æ helping them provide a service to their visitors and at the same time make a commission. It's a win-win-win situation for all three parties in the game. And RSS made it possible.
Example: iTunes http://www.apple.com [RSS] Web site type: Web store Apple's iTunes RSS feed generator allows you to select what music you're interested in, providing you with a customized RSS feed to best meet your interests. In essence, Apple customizes their product list for you, giving you direct access to the music you want. User can choose from: • Dozens of different genres • Different types of feeds (new releases, top releases etc.) • Number of content items in the feed
Screenshot: The iTunes RSS feed generator, as displayed in a Web browser
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In the actual feed you'll be getting new album or song titles, along with their cover art, links to more information about the author and, of course, a purchase link that directly launches the iTunes software, if you have it installed, or otherwise leads you to the iTunes software download page.
Screenshot: The customized iTunes feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: MSN Shopping http://shopping.msn.com [RSS] MSN Shopping goes beyond both the Amazon and iTunes examples, serving as an excellent case of tailored product lists delivered via RSS.
Are you interested in …
• a specific brand,
• a specific price range,
• a specific product category,
• a specific product sorting approach (lowest price, highest price, most popular, highest ratest, alphabet),
• or all of the above combined in the way that best suits your needs?
MSN Shopping does exactly this for you.
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As you browse their online webstore, making choices that narrow your product interests down to the specific product selection that best meets your interests, the website offers you dynamic RSS feeds along the way.
Each product list selection gives you an RSS feed that will bring you the latest results from your selection, from category to the actual sorting options you select.
The user interface is intuitive, and the results are completely tailored to your taste, giving you the ability to receive really only what you want via your MSN Shopping RSS feeds.
You are customizing your feeds simply by browsing the website.
Screenshot: MSN Shopping, as displayed in a Web browser
Screenshot: MSN Shopping RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
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The RSS feed displays the same results as the page that you got the feed from, and when they add new products, the same products are reflected in the feed, giving you the ability to get the latest product info without having to visit the website.
The feed will provide you with basic information about the product and a link to more information, and a product image as an enclosure you can click to view.
Example: CityCrybs http://www.citycrybs.com [RSS] Another product type that can easily be delivered as product lists is real estate.
But first, consider the actual benefits of RSS for the consumer.
Certainly the 100% opt-in control that is now in the hands of the user, instead of the marketer, which also forces marketers to become more relevant to the needs of their audiences.
And certainly the ability to easily manage and aggregate thousands of information sources, without all of this content crumpling your e-mail communications.
And many other benefits as well, but the true power of RSS for end-users, in direct relation to marketing, is getting precisely the content you want, carefully adjusted to your needs, at exactly the right time.
For marketers, this means delivering highly relevant information that directly addresses the needs of their audiences.
For end-users, this means consuming only the information tailored to their interests.
Combining this power of RSS and product lists presents a powerful combination that can set you apart from your competitors.
CityCrybs.com understands this, by enabling you to precisely define what what kind or property and where you are looking for, and then giving you an RSS feed with all the latest results matching your specific needs.
Screenshot: CityCrybs RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
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But, just as a word of caution, a good strategy is only as good as the implementation, and this is especially true of the CityCrybs example. A great idea, but only if the feed was actually displayed properly in the RSS Reader.
Example: eBay http://www.ebay.com [RSS]
In terms of using RSS for e-commerce and in relation with product lists, eBay is among the top contenders when it comes to sales oriented implementation.
• Do a search for any product, using the eBay search engine.
• If you need to, further refine the search and decide how you want the results listed.
• Subscribe to the RSS feed offered at the bottom of the page, giving you the same updated content that you just got from your search results.
• Whenever a product, according to your search criteria, changes, so does the RSS feed, enabling you to track exactly the products you are interested in.
Quite similar to the MSN Shopping example, but eBay really excels in the actual implementation.
• Every product, displayed as an individual content item in the feed, contains a product picture.
• You can bid on a product, buy a product or add a product to your watch list, directly from your RSS Reader.
Making RSS work for e-commerce is all about making things easy for the consumer, especially the ordering process. This is a great example of how to do it right, and a great example of strategically placed CTAs within RSS content items.
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Screenshot: eBay RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: Cherry Hill Triplex http://www.cherryhilltriplex.com [RSS]
When buying a car …
• you have a specific car or specific cars or specific brands in mind;
• you want to know if the car is available right now;
• you have a specific price range in mind.
Cherry Hill Triplex, when it comes to their RSS implementation, kept these simple facts in mind and created an excellent RSS strategy that originates where all strategies should originate Æ from the needs and the mindset of the consumer.
Define your needs and receive an RSS feed carrying all of their car inventory, with constant updates, just as new cars come in, directly pertaining to your interests.
Sure beats calling the dealer.
Discounted Product Lists Consumers might subscribe to your product list RSS feed because you carry the largest or the best inventory of specific products, or they might subscribe if you entice them with great deals Æ discounted product lists.
These are essentially the same as standard product lists, only that their main selling point are discount offers.
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Example: Woot! http://www.woot.com Web site type: Mini web store Woot! is, quite simply, a mini web store that offers only 1 (!!!) product per day in what seems to be limitless quantities and a great bargain price. And that's about it. The idea was so unique that it got a huge following in a matter of days, without any huge promotion on their part. Woot! uses RSS to deliver their daily "Woot" product announcements … that people actually want to receive, because a) the products come at great prices and b) the products themselves are often quite entertaining. The feed also includes posts from their blog, written to facilitate community building and increase product sales. It's probably the simplest product catalog in the world, and it works, and also a great example of combining blog posts and discounted product announcements in the same RSS feed. The message: deliver daily product announcements that people actually care about and want to receive.
Screenshot: Woot! RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader Woot! also deserve accolades for going one step further with RSS than most other online retailers when it comes to product description. As opposed to almost everyone else, Woot! provides full-text content items, giving details product descriptions that give the RSS subscriber the full story on the product, without the subscriber having to visit their website to find out more. The product description in the feed also includes a link to a discussion forum to discuss the product, as well as a direct order link, facilitating both community participation and product sales.
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Example: Expedia http://www.expedia.com [RSS] Product lists are not just about selling physical products in a traditional webstore, but rather about providing information about any products you might be offering.
In Expedia's case, the product are different discounted travel offers.
Through a special page, Expedia allows you to customize your RSS feed with trip type, your originating city, your destination and your package type, delivering their latest customized deals to your RSS Reader.
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Screenshot: Expedia RSS feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: Travelocity http://www.travelocity.com [RSS]
Travelocity offers a simple interface where visitors select their trip type, departure city and destinations, and then get their own individualized feed to receive customized travel info, discounted fares news and special offers.
Much like with the Expedia example, the inscentive to subscribe is to receive the best deals for the travel arrangements you are looking for.
Community Product Lists Community aspects of online shopping are becoming an increasingly important element of sales facilitation in an age where:
• consumers trust other consumers more than they trust marketers;
• consumers base their purchasing decisions on their friends' recommendations;
• consumers increasingly participate in online community building and are using the internet to stay in touch with their personal circles.
Many webstores have already recognized the power of community when it comes to online sales facilitation, using tools such as wish lists, favorite products and similar to use consumers to spread the word, give their recommendations and facilitate their sales.
Among other tools, RSS can be used to deliver such product lists to anyone that cares to subscribe to them.
• John could create a wish list RSS feed and give the URL to his friends and at the same time use the RSS feed to publish a constantly updated version of the wish list on his website. Whenever he adds a product to the list, everyone that's subscribed to his RSS feed gets notice.
• Jane is in love in certain products and wants to share her joy with her friends, recommending her personal choices to her circle of influence. Whether giving her RSS feed to her friends or using it to publish the list on her website, whenever Jane updates her recommendations list with another product directly from her favorite store, the recommendation is syndicated to everyone that's subscribed to the feed.
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• Jane and John are considering a purchase, but they're not sure this product is for them. They go to their favorite webstore and browse through customer reviews, but they still don't know. Subscribing to a customer reviews RSS feed for that product will bring the latest reviews directly to their RSS Reader, helping them make a better choice once they are convinced this product is just the right thing.
The simple moral is: if there's already a community element to your online sales, enhance that element with the power of RSS.
Example: Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com
Amazon allows you to subscribe to your friends' and family wish lists, letting you know when they've added new products to the list of what they want to get from you.
Example: Yahoo! Shopping http://shopping.yahoo.com
Yahoo! allows users to create list of products they like or dislike, and then distribute their lists through RSS feeds.
The great part is that users can add their own comments to the products in their lists, which are then displayed in the RSS feed for additional affect.
Screenshot: Yahoo! Shopping list feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: eBay http://www.ebay.com eBay Stores sellers can easily setup RSS feeds with their most recently-listed items.
Video Product Lists RSS doesn't have to be only about delivering text or audio content … it can in fact also be used to deliver online video, adding an additional dimension to product lists.
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• DRTV (Direct Response Television) companies can distribute their latest infomercials via RSS directly to their subscribers and to other online media as well.
• Are you TV ads entertaining, or have strong brand value, or are an excellent presentation of your products? Why not offer them in an RSS feed for everyone that loves your brand and wants to receive more from it?
• Also consider video options such as detailed product demonstrations, video testimonials and so on.
Product Reviews
If you don't think that standard product lists provide your audiences with enough added value to warrant a subscription, a step ahead is providing reviews of your products.
The approach is essentially the same as with standard product lists, only that in this case you are providing a more editorial overview of the different products you carry.
Example: Burpee.com
http://www.burpee.com [RSS]
Burpee.com is an online vegetables, flowers, herbs and garden gear retailer, who now has more than 10,000 RSS subscribers getting their new product information via RSS.
Instead of delivering standard lists of products using their RSS feed, they rather focus on providing daily reviews of their seeds, written by their users and with a direct link in the feed for subscribers to add their own reviews for the featured products. Each product review also includes a photography of the seed featured.
Coupons
For marketers communicating with bargain seekers or for online retailers, RSS ads another opportunity to deliver the latest savings coupons, which can either be redeemed online or printed and then redeemed in physical stores.
Essentially, RSS feeds deliver a list of coupons (each coupon is delivered as an individual RSS content item) that match the subscriber's interests and which are then available for usage after the subscriber clicks on the coupon headline (content item headline) in the RSS feed and is taken to the webpage with more information on the actual coupon the subscriber is interested in.
Example: Zixxo
http://www.zixxo.com
Zixxo first asks the users to select their location within the US and then provides a customizable RSS feed with the latest coupon headlines.
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When subscribing to the coupon feed, users can enter their location, the allowed radius from their location, coupon coverage, coupon category and coupon type (printed or webstore) and then receive a list of coupons that most match their interests.
This same approach could be used by e-tailers to notify their users of new deals for their relevant product categories.
Screenshot: Zixxo coupon feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Follow-up Letters
Automated follow-up communications via e-mail have become a mainstay for internet marketers, giving them the ability to slowly follow-up with their prospects and gradually get them from their current point in the relationship to the next level.
Since the follow-up sequence is always automated this is often also referrered to as "putting your internet marketing on autopilot", since the auto sequence begins with a specific user action ("event triggered"), automatically delivering the sequence of messages in a pre-defined time period.
The concept is simple Æ a certain action by your visitors on your website triggers a sequence of e-mail messages, delivered to that visitor, provided you have his e-mail address, over a period of several days.
Direct marketers use this to automatically communicate with the prospect after a certain action, trying to get him to do what they want.
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The most common application is offering your visitors a free report, delivered to them via e-mail. After subscribing they start receiving consequtive parts of the report day after day or a every few days, receiving both new information as well as being exposed to the marketer's promotional message.
Other applications include autoresponder messages in relation to transactional e- mail:
• Subscribe to a free e-mail newsletter. The first autoresponder message thanks you for the subscription and also gives you access to one of the newsletter issues. A couple of days later, while you're still "hot as a lead", you receive another e-mail, pertaining to the newsletter topic, giving you more advice or information on the topic and trying achieve a sales conversion. And so on.
• Complete a webstore order. The first message thanks you for the purchase and recommends an additional product at a lower price. The second message tells you more about the product you purchased. The third messages makes a special additional purchase offer. The fourths message gives you some great additional tips, and so on.
• Start an online order, but don't finish it. The first message reminds you that there are still products in your shopping cart. The second message reminds you again, giving you added inscentive to complete the order. And so on …
The opportunities are practically limitless, but you get the picture.
This same approach can also be used by, for example, public relations professionals:
• A journalist subscribes to your industry news newsletter. The thank you message brings him the latest issue, the second message invites him to send in questions, the third message provides valuable links to various industry content on your website and the fourth message delivers some amazing interviews with your team.
• You're trying to build public awareness of your expertise by establishing your company as a thought-leader in the industry. You start by offering a free whitepaper on a hot industry topic, but in order to download it your visitors needs to give you their e-mail addresses. When they do download, you send them a thank you e-mail with more interesting information. A couple of days later you send them a link to your thought-leadership blog and invite them to comment. Yet again a few days later you send them a great interview with your resident experts, and so on. Essentially, you're using autoresponders to facilitate direct interaction with your new prospect and continue building your thought-leadership position.
Now simply transform this concept into the realm of RSS.
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Someone subscribes to your RSS feed. The first couple of content items, spread-out through the first week, serve as a series of welcome messages giving the new subscriber access to your top content and inviting him to actively participate. Your latest feed updates come through as well, but your new subscriber also gets the extra treatment (content) in the same feed.
And now apply this to anything you're doing with RSS, where it makes sense to follow-up with additional information to your new subscribers once they subscribe, of course depending on the feed topic and target audience.
Example: RSSautoresponders.com
http://www.rssautoresponders.com
RSSautoresponders.com, an online service offering RSS autoresponder capabilities, also offers the most basic example of delivering follow-up messages via RSS.
Simply visit their website and then subscribe to their RSS follow-up sequence by entering your name in the specified field, submitting the information and then receiving the RSS feed URL to add to your RSS Reader.
Following your subscription, you will start receiving follow-up letters explaining the marketing uses of RSS autoresponders, automatically spread-out for a couple of days.
Each new message comes as a new content item in the RSS feed you subscribed to, linking to the corresponding article on the website, which you access by clicking on the content item headline.
Screenshot: RSSautoresponders.com follow-up feed, with the first message, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Standalone RSS Ads
Standalone ads in RSS feeds are advertisements presented as individual content items in RSS feeds that otherwise carry more editorially focused content with higher added value.
In essence, this is simply placing ads within your RSS feed that is otherwise not strictly advertising-oriented.
CTAs in Other Content Types
Ultimately, any RSS feed can contain CTAs within the content, which is otherwise not advertising-oriented.
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Customer Relationship Management Content
The old adage goes that it's 8 times more expensive to get a new customer than to sell to an existing customer.
Whether the same applies to your business is a whole different story, but everyone would agree that communicating with your existing customers and managing relationships with them is key to long-term sales growth and profitability.
As such, customer relationship management is an important field for RSS content delivery.
• If you consider your customer content updates important you naturally want to make sure that all of your customers actually receive them. E-mail is no longer the content delivery tool to enable you to do so, as you have a good reason to fear that your content might not be delivered. RSS eliminates this fear. If your customers subscribe to your feed, they will surely get the content you prepare for them. No need to fear it's going to be stopped by obstacles such as spam filters or not be read because the recipient mistakes it for spam and deletes it on sight.
• RSS is appropriate for delivering many different content types, such as product support updates, news for customers, added value content etc. … all this without adding to the recipient's e-mail load.
• Because RSS can be secure, you don't have to worry about unauthorized people accessing the content you have prepared especially for your customers and should perhaps only be seen by them.
• You can track what your customers are interested in and increase your knowledge about them Æ the knowledge you can then use to better meet their needs and increase their purchases.
• RSS is the content delivery vehicle that will help you to better manage your relationship with your customers: communicate with them; increase their satisfaction; get to know them better; increase their purchases etc. • When a business transaction occurs, the level of trust a person or company places with you increases. This is an excellent opportunity to get your customers to subscribe to your RSS feeds, even if they don't know what RSS is yet. They trust you enough to buy from you. They will trust you enough that it makes sense for them to start using RSS. But what are the concrete RSS content delivery opportunities when it comes to customer communications? In essence, everything that your customers might want to hear from you about and everything that you already might be delivering to them using e-mail. Special Announcements Do you often announce something new to your customers?
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Such as letting them know of new product launches or improved services, and even letting them know of your latest case studies that they can learn something from? Use RSS to deliver such announcements, especially if it's of great importance that your customers actually see them. Special Offers One type of special announcements are also special offers for your loyal customers: early product announcements for your most faithful customers; special discounts or product packages; exclusive offers for your best customers etc. These could come in the form of special discount RSS feeds or quite simply in the form of standard product lists, with the updated pricing to match the special benefits you offer to your loyal customers. Product Support Updates If you are providing products that often have upgrades available, such as • new drivers for a hardware product;
• new version updates for a software product, such as the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2;
• additional services that come in a package already bought by your customers;
• new music tracks, if for instance you provide music compilations;
• new content updates for an e-book you published;
• new parts for your product that greatly increase its performance;
• new educational material relating to your products;
• new manuals for your products;
• etc.,
or if you are constantly resolving the problems your customers are having with your products, such as • updating your customers on resolved problems;
• new added functionality that will enhance their experience or answer to their growing needs;
• etc.,
you can deliver this information via an RSS feed as well.
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Business Relationship Information Think of the information you often have to deliver to your customers. If you own a web store you need to let them know when their product has been shipped and even when you've taken their money from their credit card account. Or you have to let them know when a product they wanted becomes available for order. This basic transactional information can quite easily be delivered using RSS. The approach is just the same as with e-mail; the only difference is that you are making this content available through RSS as well. But there is other information pertaining to the customer's business relationship with you that can also be delivered using RSS: • If you often need to resolve customer issues you can use an RSS feed to let them track how far you are with resolving their problems, and then deliver the final resolution report through their personalized RSS feeds. This will also work if your customers are only asking your questions; just deliver the answers using RSS.
• This information might also include providing certain individuals within a company with easy access to new contracts, billing information and so forth.
The information pertaining to the business relationship can actually encompass everything that is relevant to the customer and at the same time has something to do with his relationship to your company. For instance, an investment fund might use RSS to daily inform their clients of the exact value of their assets in the fund. An investment consulting company might use RSS to daily inform their clients of their total portfolio standings on that day. And the list of the possibilities goes on and on …
Example: IBM Gold Service http://www.ibm.com Web site type: Corporate site A few years ago IBM launched a new web service, named Gold Service, aimed at its key corporate accounts with the goal of increasing interaction with them as well as increasing profitability, while reducing the need for real sales reps and at the same time reducing costs and consequently prices (and they actually did that Æ they grow their profits from their key accounts by 30% a year). MarketingSherpa.com reported:
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"Each Gold Service corporate customer gets access to a special IBM Web site developed just for their organization. This password protected Web site has their company name on the home page, and can include a wide variety of useful account information, such as: technical data and user tips for the IBM products they've purchased; email and phone access to customer support reps who are well-versed in their particular account; news on special IBM offers just for their company; a product catalog with items specially selected for easy integration into their current systems; and more." But the most interesting part is the way they communicate with individual people within these corporations. They survey each relevant individual to see how they can best profit from their company's personalized web site. "Survey results are entered into a customer database, and IBM then sends a monthly communication to everyone enrolled in the program. Gold Service Manager Dianne Lucca explains, "We've really evolved to one-to-one messaging. We send monthly communications based on their area of interest. Depending on their profile one person could get information on printers and a person two floors down might get news on large enterprise storage. In the old days we sent everyone the same thing based on what was installed in the account. But people don't have time to get everything now!" Exactly this would be a perfect fit for personalized content delivery via RSS. And it's quite possible that IBM's customers would appreciate the additional possibilities, if they are perhaps experiencing the same problems with e-mail as the rest of us. This just goes to show that RSS can be implemented in any kind of business environment. Content as an Added Value Service Many companies are already publishing e-mail e-zines only for their customers that include premium educational content that the company publishes to give additional value to their customers, increase their purchases and increase their loyalty.
Just imagine some possible examples:
• An investment consulting company might regularly educate their clients on investment strategies and provide them with advice on how to best manage their personal assets.
• A car manufacturer might regularly send safety and car-driving tips to his clients, including information on upcoming models (letting them be the first to find out), taking care of their car etc.
• A software company might offer tutorials for using their products.
The possibilities are endless.
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The key difference between this and regular e-zines is that "content as an added value service" is available only to your customers and not anyone else. It's just "a little something" to show your customers you really care for them and to help them even more.
But e-mail doesn't have to be the only channel to deliver this information through.
Enterprise RSS
The term enterprise RSS encompasses both the different uses of using RSS for internal communications and using RSS as an internal business intelligence tool for your employees.
But, in both cases, enterprise RSS requires investing not only into your RSS publishing or delivery infrastructure, but more importantly into enterprise-grade RSS aggregation software, which enables your organization to manage RSS consumption across hundreds of thousands of employees.
Standard RSS Readers fall short because organizations need:
1. Better control over their employees' content consumption, which includes automatic subscriptions to key internal RSS feeds The organization needs the option of pushing important RSS feeds directly to employees, but in a highly targeted manner. Different groups of people need access to different content, which needs to be distributed to them through different RSS feeds. An enterprise level RSS solution needs to allow the organization to setup various user groups and easily target different RSS content to them.
2. RSS Readers with a "higher level of intelligence", which help the employees better manage their RSS consumption For users with little experience in information management, RSS consumption may actually turn into a time-consuming process, taking their time from their daily operational priorities. It is so crucial that an enterprise-grade RSS Reader is able to determine, based on (1) specific sets of rules, such as source priority and content relevance and (2) based on reading habits of the various leaders in the organization, exactly which content to prioritize for which employee, to help them save time and only focus on the content that really matters to them.
3. The ability to quickly and easily deploy RSS consumption capabilities across hundreds or thousands of employees Installing and setting-up a new piece of software across hundreds of computers and sometimes across dozens of geographically separated offices and often across various countries is a difficult and expensive task. Enterprise RSS solutions are built to make this process as easy as possible.
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4. Manage bandwidth issues In a large organization, internet bandwidth can quickly become a big problem. Enterprise RSS solutions help you manage this by establishing a single consumption point and then delivering the relevant content to individual content consumers in the organization from a centralized server framework.
All of this is now offered by enterprise RSS vendors such as NewsGator or Attensa, specializing in internal RSS content consumption.
Internal Communications
Internal communications are the most natural fit for RSS delivery, mainly because you don't have to worry about your employees not having an RSS Reader. If you control what's on your employee's computers, you can easily have an RSS Reader installed on each of them, or buy an enterprise-level RSS solution that will make this even easier for you.
Direct Communications to Your Employees In terms of communication priorities, your employees are certainly or should be one of your key target audiences.
• You need to motivate them.
• You need to provide them with specific information pertaining to their work.
• You need to educate them.
• You need to integrate them into the company and make them feel part of the community.
• You need to build their awareness of the company, your identity, your values and your key marketing messages.
Most companies aren't doing any of these things, and that goes for small businesses as well as large enterprises.
You can be different, because in the end, it's your people that create your company, and all of your people are in fact also your marketers. It's not only about increasing their productivity, but communicating with them in such a way that they become evangelists for your company.
You can never achieve that if you just leave them alone. You need to communicate with them on a regular basis, giving them the information that will gradually make them "live your company".
On the other hand, you also need to inform them of what's going on, and make all kinds of relevant information available to them, such as what direction your company is going to, what new products you are launching, and when's the next big company picnic.
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• Corporate news This includes everything from the Annual report to new product launches to listing the company's successes and letting people know what direction the company is heading in.
• Community news and motivational content Includes introducing new employees, announcing the next company picnic, featuring especially deserving employees, letting your people know how various projects are doing and who can be thanked for their success, articles on why every employee matters and how they contribute to the overall success of the company, new case studies, best practices, what others are doing and what their responsibilities are, giving credit when and where it's due etc.
• Corporate culture As already mentioned above, corporate culture does not grow on its own. It's not just a piece of paper you force every employee to read when they start working for you. But it is about constantly communicating with your people. Constantly telling them what you stand for and making the point with concrete examples and case studies (for instance, if you support any causes, give them concrete examples as they arise); giving tribute to other employees who are "living the company"; publishing relevant articles that represent what your company stands for; providing constant reminders of how your company communicate to the outside world and what it stands for; constantly communicating your mantra; etc.
• Intranet content updates Do you have an intranet where you publish new documents and similar content that's important to your employees, such as meeting briefings, memos, reports, contracts etc. RSS is an excellent channel to deliver such content updates. It might require customization though, if you publish much of this stuff, so that the right content updates get to the right people. For instance, if you have many project groups, members of each project group should primarily get the content updates relevant to their work.
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• Educational content and latest news Everyone wants to increase the productivity and effectiveness of their people, and to do so you do need to educate them. The people in your marketing department need to become even better marketers. The people that cover your finances need to learn how to do their jobs even better, and so on. Everyone in your company can become better at what they are doing, period. If you're not educating them constantly, you're losing out on their potential. Providing such educational content will definitely require customization Æ you need to allow your people to select what educational content they want to receive and let them choose for themselves what content they'll profit from the most. Or, using new RSS technologies, you could provide them with access to the feeds watched by your Chief Marketing Officer, your IT manager and so on. But what content are we talking about? It can include relevant articles from different sources, whitepaper updates, industry news, case studies, etc. You don't even need to write this content in house -- you could easily syndicate it from other online sources.
Does all of this look extremely "corporate", not appropriate for small businesses? It's anything but that. This is what every business should be practicing, no matter its size.
Team Collaboration RSS for internal communications is not only about getting "your" content to your employees, but also about using RSS as a tool to aid in team collaboration between your different teams and employees. RSS, in conjunction with blogs or wikis or your standard intranet, can be used with success for different forms of collaboration. The blog/wiki/ingranet is used as an online place where all of the content is published and available to the people it is relevant to, and RSS is used to deliver content updates for the blog/wiki/intranet itself. It's a perfect match. • Conducting interviews Many companies are already starting to use blogs in combination with RSS to conduct interviews more easily. Questions and answers are posted on the blog, usually private, and RSS lets the participants know when new questions or answers have been posted, without requiring them to check the blog every minute. It saves time and is an excellent choice for conducing written online interviews. And it's much better than e-mail, because it provides a constant record of what was said and by whom, without the confusion usually created by e-mails flowing back and forth. The other benefit is that interviews conducted using this approach can be immediately syndicated via RSS (answers can even be syndicated as they are posted) to other online media, or used in a variety of other ways that can use RSS as an input content channel.
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• Project collaboration Collaborating on projects is quite similar to conducting interviews. Now, e- mail is actually counter-productive when it comes to this type of cooperation, because it provides no real record available for everyone to see and it can easily become confusing. But with blogs/wikis and RSS, people can post project development updates, tasks and other relevant content, pertaining to the project, for everyone with access to see, in a chronological order.
• Knowledge sharing The same applies for knowledge sharing. If you want different partners or team members or employees to share knowledge, blogs and RSS are again the perfect match. Everyone with the appropriate permissions can access and post to the blog/wiki, and even categorize content so that it's more easily manageable and controlled. RSS customization can work especially well here, because different people can select different "knowledge" (content) categories they are interested in and receive only those.
• Shared calendars Whenever a project team member updates his calendar, everyone that subscribes to his calendar via RSS can see the change. This can also work for group calendars, such as product launch or cornerstone calendars and similar
• Activity reports One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation.
• Important team collaboration updates Another company uses RSS feeds as a security awareness mechanism at a Zoo, making security updates, such as missing children or handbags, immediately available to Zoo security sites and personnel with wireless devices.
Internal Business Intelligence
Using RSS for internal business intelligence means giving your employees the capacity to be constantly informed about the latest developments in their industry, with their customers and with their competition.
The process for internal business intelligence on an enterprise level is simillar to conducting business intelligence via RSS on a smaller scale, only that again you will need an enterprise-grade RSS solution to support this.
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Other Database Content Items
Don't limit your thinking of RSS simply to the various "standard" content types listed here, but rather again consider what RSS really is: a way to deliver any kind of content in a linear list.
In other words, this means that any type of content that resides in your database and can be delivered in a list, can be delivered using RSS.
And as long as your audiences would benefit from having certain information delivered to them in an RSS feed, it makes perfect sense to further explore the various opportunities available.
Take a look at these generic examples of the kind of database content items we are talking about:
• Investment websites Æ delivering the latest quotes about the financial papers of interest to the subscriber, or even better, delivering only notifications of relevant quote changes of interest to the subscriber using the desired quote change span set by the subscriber.
• Banks Æ delivering information about each credit card transaction as an individual content item in an RSS feed, or delivering weekly or monthly financial statements to clients in an RSS feed.
• Dating websites Æ delivering information about the "best candidates" when it becomes available, with each new candidate presented in a new content item.
• Job seeker websites Æ delivering information about the latest jobs available, matching the job seeker's criteria, and delivering the most appropriate new candidates to job providers.
• Real-estate websites Æ delivering the latest real estate properties, matching the prospect's criteria.
• Classifieds websites Æ delivering the latest classifieds, matching the subscriber's criteria.
• Search engines Æ delivering the latest search results for a given search term via RSS, by creating a persistent search function that constantly updates the user's RSS feed when new content that matches his keywords is added to your database.
The opportunities are quite endless.
• Whenever your database contains any information with certain meta data describing that information, each piece of this information can be delivered to RSS subscribers as an individual content item within an RSS feed, directly pertaining to their chosen criteria, based on this meta data.
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• Whenever your database contains any information directly pertaining to an individual, each change to that information or each new piece of information can be delivered to that individual as a content item in the individual's RSS feed.
To make this easier to understand, let's take a look at some examples of how online users use the internet:
• People interested in finding their matches post their profiles on dating web sites and indicate what kinds of people they are interested in meeting. Other people browse this database and again try to find the people that match their interests.
• Home owners interested in selling their homes post information about their properties on real-estate web sites, while people interested in buying or renting real-estate properties search these databases, trying to find what they are interested in.
• Tourism portal providers search for relevant tourism packages, matching their visitors' interests, thus filling their large tourism package databases. Their visitors come to their web sites to search for destinations and packages that best meet their interests.
• People post their classified ads on classifieds web sites. These classifieds are from a variety of categories, from personal ads to product sales ads. Again, people using such web sites are usually interested only in a few classified ad categories.
• Companies post their human resources needs on job listings web sites, where people go to find appropriate job openings.
The most common denominator between all of these is that the people searching for this information have very specific demands.
• People trying to find their matches are interested only in very specific people and have very "strict" criteria, such as gender, age, personal interests, looks, etc.
• Real-estate buyers or renters are interested only in very specific real-estate, such as "for sale", "for rent", location, price, type etc.
• Tourists are looking only for destinations, such as geographical location, and packages (price, type etc.), that match their exact interests.
• It's the same with all of the other content providers listed above.
The key requirement for delivering such database content items is the ability for the user to select specifically what information he wants to receive from you or that the information being delivered is pre-customized using the data you have about your users.
Example: SimpleTracking.com
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Simply enter:
• your package tracking number,
• select your shipping company, and get a customized RSS feed with the constantly updated information about your package, with each new event delivered as an individual content item in the feed, containing the event type, date and time and the location.
An example of allowing the user to enter a code that allows the provider to match his data with his database content and in turn provide the information pertaining to his personal data to the user via RSS.
Screenshot: SimpleTracking.com RSS feed example, as displayed in the RSS Bandit RSS Reader (source: SimpleTracking.com)
Example: NexTag http://www.nextag.com
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NexTag is a comparison shopping search engine, which allows internet users to compare product prices from multiple sellers.
Simply search for a product for which you would like to get the latest price comparisons and the system generates an RSS feed with constantly updated results, with each content item in the RSS feed containing a product returned from your search, a short product description, user rating, price range and direct link to more product information and the product price comparison chart.
An example of allowing the user to specify a set of meta data to create his selection criteria and then using the selection criteria to deliver the relevant results using RSS.
The same RSS feed is automatically generated for you while browsing any product category on the site, giving you the latest results for that category.
Screenshot: NexTag search feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: PriceFish.com http://www.pricefish.com
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As opposed to NexTag.com, which delivers a list of different products for which you want to compare prices, PriceFish.com will provide you with an RSS feed carrying the latest pricing information from multiple providers for just a single product in an RSS feed, with each new price offer presented as an individual content item.
Screenshot: Pricefish.com product feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: Monster.com http://www.monster.com [RSS]
Monster.com makes your job searches easier using RSS, providing you with three methods of receiving latest job information via RSS:
• If you don't want to take any time to customize your results, simply select one of their pre-defined search feeds, giving you total results for the most popular job searches by keyword, category or location.
• If you would like to narrow your search, do a quick search using their search engine and receive more precise results pertaining to your keywords, job category and desired location, and receive an RSS feed with the latest results.
• For best results, combine your keyword search with a personal profile. Monster.com will further reduce the search results to the most relevant opportunities available for you.
In all three cases the RSS feeds are based on a certain search query, with the only difference in the actual method of access to the feeds. Each new job listing is delivered as an individual content item.
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Screenshot: Monster search feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Example: News.Google.com http://news.google.com [RSS]
Google News, one of the most popular news engines, allows you to search for the latest news you are most interested in and then also provides the updated results in an RSS feed.
Each news item, delivered as an individual content item, includes the news headline, news recency, news summary, source information and a link to other related news.
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Screenshot: Google News search feed, as displayed in the FeedDemon RSS Reader
Affiliate Marketing
Using RSS for affiliate or partnership marketing deserves a special chapter, although its two applications easily fall into any of the other content types discussed here.
Using RSS to Communicate With Your Affiliate Partners
Using RSS for affiliate marketing starts with providing your affiliates with affiliate training content to help them increase their sales.
This may include any of the following:
Periodic Affiliate Updates Communication is key to getting results from your affiliate program, of course depending on the type of affiliates that your affiliate program attracts. Some affiliates prefer to not receive periodic updates from you, while others will want to hear from your regularly about:
• New special promotions of your bestselling products that they can partake in
• New marketing techniques that you found work especially well for your affiliates and other top marketing tips for marketing your products
• Success stories of your top affiliates and how they are achieving their results
• Proven marketing approaches for your products
• New product announcements for new products they could sell
• And so on …
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With RSS, you can give your affiliates a choice of whether they want to receive such updates from you, simply giving them access to a password protected RSS feed they can subscribe to on their own accord and then watch for new updates from you, without your affiliate communications interrupting their daily e-mail communications.
The benefits for you are:
• You no longer have to worry about your affiliate updates actually reaching your affiliates due to their e-mail spam filters.
• If you're not interrupting your affiliates with their e-mail communications and are instead only delivering them top information using RSS, the chances that they'll actually keep watching your content updates should increase.
Affiliate Sales Collateral via RSS Some of your affiliates may not be interested in your marketing tips or success stories of your top affiliates, but might want to be notified when new sales collateral, such as sales letters or online ads, is made available.
For these you can provide an RSS feed that only carries your latest sales collateral, notifying them immediately when new sales materials are available for their use.
In this case each new sales collateral piece would be presented as a new content item in your affiliate sales collateral RSS feed.
Automated Affiliate Follow-up Sequence When your affiliates sign-up to work with you, the first few days and weeks are the most critical. This is when they need the most support and also need to be slightly pushed day-by-day to start promoting your products.
An automated affiliate follow-up sequence, delivered via RSS, can be used to bring a sequenced training program to them every day or every other day, constantly reminding them to start marketing your products and giving them daily instructions on how to actually do it.
An Affiliate "Mix" Or you could create a mixture of all of these types of direct messaging to your affiliates.
• Once a new affiliate signs-up to work with you, you give him access to his own password protected RSS feed to receive the latest updates and tips from you.
• During the first few weeks after the affiliate signs-up, the RSS feed brings him the automated follow-up sequence, starting with day #1 training and then gradually taking the affiliate from step #1 to successfully marketing your products.
• When new updates are available for all the affiliates, they are delivered through this same RSS feed, and the same goes for your sales collateral.
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In this case, when you only offer a single RSS feed to a new affiliate, without demanding from him to subscribe to multiple feeds from you, you will increase your chances of getting the proactive subscription and of establishing a constant channel of communication with him.
Providing Your Affiliates With Affiliate-Powered RSS Feeds
While using RSS to communicate directly with your affiliates is all about direct communications and keeping in touch with the affiliates, you can also provide them with RSS feeds as additional sales tools to better market your products.
Just think of all the different content types we covered in this chapter:
• The different news types
• Product lists and other promotional content types
• Articles via RSS
• Forum posts via RSS
• And so on …
If you are already publishing these different types of RSS feed content, providing your affiliates with affiliate-powered RSS feeds is just one more step.
• Take your existing RSS feeds and allow your affiliates to use them to better promote your products.
• When you generate these RSS feeds for an individual affiliate, make sure that all the links in the RSS feed in the individual content items are equipped with the affiliate tracking links.
• Your affiliates can then either promote your RSS feeds directly on their sites, inviting their visitors to subscribe, or they can use these same feeds to display your latest content from you on their sites.
• Whenever someone clicks on an affiliate-powered RSS feed and is taken to your website, the link already includes his affiliate tracking code so that the affiliate is rewarded if the purchase is made.
This is a simple concept with much power and potential for advanced affiliate managers.
Just two examples to help you come up with your own affiliate-powered RSS feeds:
• You're publishing a blog with marketing tips, which you also use to sell your e-books and software products for marketers. Provide your affiliates with affiliate-powered feeds they can use to display your latest blog headlines on their own websites. When someone comes to your blog through one of these headlines and makes a purchase, the affiliate is awarded with a commission.
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• You're an online retailer with a rich product catalog. Provide your affiliates with RSS feeds carrying your latest products, which they can either display on their websites or offer to their visitors. When someone makes a purchase as a result of clicking on your headlines from your affiliate-powered RSS feeds, the affiliate receives a commission.
Alternative RSS Content
In addition to more the more traditional RSS content that we can frequently access as users ourselves, RSS also supports a variety of alternative uses.
Transactional Information
Transactional information is delivered to internet end-users by a website when they perform a certain transaction on the website. Types of transactional information may include:
• Online purchase Æ send purchase confirmation with additional cross-sell offers
• Newsletter subscription Æ send subscription confirmation with additional offers
• Online product cancellation Æ send cancellation confirmation with additional cross-sell offers
• And similar …
In essence, transactional information is about informing the user of a successfully concluded website transaction, and also trying to use this as an opportunity to make an additional sale.
In the world of website conversion optimization, transactional messaging, conducted via e-mail, has recently also been utilized for non-traditional transactional information, such as:
• The customer fails to complete the purchase during the check-out process Æ send warning with the opportunity to complete the purchase now
• The customer performs a search on your website Æ send search results via e-mail
• The customer performs an unsuccessful search on your website Æ send alternative search results and recommendations via e-mail
• And similar activities, devised to utilize every possible on-site user activity to facilitate online sales.
Traditionally, transactional messaging is conducted using e-mail as its primary delivery channel.
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The problem nowadays, however, is that e-mail delivery issues are often preventing the consumer to actually received the transactional information, not only limiting additional sales opportunities for the marketer, but also decreasing consumer trust, since consumers do not get a confirmation of a successful transaction.
With individual user RSS feeds, transactional information can now easily be sent to individual users via RSS, as long as your system supports individual user RSS feeds or iRSS feeds, as they are called.
In this case a user gets a single individualized RSS feed, through which he also receives his transactional information.
While this approach to using RSS should really be a part of the Customer Relationship Management Content section, it is so rare that it still falls under alternative RSS uses.
Full-Ad RSS Feeds
When RSS started gaining traction, several publishers were strictly opposed to the idea of placing any kind of advertising in their feeds, for both their own products as well as for third-party advertising.
Many of these publishers experimented with creating RSS feeds, which were made entirely of third-party ads, under the notion that people that want to receive advertising might as well directly subscribe to it.
However, consumers don’t want to receive ads and especially don’t want to pro actively subscribe to them. They’re putting up with them because they have no choice. And when the ads get capture their interest, they act on them. But they don’t want to subscribe to them.
Consequently, this idea never really attracted advertisers and soon died out.
But, don’t confuse this model with RSS feeds with product listings or coupons. In that case the product lists and coupons function as relevant content. They are placed in the feed in a high-relevance context to the needs of the people that want to receive information.
In the case of Full-ad RSS feeds the story was simply about selling ad space to third- party companies, without taking the care to actually put these in a relevant context for the user.
Ad Serving
RSS can be used as a simple Ad Serving platform, functioning almost the same as using RSS to syndicate your content to other sources.
The procedure is quite simple:
• Create a standard RSS feed, which only carries your latest banner or text ads
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• Insert individual ads into the RSS feed as individual content items
• Distribute the RSS feed to your media partners where you plan to advertise or use it for your own on-site advertising
• Use a special script that can take the latest ads (or that can rotate all the ads in the feed) from this RSS feed and display the banner or text ad on the website
• Whenever you update your RSS feed with new ads or change your existing ads, the change immediately happens across all the sites that are using your RSS feed to serve your ads
A simple solution if you don’t want to invest in a real ad server, but still want to quickly update your banners through multiple websites.
Ad Content Serving
Several companies have also started using RSS to serve latest content directly into dynamic banner ads.
As opposed to using RSS for ad serving, in this case you need to prepare a banner that can consume RSS content and display it to users on-the-fly, and then have an RSS feed that delivers your latest content to the actual banner ad, updating the banner ad easily and quickly.
This is a good option when you want to use your banners to display the latest news or article headlines from your website on other websites, or your latest products and similar, and not worry about modifying the banner every time your content changes. In this case, the banner will change automatically and on-the-fly when your content changes, saving you time and money.
Mixed Content Types
Many of the content types presented in this chapter often cannot be mixed well within individual RSS feeds, simply because they are so different.
Just three quick examples:
• Forum posts are usually written in a loose tone, are short, informal and often do not provide much value to the reader. Certainly not something you could mix with your corporate news, product lists, product coupons, letters to your customers or your how-to articles.
• Corporate news in itself is most often only of relevance to a small audience interested in your company. Publishing your corporate news in the same feed with your highly-relevant and educational third-party news coverage or editorial news might increase exposure to your corporate news, but will turn away most readers that are only interested in highly-relevant content. And as you know, RSS feeds are just too easy to unsubscribe from if you're not happy with what you're receiving.
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• If interested only in short news summaries, your RSS subscribers might not appreciate also receiving long how-to articles they don't have the time to read.
Key Aspects of Mixing Content Types
But all of this is not to say that you cannot or should not mix different content types into the same RSS feeds offered to your subscribers.
Often, mixing content types will prove beneficial to both you, from the business point of view, and your readers:
• when mixed content types provide for a better user experience, such as providing more information about a relevant topic in a different format;
• when using mixed content types to increase your marketing results, without harming your readership.
But certain criteria needs to be met to allow for this:
• The content types you mix must contain contextually relevant information to each other; namely, all of the content items must work together to create a better user experience.
• The content types you mix must contain information of the same level or similar level of relevance to the user.
RSS Marketing Models and Marketing Mix Integration
Knowing the different content types that are available is one thing, but the biggest challenge to RSS marketing success is trully integrating RSS into your marketing mix in a way that supports the growth of your bottom-line.
As we discussed in the Business Case for RSS chapter, the only true RSS monetization model for marketers is using RSS to increase your marketing effectiveness and impact ... just as you're doing with e-mail and other key online marketing channels.
In this chapter, we'll take a quick look at how you can specifically use RSS in various marketing functions. 1. RSS for Public Relations
How Public Relations Overview RSS Feed Content Types / Professionals Can Profit From Activities RSS
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Conducting market research and Using RSS to tap into thousands of Activities business intelligence sources of online news &
commentary about your industry, ● Subscribe to all the competitors, customers etc., to relevant content sources react quicker and better ● Aggregate & filter these content sources using an RSS aggregation & filtering tool ● Watch, react and respond
Direct communications with the Publishing your own RSS feeds to RSS Feed Content Types media and other influencers deliver your PR content to the News key influencers ● ● Articles ● Blog Content ● E-zine Publishing
Feeding the News Engines and Distributing your latest relevant Activities Aggregation sites content to the News Engines and Start publishing your RSS Content Aggregation sites where ● feeds they can be easily accessed by anyone looking for news & ● Submit your RSS feeds to content about your industry, all the relevant News company or products. Engines and Aggregation Sites
Becoming a prefered news Implementing RSS Radars on your Activities source for your industry site, aggregating and filtering Subscribe to all the content from thousands of online ● sources to provide your visitors relevant content sources with the latest and most relevant ● Aggregate & filter these highly targeted content from your content sources using an industry. RSS aggregation & filtering tool ● Display the filtered content on your website as a river of news
2. RSS for Direct Marketing & E-commerce
RSS Works for Direct Marketers
The direct marketing and e-commerce industries have been relatively slow to pick- up on RSS marketing, although many webstores have already started publishing their product lists as RSS feeds, delivering subscribers their latest product changes.
But what direct marketers need to understand is that RSS can go much further for them then simply to get their latest product information out. RSS in fact does have what it takes to support most of their marketing mix.
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Outbound: Thinking of RSS in Direct Marketing Tearms
For direct marketers sales-oriented outbound communications with the all-powerful Call to Action are still the king, since they provide easily measurable results with a clear contribution to the bottom-line.
In this regard, standard direct marketing terms can easily be applied to RSS. We are talking about the holy grail of direct marketing theory:
• List The people you communicate with and send your sales messages to. Usually e-mail lists, postal lists or even outbound telemarketing lists.
• Offer What you offer to the list, including the product, terms of purchase and similar.
• Creative How you make your offer, including everything from the copy to the visual representation.
The Three applied to RSS can be easily understood:
• List With RSS, your actual RSS feed that your audiences are subscribed to becomes the list. These are the people you can send your marketing messages to. But, with RSS, you can only send your marketing messages to the people that pro actively subscribe and keep subscribed to your RSS feeds. If you are publishing One-Size-Fits-All RSS feeds, as is usually the norm, all the people that are subscribed to a single RSS feed represent your list. You cannot target your content by individual subscriber characteristics, but only by the RSS feed as a whole. A single road to your entire universe of subscribers subscribed to the same feed. If however you are publishing iRSS feeds, where you can identify an individual subscriber, you actually can target your messages according to your existing data about individual subscribers.
• Offer What you offer to the list, including the product, terms of purchase and similar.
• Creative How you make your offer, including everything from the copy to the visual representation. With RSS your first creative choice needs to be the RSS media type you want to use: text & images summaries; full-text; document attachments; video or audio. This will depend on the type of media that best helps you achieve your marketing goals. You just have to realize that RSS is still a relatively limited channel, in comparison for example to a website.
There is just one problem.
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Direct marketing and e-commerce traditionally focus their messaging to getting the sale now, not tomorrow. That's why most e-retailers still haven't gone beyond using RSS to deliver their latest product information or why e-mail is still being primarily used as a direct sales facilitation tool.
If you're Amazon or any other webstore that provides relevant customer value through either an incredibly large product range or a highly targeted niche product range or are focusing on a highly competitive pricing strategy, that's fine. Your subscribers want to receive your latest product information, because in their eyes this product information is actually relevant content. They want it. And they will subscribe to your RSS feeds carrying this content.
However, if your product portfolio itself is not perceived as high value and relevant content, you will be in trouble if you persist in only using RSS for shooting out direct sales messages.
In essence, the direct marketing & e-commerce view of "outbound" needs to shift from "sales are the primary goal" to "readership & relationship are the primary goal, sales only come as a result of this".
What does this mean in real life?
Take a look back at the BabyCenter.com example. BabyCenter.com is a webstore in the full meaning of the word. Their primary business model is online retailing of baby products.
But, when you visit their website or receive their e-mail communications, you don't notice that.
Instead, you notice valuable tips that are carefully targeted to the current development stage of your pregnancy or your baby. The selling itself is done as a supplement – always there in the form of targeted ads and product recommendations, but never at the forefront of the key communications channel, except for occasional hard-sell communications.
But even when you receive the hard-sell communications you don't mind. They already provide you with incredible value as it is. You either put up with the additional selling because you love BabyCenter.com so much or you even find the selling valuable, with carefully targeted sales messages bringing you product offers you actually need.
They're even applying the same strategy to RSS.
You don't have to be BabyCenter.com to use this strategy and you don't need to invest nearly as much.
Take a look at the Burpee.com RSS strategy.
Instead of delivering standard lists of products using their RSS feed, they rather focus on providing daily reviews of their seeds, written by their users and with a direct link in the feed for subscribers to add their own reviews for the featured products. Each product review also includes a photography of the seed featured.
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Again, relevant content for their target audiences.
This should in fact become the new king of direct marketing. Relevant content to build readership and relationships for the soft-sell or the occasional hard-sell.
With this in mind, let's take a look at the Three for RSS from this viewpoint:
• List Same as above.
• Offer The offer now moves from the product to relevant content. The content itself needs to become the product.
• Creative Representing your offer (content) in the most reader-friendly way, but also adding the Call to Action that will ultimately need to make the sale.
Just study the various examples given in the book and you will quickly get the hang of it.
RSS Meets the Needs of Direct Marketers Last but not least, in the outbound department it needs to be made clear that RSS does in fact meet all the needs of direct marketers.
• 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.
• RSS metrics RSS can in fact be tracked: track anything from the number of your subscribers, their reading habits, their reading frequency to your click- through rates and activities after clicking-through from your feed. This includes tracking which of your RSS feeds are performing better, are more interesting to your readers and drive more sales ... and the same for individual content items.
• Message targeting Since RSS feeds can be dynamically generated on a per-user basis, you can easily track the interests of your individual subscribers and then target marketing messages directly to them, making each message relevant to their needs and interests in order to increase your sales success.
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• Message personalization If you generate your RSS feeds for each individual user, you can also personalize these feeds. Basic personalization includes elements such as the reader's first name, while more advanced personalization might include personalized content and product recommendations and so on.
• Data capture E-mail marketers have already become experts at using opt-in forms to get as much information from the prospect as possible; the prospect's name, his interests, the current products he is using, his current position in the purchase cycle and so on. RSS can be used in the same way, giving your visitors access to the RSS feed only after they've filled in a simple or complex opt-in form. This can work with e-zine subscriptions, as well as forms you require your visitors to fill in to either register on your website or download your free report or whitepaper.
Good news for direct marketers is that these capabilities are already available in many RSS publishing/marketing solutions, available at very acceptable prices, accessible even to the smallest companies.
This should also make it clear that the best publishing model for direct marketers is iRSS.
The RSS Lead Generation Model With Data Capture: How it Works Lead generation often isn't enough by itself, if it also doesn't come with capturing additional qualification data from the prospects, such as their personal or business information. Direct marketers, both B2B and B2C, and e-commerce professionals need this data to qualify leads and better target their outbound communications.
The traditional RSS subscription model does not support this well; visitors get direct access to the RSS feed simply by copying a link to the feed from the site and entering it into their RSS Reader ... without any barriers on the way, which would allow the marketer to capture additional subscriber data.
However, this model can also turn the other way, requesting visitors to submit their data prior to getting access to the RSS feed, or requesting this data to receive access credentials for secure RSS feeds. This of course will only work if the content offered is of high enough value to the visitor, and this might also include giving a free whitepaper, free demo or other bonuses to new subscribers.
The process is quite simple:
• Promote the RSS feed on the website, as you would promote an e-mail e- zine ... but without making the RSS feed directly available.
• When the user clicks on a button, inviting him to subscribe, you present him with a short data capture form.
• After submitting the required information, the visitor gets the link to the RSS feed.
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• When the visitor accesses the RSS feed for the first time (only works if you're doing iRSS), the first content item in the feed contains the download links to the whitepaper or the other bonuses you promised.
• To capture additional information about the specific subscriber, publish additional data capture messages (content items as individual ads) in the RSS feed occasionally, targeted only at this specific subscriber, giving him an option to receive more valuable information if he updates his profile on your website, by clicking-through from the content item to the website.
The only problem with this model is that visitors might be reluctant to provide personal or business information to subscribe to an RSS feed, since they are used to getting RSS feeds without any "payment in the form of personal data".
If this proves to be the case for you, which you can only find out by testing the two different approaches on your website and seeing which gets you more subscribers with relevant data, you can combine the two models.
The visitor gets access to the RSS feed directly on the website, without having to provide any additional personal or business information.
But the feed he gets contains only content summaries. When he wants to click- through to read more on the website, the website requests additional personal or business data.
However, don't look at this as website registration. The visitor has already converted into a subscriber. When he clicks-through from the content item to the website, your website needs to recognize him as that specific individual subscriber and then simply ask the basic questions (without an e-mail address), which can automatically be appended to this user's existing profile.
Optimizing Direct Marketing Processes Using RSS
For both direct marketers and e-commerce professionals, RSS has much more to offer than just outbound communications, although this is the first thing that comes to mind.
To better understand all the possibilities, let's take a quick look at one of the online-based direct marketing models that integrate multiple channels.
• Front-end: Advertising & promotions
• Affiliate advertising (1) Providing affiliates with RSS feeds they can either use to publish the latest content/products from the marketers on their websites or promote to their visitors, getting a commission on every sale made. (2) Communicating with affiliates using RSS, both for training content and for delivering the latest offers or sales collateral.
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• Search Engine Optimization Using RSS to improve website search engine placement (enriching the website content with relevant content from other sources; getting more inbound links from relevant websites through a smart syndication strategy or RSS directory submissions) and to further distribute website content to the News Engines and Content Aggregation sites, where this content can be discovered by relevant target audiences.
• Merchandising (other sites) Using RSS feeds to deliver the latest product information, ready made for automatic on-site publishing, to other webstores for their inclusion in their product catalogues.
• RSS Advertising Using third-party RSS feeds as an advertising medium.
• Middle-end: Family of websites
• Enhancing Website Content What if Amazon used RSS to tap into thousands of online content sources, to bring their visitors all the latest news, blog commentary and reviews about each individual product it carries? This would enhance the visitor experience (since visitors could directly use Amazon to get all the information on a specific product from multiple sources, directly through Amazon), increase visitor-to-customer conversion, increase web-site stickiness and visit frequency, as well as provide Amazon with even more relevance for specific products for the search engines. With RSS this can all be done using RSS aggregation & filtering tools.
• Capturing Additional Leads Since RSS is easy to subscribe to, without any spam concerns from the consumer, offering RSS feeds on a website increases the number of leads or subscribers that the website is able to capture.
• Back-end: eFollow-up and Call Center
• eFollow-up Using RSS for all of the different types of customer follow-up, such as e-zine publishing and transactional messaging.
• Call Center Using RSS to improve the flow of information within the Call Center.
• Business Intelligence As already noted many times, RSS is one of the best business intelligence and market research tools available today. For direct marketers and e- commerce professionals that means being able to more easily get information on competitors, detect dissatisfied customers and respond to them, manage their reputation and also quickly receive all the pricing changes made by their competitors.
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How Direct Marketers & E-commerce Professionals Can Profit From RSS
Having layed-down the groundwork, let's take a summary view of how direct marketers & e-commerce professionals will benefit from RSS.
How Direct Marketers & E- Overview RSS Feed Content Types / commerce Professionals Can Activities Profit From RSS
Outbound Communications Using RSS to get all types of RSS Feed Content Types content delivered to prospects
and customers ● Articles ● Blog Content ● E-zine Publishing ● Product Lists ● Product Reviews ● Coupons ● Follow-up Letters ● Customer Relationship Management Content ● Transactional Messaging
Affiliate & Merchant Partner Using RSS to communicate with RSS Feed Content Types Management affiliates as well as offer them Periodic Affiliate RSS feeds they can use as ● promotional tools. Updates ● Affiliate Sales Collateral via RSS ● Automated Affiliate Follow-up Sequence ● Affiliate-Powered RSS Feeds
Improved online visibility Distributing your latest relevant Activities content to the News Engines and Start publishing your RSS Content Aggregation sites where ● they can be easily accessed by feeds anyone looking for news & ● Submit your RSS feeds to content about your industry, all the relevant News company or products. Engines and Aggregation Sites
Improving website conversion Enhancing your website content Activities to provide your visitors with Subscribe to all the access to more relevant ● information, related to your relevant content sources products, from various online ● Aggregate & filter these content sources. content sources using an RSS aggregation & filtering tool ● Display the filtered content on your website as a river of news
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Lead Generation Offering RSS feeds to visitors to Activities increase lead capture. ● Publish RSS feeds on your website ● Promote RSS feeds on your website
RSS Advertising Advertising in third-party RSS Activities feeds to increase your reach. ● Define your campaign goals ● Connect with RSS advertising providers and prepare a media plan ● Execute
Conducting market research and Using RSS to tap into thousands of Activities business intelligence sources of online news & Subscribe to all the commentary about your products, ● competitors, competitor pricing relevant content sources and customer feedback. ● Aggregate & filter these content sources using an RSS aggregation & filtering tool ● Watch, react and respond
3. RSS for Online Publishing
In this meaning of the word, we understand online publishers as companies or individuals whose core business model is online publishing, either with paid- subscription or advertising supported.
For online publishers, standard RSS benefits are similar to those of other marketing functions, but differ in the "goal department", mainly by the fact that for online publishing the most important metric is readership. Without readership it is impossible to sell either advertising space or subscriptions.
RSS Marketing for Paid-Subscription Publishers
For paid-subscription publishers, RSS is all about getting their content previews out to their target audiences, and after they subscribe, use RSS to improve their subscription experience by (1) getting content delivered to them using RSS, if that is their preferred content consumption channel, and (2) possibly enhancing the value of the subscription package by also offering RSS Radars pertaining to the topics covered by the publisher.
Increasing Your Reach
The first online publisher challenge for RSS is increasing the publisher's reach using the various benefits of RSS.
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How you do it depends on your overall subscription marketing strategy. The most obvious possibilities are:
• Paid Subscription as an Upgrade to Free Subscription
• Paid Subscription Only
Paid Subscription as an Upgrade to Free Subscription The basic offer in this case is a free subscription with limited content access, enticing the subscriber to upgrade from free to paid to access all the high-value content.
The free subscription serves as a teaser to get the prospect to subscribe and make the first easy step towards paid subscription. The free subscription might come with selected full-text basic articles or other content and summaries of the top content, available only to paid subscribers.
For publishers using this model, taking advantage of RSS to increase their online reach is easy:
• Prepare topical RSS feeds that carry all the latest content for that topic and submit the RSS feed to the News Engines and Content Aggregation sites.
• Personally contact other relevant publishers that might profit from either adding your content to their sites to increase their relevance to their visitors or will profit by becoming your affiliates, driving traffic your way and getting a commission for the subscription sales they generate for you. In either case, prepare RSS feeds that they can use to display your content on their sites. When people will click on your headlines to read more they will come to your website, where the conversion process can begin.
Paid Subscription Only Online publishers that only offer a paid subscription without the option of a preview free subscription will need to at least prepare RSS feeds that carry summaries of their paid content and distribute those feeds in much the same way as those that are using free subscriptions.
Moving From Free to Paid
As always with paid-subscription marketing, the key challenge is moving subscribers from free to paid, regardless of the model you are using.
The most important point to remember is that you need to offer a free RSS subscription on your website without requesting any sort of registration. If you're already doing free subscriptions simply apply the same strategy to RSS, but without registration. Simply give them access to the feed directly on the website. When the free subscribers want to access the content only available to paid subscribers, for example after getting a preview in the RSS feed, present them with the order screen.
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If you're not already offering a free subscription, you will still need to prepare an RSS feed that carries at least the latest summaries of your paid content, requesting subscribers to purchase before accessing the full-text articles on your website.
But again, remember that in order for the visitor to take the most basic step, that's getting the free subscription, you shouldn't use any barriers such as requesting website registration before providing basic free access.
Enhancing the Subscriber Experience
Paid subscription online publishers would also do well to use RSS to enhance the subscriber experience:
• Paid subscribers should have the option of receiving full-text content directly in the RSS feed. Do not worry about content theft. Simply use secure RSS feeds, where subscribers need to enter their individual access credentials to be able to consume the RSS feed content.
• Increase the value of your subscription package by offering RSS Radars on your website, which will provide your paid subscribers with easy access to additional high-relevance content on other websites.
RSS Marketing for Advertising Supported Publishers
In terms of monetizing RSS, two different models are available for advertising supported publishers.
Most Revenues Generated From On-site Advertising
If most of your advertising revenues come from selling the ad space on your website and driving traffic to the website to expose it to this advertising, your primary RSS use is website traffic generation.
• Generate Traffic Through RSS Content Syndication To use RSS to increase your traffic from other websites, you will need to prepare summary feeds carrying the summaries of your latest content, and distribute those to the News Engines, Content Aggregation sites and other website partners. When someone clicks on your latest headlines on another website they visit your site, are exposed to your advertising and may subscribe to your RSS feeds directly.
• Use RSS to Drive Subscribers to Your On-site Advertising Because you are dependent on your on-site advertising sales, you need to use your RSS publishing to drive your RSS subscribers from the feed to the website, which means only publishing content summaries, which attract the subscriber to click through to the website.
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Most Revenues Generated From RSS Advertising
But, if on-site advertising is not your primary source of revenues and you prefer publishing full-text content in your RSS feeds, you can still monetize RSS by placing paid advertisements within your full-text content items in your RSS feeds.
This way you can afford to keep your subscribers in the RSS Reader, where they read your full articles, without driving them to your website, and still expose them to paid advertising in the feed.
As for increasing your reach, summary feeds again need to be used instead of full- text feeds.
How Online Publishers Will Profit From RSS
How Online Publishers Can Overview RSS Feed Content Types / Profit From RSS Activities
Delivering latest content to Using RSS to get all of the latest RSS Feed Content Types subscribers content delivered to subscribers
to: ● Editorial News Articles ● Generate return traffic ● to your site ● Blog Content ● Increase your readership ● Forum Updates ● Increase exposure to ● ... your advertising [in the RSS feed or on the website] ● Build the relationship towards a purchase
Improved online visibility Distributing your latest relevant Activities content to the News Engines and
Content Aggregation sites where ● Start publishing your RSS they can be easily accessed by feeds anyone looking for the type of ● Submit your RSS feeds to content you offer --> to be used all the relevant News as a teaser to bring people to Engines and Aggregation your sites and convert them into Sites either a free or a paid subscription
Improving website relevance Enhancing your website content Activities to provide your visitors with Subscribe to all the access to more relevant ● information, related to the relevant content sources various topics you cover, from ● Aggregate & filter these various online content sources. content sources using an RSS aggregation & filtering tool ● Display the filtered content on your website as a river of news
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RSS Advertising Advertising in third-party RSS Activities feeds to increase your reach. For
online publishers, this is mostly in ● Define your campaign the realm of promoting (1) goals whitepapers that serve as a ● Connect with RSS valuable teaser for the free or advertising providers and paid subscriptions or (2) the prepare a media plan latest breaking news that will motivate readers to clickthrough ● Execute and read your content.
Conducting market research and Using RSS to tap into thousands of Activities business intelligence sources of online news & Subscribe to all the commentary for keeping up to ● relevant content sources date of the best stories to cover or comment on ● Aggregate & filter these content sources using an RSS aggregation & filtering tool ● Watch, react and respond
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IV. Act! Your 9-Step RSS Marketing Plan
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You now understand what RSS is, how it works and how specifically it can be used in various marketing functions.
The key question that remains is how to actually do it.
To help you get the most out of RSS, we developed a 9-step RSS marketing plan that covers all of the key RSS marketing functions, from business intelligence to outbound communications ans measurement.
The 9 steps are:
1. Start using RSS as an end-user
2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
3. Plan your outbound RSS content & marketing strategy
4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
5. Promote your RSS feeds internally
6. Promote your RSS feeds externally
7. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
8. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
9. Use RSS to enhance your website
1. Start Using RSS as an End-User
The first step to getting started with RSS marketing/publishing is getting your own RSS Reader, subscribing to other RSS feeds and just seeing and understanding how it all works.
So first, you need to get an RSS Reader.
The difficult question is how to actually select one that's best for your individual needs. What to Look For in an RSS Reader
The choice of an RSS Reader is not simply the choice of whether you want a web- based, integrated or desktop RSS Reader, but also needs to be based on the features you need to make your content consumption more productive.
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Advanced Features You Need
If you're serious about your RSS consumption and want to use RSS for business intelligence, you need to go beyond the basic RSS Reader features. Here are the advaned features to consider ...
• User authentication Private RSS feeds that are not made available to everyone that stumbles accross them - usually feeds with relatively sensitive content - require you to provide credentials (username and password) to access the feed. Unfortunatelly not every RSS Reader supports user authentication, so this is a feature that absolutely must make it to your list of top things you want from an RSS Reader.
• Synchronization accross multiple platforms Simply put, if you want to receive the most important updates also when you're away from your main work computer, you will need to use multiple RSS Readers: desktop or integrated, web-based and mobile. In this case, you will (1) need an RSS Reader vendor that offers all of the RSS Reader types you need and (2) the ability for all of your RSS Readers to synchronize. Syncrhonization is simply about making sure that all of the RSS Readers you are using always contain the same RSS feeds you already subscribed to and unsubscribed from, without you having to do it in each RSS Reader separately. Readers with good synchronization will also mark your read content items in the other Readers you're using, making your work even easier, and synchronize other settings as well.
• Podcatching and videocatching capabilities Do you also want to use your RSS Reader as a podcatcher or videocatcher, to download and listen/watch audio or video content that comes delivered to you via RSS feeds? Some RSS Readers will simply allow you to click on the enclosed rich-media file and listen/watch it using your existing rich-media player. Others will also play the file in the Reader or integrate with your rich-media player by automatically loading your rich-media files into it. And yet again others will allow you to create play lists and so on.
• Basic content filtering RSS is great for organizing your content consumption from dozens and dozens of sources, but when you're subscribed to over 100 feeds even standard RSS features cannot save you. RSS Readers with basic content filtering features will allow you to specify certain keywords and then display only the latest content, from all of your feeds, that includes (or does not include, in the case of negative keywords) these keywords, making it easy for you to identify the most relevant content for your needs.
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• Advanced content filtering via Attention XML Attention XML is a special feature, available only in the most cutting-edge RSS Readers, that helps your RSS Reader track what content from your RSS feeds you or your team are paying most attention to and then actually bring simillar content to your attention, to make your life even easier. How does this really work? The RSS Reader watches what kind of content you pay more attention to in your RSS Reader. As it learns your RSS reading habits, it starts pushing the most relevant content higher in the RSS Reader, or even displaying only the most relevant content, based on your attention data, if that's how you like it. This is a crucial feature to increase your content consumption productivity.
• Integrated search Integrated search features that allow you to search for new feeds or new content from RSS feeds using various traditional search engines, RSS search engines, tag search engines and content aggregation websites. Great for finding additional information of interest directly from your RSS Reader. Some RSS Readers will also allow you to set-up persistent search, which will constantly bring you the latest content for your keywords from the chosen search engines, without you having to search manually for those keywords again.
• Content item forwarding Received a new piece of content you want to share with your team or friends? Some RSS Readers will allow you to forward it via e-mail directly from the RSS Reader, without having to manually copy and paste the content into your e-mail application.
• Integrated blog publishing Are you a blogger? Then get an RSS Reader that allows you to post directly to your blog without even leaving the Reader. It should also enable you to republish content from the feeds you're subscribed to directly to your blog, adding your own comments of course. This is also a good feature to have if you're not a "standard" blogger, but instead only want to use a blog to let your team-members know what's new and important.
• Content tagging Mark individual content items or feeds with your own set of tags to better organize and categorize the most relevant content. Share your tags with others or watch the content others are tagging.
• Aggregate views You might be subscribed to hundreds of feeds, but you usually won't have the time to browse them all. This is where aggregate viewing comes in Æ single aggregate views that pull together all the latest content from the feeds you're subscribed to and present them in a single chronological list, regardless of the source. Aggregate views are often also called »river of news«, since they deliver all the news in a single stream of content.
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• Feed autodiscovery Some RSS Readers will automatically recognize RSS feeds on the websites you visit, making it easier for you to subscribe. An important feature to save you a couple of seconds with each RSS subscription.
• Import lists of feeds OPML is a special format that allows you to import a list with multiple RSS feeds directly into your RSS Reader, without having to enter them one by one.
• Platform What computer platform do you need the RSS Reader to work on? MAC, Windows, mobile? Make sure that the Reader you choose supports it.
• The user experience These are the most important features to watch for, but certainly not all there is. Almost every RSS Reader differs in terms of the actual user experience, so you will need to play around with them at least somewhat to see which user experience best fits you.
More About Advanced Features
While you might be tempted to go straight for the free RSS Readers, instead of paying around $30 for a fully-featured RSS Reader, at least until you get into the hang of things, you first need to understand what some of the more advanced features of RSS Readers will do for you and how.
For using RSS for business intelligence, these are actually the most crucial features that will allow you to perform at your best.
Advanced Search Features You need to keep up with the latest information, and most importantly, you need to get it to come to you, instead of having to actively search for it.
This is where persistent integrated RSS search comes in.
Advanced RSS Readers will allow you to specify certain keywords and certain sources of information, all RSS based, and then create a new stream of content just for that specific search, bringing you the latest information from your selected sources, containing only the keywords relevant to your needs.
Advanced Aggregate Views & Attention XML The one problem with RSS is that there is just too much content to keep track of. RSS does give you the power to keep track of almost everything, but at the same time that very power might make your work less productive, bringing you more news and information than you can handle. Eventually, the information overload might even deter you from using RSS any further …
To combat this problem several RSS Reader vendors have started developing advanced features to help you get through the clutter and bring you only the most relevant news.
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It all starts with Aggregate Views or "River of News", which is a special display within an RSS Reader that combines all of the latest news from all of your RSS feeds, giving you all of the latest news in chronological order in a single display.
If you’re subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds, this will help you get the latest news fast, without having to specifically look at each RSS feed with the latest content.
Screenshot: Aggregate View or "River of News" in NewsGator Outlook
But while aggregate viewing is the step in the right direction, all the pieces come together when it is joined by advanced content filtering using Attention XML.
Now, don’t worry about the complicated name.
What you have to know is that Attention XML is a special method used to help the RSS Reader recommend the most relevant content to you, based on your previous activity and preferences.
When using your RSS Reader with this capability, you create an attention stream – data on which RSS feeds and which content you are giving most attention to.
RSS Readers use your attention stream to recommend content to you, allowing you to only spend time on what’s most important to you.
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Screenshot: Aggregate View or "River of News" in Attensa for Outlook, with attention streams
For example, the Attensa for Outlook RSS Reader gives you three options of how your "River of News" is displayed to you:
• Priority Attensa constantly observes and analyzes your behavior in the RSS Reader as you consume RSS content, taking into account the time and frequency that you access your feeds and read, delete or ignore individual RSS content items. Based on this, the RSS Readers provides you with a prioritized list of latest feeds, based on the likelihood they will be of interest to you. At any given time, the RSS Reader provides you with the content that, based on your previous behavior, is supposedly most relevant to you at exactly this time. For example, in the morning general news might be more prioritized, while at noon industry news might get higher priority.
• Favorites Attensa watches the RSS feeds you read most frequently and consistently, and then puts your perceived favorite content higher in the rivers of news. It also gives you the option to manually rank your favorite feeds.
• Date As the name implies, this view displays the latest content from the latest updated RSS feeds.
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All of this is especially important when you come to enterprise RSS and need to manage RSS content within a larger organization, or when you want to use RSS in a collaborative environment. Quick Overview of RSS Readers
Fully-Featured RSS Readers
To make your choice easier, here is a list of recommended RSS Readers offering most of the features required to make your job easier.
RSS Reader Type Windows Mac User authentication Synchronization Podcatching filtering Basic content Advanced content filtering Integrated search item forwarding Content Integrated blog publishing tagging Content Aggregate views Feed autodiscovery feeds of lists Import NewsGator Integrated x x x x x x x x x x x Inbox (Outlook) NewsGator Desktop x x x x x x x x x x FeedDemon NewsGator Online x x x x x x x x x x x Online NewsGator All x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Enterprise Attensa for Integrated x x x x x x x x x x x x x Outlook (Outlook) Attensa Mobile x Mobile Attensa Web- x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Online based Attensa Feed All x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Server NewsGator Desktop x x x x x x x x x x x NetNewsWire Awasu Desktop x x x x x x x Pluck Web Web- x x x x x x x x x x Edition based Pluck Integrated x x x x x x x x x x x (FireFox, Internet Exporer)
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RSS Readers With Essential Features
While these RSS Readers certainly provide the most features needed for advanced RSS usage, you may also want to check out the following RSS Readers that don't provide as much, but are easy and quick to use:
• Bloglines
• Windows Live
• MyYahoo
• Google Reader
• MyMSN
• FeedLounge
• GritWire
• NewsAlloy
• Rojo
• SharpReader
• RSS Bandit
• Awasu How to Select Your RSS Reader
Confused with all the options? There really are many, and it is a difficult choice to make without testing at least a few Readers to see what works best for you.
1. Define Your Basic RSS Reader Requirements Start by defining your basic RSS Reader requirements, based on the list we just went through.
2. Select the Appropriate RSS Reader Type You will need to decide whether to go web-based, desktop or integrated. With all the features offered today by all the three categories, the choice depends most on your working style and your work schedule.
• If you "live" in Outlook or Thunderbird, an e-mail client integrated RSS Reader is best.
• If you "live" in your internet browser, you can go for either an internet browser toolbar with RSS capabilities, a standard browser integrated RSS Reader or a web-based RSS Reader.
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• If you travel and you want to have it all on your laptop and read on the plane then a desktop Reader or an integrated Reader will be best.
• If you want to be able to access the data from any computer then an online Reader will work.
• If you want to have an RSS Reader constantly running in the background and notifying you via an alert window when something new and important happens, a web-based RSS Reader might not be the best choice.
• If you want to get the latest and most important information "on the go", you'll also need a mobile RSS Reader that works with your mobile phone.
There's no standard answer or an evaluation chart that could help you choose the best RSS Reader type for you. In the end, it will all come down to your personal preferences and testing multiple options to see what works best for you in action.
The ideal choice in the end might be getting an RSS Reader package with different RSS Readers, such as an Outlook integrated Reader, web-based Reader and mobile Reader, which automatically synchronize so that you always have access to all of your feed subscriptions, regardless of the Reader you're using.
Just as an example:
• Use the Outlook integrated RSS Reader whenever you're behind your work computer.
• Use the web-based RSS Reader whenever you're away from your computer, but can access the internet from another computer.
• Use a mobile Reader to get the key information while on-the-go.
And whichever RSS Reader you use to subscribe to the feed, the subscription will be synchronized with the other Readers so that you always have the most recent version available anywhere.
3. Create an RSS Reader Short-list and Test Now that you know exactly what you need, simply go through the various Readers available on the market, create a short-list based on your requirements, select the top 3 or 5 and start testing.
4. Implement Personally and Start Using After you found your perfect match, simply install it and start using it by subscribing to various RSS feeds of interest to you. Quick Tips: How to Find the Right RSS Feeds For You
If you're new to RSS, you will need to start by finding various content sources of relevance for you to subscribe to.
Here are some of the basic choices:
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• Top Industry Sites, Your Competitors and Your Customers Regardless of your business, you probably already know the top websites that cover the latest news, developments, commentary and events in your industry, as well as who your competitors and your customers are. Seek out these websites and subscribe to their RSS feeds to be constantly informed of the latest developments. This also goes for the news sites you regularly watch for latest news. Simply subscribe to their feeds to make your news consumption easier.
• The News Engines The online news engines specialize in bringing you the latest news from thousands of different sources online. Start with Google News and Yahoo! News. Either choose the general news categories of interest to you on these sites and subscribe to their corresponding RSS feeds, or do a keyword search with your top industry keywords and subscribe to the search results RSS feed for those keywords. Whenever something of relevance is published on the sources covered by these two websites, you will receive the latest news into your RSS Reader.
• Top Industry Blogs Use a blog search engine like Google Blog Search or Technorati to find various blogs in your industry. These will usually provide you with the latest commentary of what's happening in your industry.
• Finding Additional RSS Feeds To find additional RSS feeds, use an RSS search engine such as Feedster.
2. Start Using RSS for Business Intelligence
While RSS is excellent for subscribing to individual RSS feeds, or for watching multiple RSS feeds through an advanced RSS Reader that's capable of applying your behavior stream to display only the most relevant latest content for you, things really move up a notch once you start doing real business intelligence via RSS.
As already noted before in the Business Case for RSS chapter, RSS is perfect for pulling together the latest content from thousands of different content sources. Additional tools then allow you to filter that content using specific keywords and then repackage it into various new niche feeds that contain only the most important information for you. These new feeds are then ready for consumption via an RSS Reader.
In essence, RSS allows you to watch thousands of content sources at the same time, using just one tool to actually watch the content - the RSS Reader - and only getting you the most relevant latest information without overwhelming you.
The process is simple:
• Subscribe to thousands of content sources.
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• Aggregate and filter your content sources to get only the most relevant information.
• Access all of the relevant information through one application --> an RSS Reader.
As you can see from the process itself, three things are needed to make this work:
• Third-party RSS feeds that you subscribe to with an RSS filtering tool.
• An RSS filtering tool that "captures" these subscriptions, filters them and creates new filtered RSS feeds for you.
• An RSS Reader that you use personally to subscribe to the output RSS feeds created by the RSS filtering tool.
Bloggers, online publishers, corporate RSS Search Engines websiteswebsites …… and Content Aggregation Sites
RSS Filtering Tool RSS Reader You Wire Services
News Engines
E-mail E-zines, Websites without RSS RSS Scrapping Tools E- i Let's tackle this process step-by-step ... A. Subscribe
The subscription phase starts with defining your business intelligence objectives and then creating a wide repository of the keywords that match your objectives.
During this phase we will need to prepare a short but complete document that will help us setup all the needed sources of information.
A1. Define Your Objectives
What Do You Need to Know?
What is it that you need to be informed of constantly? Is it ...
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• What your key audiences, such as your customers and the influencers are saying about you?
• What your competition is doing? How are they interacting with their environment? What the key influencers are saying about your competition?
• What are the key trends in your industry? What are the key influencers saying? What are the key challenges the industry is facing?
• What are the top companies outside of your direct field doing, which you may use to power your own creative processes?
Creating a short-list of your top information objectives will help you better define what specifically you need to be looking for for your RSS business intelligence needs.
To get started, consider all the overall objectives you would alike to achieve and start completing the first field in a table such as this:
Overall Objectives Focused Objectives Keywords Sources
What my key audiences are saying about my company?
What my competition is doing?
What is happening in my industry?
Focus Your Information Objectives
The problem with using RSS for business intelligence, like with most business intelligence tools, is that unless you precisely define what you want to know, you will never get really relevant, valuable and actionable information.
To focus your objectives, go back to your overall objectives and consider all the concrete topics you are really interested in. Move from general information to highly focused information, asking yourself "What specifically am I interested in?"
For example ...
Overall Objectives Focused Objectives Keywords Sources
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What my key Overall Audience Feedback / audiences are saying Company about my company? [a single source of information of what people in general are saying about our company; we want to receive a single view of the most relevant feedback about the company]
Overall Audience Feedback / Product #1 [a single source of information of what people in general are saying about our Product #1; we want to receive a single view of the most relevant feedback about the product]
Blogger Feedback / Company [what bloggers specifically are saying about our company; we need to know this because we need to respond quickly to them]
Customer Feedback / Company [what if anything our customers are saying about us; we need to know this because we need to focus on better meeting their demands]
...
What my ... competition is doing?
What is happening ... in my industry?
Define Your Keywords
Based on your focused objectives now define the various keywords that are highly relevant to those objectives. Use all relevant keywords that can describe the subject of each of your focused goals.
Add these keywords to each of the focused goal in your table, such as ...
Overall Objectives Focused Objectives Keywords Sources
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What my key Overall Audience Feedback / Company Name audiences are saying Company [all the variations of about my company? [a single source of information of how the company name what people in general are saying can be spelled] about our company; we want to Brand Names receive a single view of the most [all the variations of relevant feedback about the how your most company] important brand names can be spelled]
Overall Audience Feedback / Product Name Product #1 [all the variations of [a single source of information of how the product name what people in general are saying can be spelled; also about our Product #1; we want to use the Company Name receive a single view of the most + Product Name relevant feedback about the keyword if it makes product] sense] Niche product category keywords [if your product is a category leader, also use niche product category keywords that might describe your product]
Blogger Feedback / Company Company Name [what bloggers specifically are [all the variations of saying about our company; we how the company name need to know this because we can be spelled] need to respond quickly to them] Brand Names [all the variations of how your most important brand names can be spelled]
Customer Feedback / Company Company Name [what if anything our customers [all the variations of are saying about us; we need to how the company name know this because we need to can be spelled] focus on better meeting their Brand Names demands] [all the variations of how your most important brand names can be spelled]
...
What my ... competition is doing?
What is happening ... in my industry?
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As you can see from the example below, many keywords are often repeated, even though they are to be used for different information objectives. The reason for this is that your objectives are not only reached by the keywords you use, but also by the sources you use for them.
A2. Tap Into All the Relevant Sources
Now that you have identified your key focused information goals, you need to seek out the various sources that will help you gather information for your information goals.
Top Sources and How to Use Them
News Engines The news engines specialize in tapping into the key sources of information and bringing you only the most relevant news from these various sources.
The top representatives of this category are:
• Google News
• Yahoo! News
Since neither offer exactly the same results as the other, you should tap into both of them.
Let's take a look at how to do this step-by-step with Google News.
1. Launch http://news.google.com in your browser
2. Click on the "Advanced News Search" link to start your advanced search
3. Start with the first focused objective and the first keyword group, create a comprehensive search and click on the "Google Search" button [define your search with as much detail as possible; if possible use the "Find results with at least one of the words" to combine various keywords in a single search]
4. On the search results page scroll down below the list of all the topics on the left side and copy the RSS link from the results page to your table, as one of the sources for the keyword group.
5. Go back to step #2 and do the same for your next keyword group.
Here's a quick example of how this might look in your table for one of your keyword groups.
Overall Objectives Focused Objectives Keywords Sources
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What my key Overall Audience Feedback / Company Name Google News RSS audiences are saying Company [all the variations of about my company? [a single source of information of how the company name what people in general are saying can be spelled] about our company; we want to Brand Names receive a single view of the most [all the variations of relevant feedback about the how your most company] important brand names can be spelled]
Overall Audience Feedback / Product Name ... Product #1 [all the variations of [a single source of information of how the product name what people in general are saying can be spelled; also about our Product #1; we want to use the Company Name receive a single view of the most + Product Name relevant feedback about the keyword if it makes product] sense] Niche product category keywords [if your product is a category leader, also use niche product category keywords that might describe your product]
Blogger Feedback / Company Company Name ... [what bloggers specifically are [all the variations of saying about our company; we how the company name need to know this because we can be spelled] need to respond quickly to them] Brand Names [all the variations of how your most important brand names can be spelled]
Customer Feedback / Company Company Name ... [what if anything our customers [all the variations of are saying about us; we need to how the company name know this because we need to can be spelled] focus on better meeting their Brand Names demands] [all the variations of how your most important brand names can be spelled]
......
What my ... competition is doing?
What is happening ... in my industry?
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Wire Services Press Release wire services specialize in bringing you the latest press releases from their customers. Due to their high reach they are capable of delivering incredible amounts of press releases from various companies directly to your RSS Reader.
The most popular overall wire services are:
• PR Web
• PR Newswire
• I-Newswire.com
Fortunately, PR Web and PR Newswire, as well as some other press release wire services are already covered in Google News, so there is no need to include these under your sources as well.
However, there are several highly focused and niche wire services, which are not covered by Google News or Yahoo! News and may as such provide valuable additional information, based on your specific information needs. Here are just two examples not covered by Google News.
• Kyodo News – Japaneese news search
• M2.com – Technology news wire
Some of these alternative wire services offer search features with search results RSS feeds. Use these the same way as you would Google News or Yahoo! News. Others only carry one RSS feed. To use these, simply add the full RSS feed link to your list.
RSS Search Engines, Blog Search Engines and Content Aggregation Sites RSS search engines and blog search engines specialize in searching various RSS feeds in their database to help you find the latest content from around the world. Content aggregation sites on the other hand function in a similar way to Wire Services or News Engines, only that they tap into different sources.
To further expand your business intelligence reach you should use these as well.
The approach again is similar to the approach we explained for Google News --> always first create a search for one of your keyword groups; add the search results RSS feed to your list; and go back to step #1 and continue.
To get the latest and most comprehensive list of these search engines, visit Robin Good's Top55 list, which has now grown into more than 199 sources you can tap into.
Individual Sites But no matter how many news, wire and other search engines you use, you will never be able to tap into all the specific RSS feeds that might offer you highly relevant information that you specifically need to focus on.
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These individual subscriptions might even be more important than aggregate subscriptions to the other sources noted above, since you can hand-select the most important sources for you.
These sources are:
• Your competitors' RSS feeds
• Top bloggers in your field
• Your customers' websites
• Price comparison websites
• Employment websites
• Web forums & other online communities
• ...
Seek them out and subscribe to all the sources that carry any bearing on your business intelligence needs.
RSS Scrapping Tools Once you start searching for other sources you may find that many of these don't offer RSS feeds. You will find some websites that don't offer RSS feeds at all, and you will find some content providers that still only publish in e-mail and not in RSS.
To make your content consumption easier, more productive and especially to gain more business intelligence value from it, you may want to convert these non-RSS enabled sources into RSS feeds as well.
The tools to enable you to do so are called RSS Scraping tools, and have the capability to take a website without an RSS feed, screen its contents on a regular basis, and create an RSS feed of that content for you. An example of such a service is Feedity.
And "e-mail to RSS" tools allow you to subscribe to e-mail newsletters and then have the service convert those into an RSS feed. Some of these tools include MailBucket and QuickMail.
Just keep in mind that you may only use this for your own information purposes, and not distribute RSS feeds generated in this way with anyone.
Completing Your Table
Go through all the various sources noted above and slowly complete your table with all the relevant sources. Every time you create a new subscription for one of your keyword groups, simply add the links to your table.
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B. Aggregate & Filter
When you have completed your list of objectives, keywords and most importantly your sources, you need to aggregate & filter them to create fewer highly focused streams of content.
To do so, you will need an RSS aggregation & filtering tool, capable of taking multiple RSS feeds, aggregating them together and applying various rules to filter all of this content into a fewer highly relevant content streams.
Top tools to allow you to do so:
• mySyndicaat – top RSS aggregation & filtering tool with all the features you need to professionally aggregate & filter RSS feeds
• FeedDigest – an aggregation & filtering tool more adjusted to the end consumer, but with enough of the important features to help you work with RSS aggregation & filtering
• Moray – a server-side aggregation & filtering tool, which you need to install on your own server; powerful application, but only for those that have the technical capacity to install it and set it up on their servers
• HexaMail – corporate-grade RSS aggregation & filtering tool
In addition to these tools, several Enterprise RSS solutions already provide this functionality out of the box.
The Process
The aggregation & filtering process is simple and once everything is set-up only requires minimum tweaking from your side.
1. Register at an aggregation & filtering service of your choice
2. Create a new RSS Radar for each of your objectives/keyword groups [an RSS Radar is an umbrella term for a single stream of aggregated & filtered RSS content, aggregating multiple RSS feeds, applying a keyword filter to them and providing a single RSS content stream with the aggregated & filtered content from all of your RSS feeds]
3. Add filter keywords to each of the Radars, which the system will use to filter out all the content that doesn't match your specific requirements
4. The system will create a new RSS feed for each of your RSS Radars C. Access & Consume
Now simply subscribe to each of the RSS Radar feeds, generated by your RSS aggregation & filtering tool, using your RSS Reader.
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3. Plan Your Outbound RSS Content & Marketing Strategy
Planning your RSS content & marketing strategy is all about using RSS for outbound communications and content delivery. This is the most important step in your entire RSS implementation phase, since it defines precisely what kind of RSS feeds you will publish.
Making mistakes on this level might in fact hinder your overall capacity to use RSS for improved marketing efficiency, preventing you from achieving any real marketing results from RSS.
The key elements of your RSS content & marketing strategy are:
• Your RSS marketing goals
• RSS marketing mix integration
• Planning your RSS feeds
• Planning your RSS publishing method A. Your RSS Marketing Goals
As always with marketing, everything starts with your goals, in this case with your goals for outbound RSS marketing.
Consider what you wish to achieve with your outbound RSS marketing activities:
• Increase sales through direct communications with my target audiences via RSS
• Increase sales due to improved online visibility
• Increase online readership and reach using RSS
• Improve public relations effectiveness through RSS publishing
• ...
As you already know, RSS supports a very wide array of marketing goals, which have been represented throughout this e-book. Think about them and decide on the most important goals for you. B. RSS Marketing Mix Integration
Now, based on your goals, think about how they can best be achieved by integrating RSS into your marketing mix, by following the various strategies outlined in the RSS Marketing Strategies chapter.
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C. Planning Your RSS Feeds
As already stated, every content strategy begins with the reader Æ the target audiences you want to deliver your content to, and their specific online content consumption needs and interests, related to your business model of course.
These target audiences include:
• Business prospects, segmented by prevailing product category or business segment interest.
• Existing clients, segmented by prevailing interest, product category, business segment, existing products or existing relationship.
• Business partners, segmented by partner type, such as suppliers, or by relationship level.
• Internal audiences, such as employees, owners and investors, and different subsets of these.
• The media, which can further be broken-down into smaller groups of target audiences, such as by media type, existing relationship or the business segment different groups of media representatives cover.
• Institutional audiences, such as the government.
• Website syndication partners, segmented by the content they publish, which has bearing on the actual content you may want to provide to them for republishing purposes via RSS.
• Search engines and directories that you want to syndicate your content to.
Strategizing For Your Different Target Audiences
The key to all online communications and content delivery, not just with RSS marketing, is understanding that:
• different target audiences have different content needs;
• different target audiences require different types of content from your company;
• your business goals differ from target audience to target audience;
• different target audiences demand different strategies for you to be able to build a solid bridge between where they are now and where you want them to be or what you want them to do.
We would never go as far as to presume we know the best content strategy for your target audiences. You know who they are, what they need, what you want to achieve with them and how to best get there.
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But just to demonstrate the point, here is a simple example chart of how your content strategy may differ from target audience to audience, made on an imaginary example of a specialty product retailer …
Target Audience Primary Audience Final Company Goal Content Strategy Interest Business prospects: Fitness & diets products Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide fitness & diet Fitness & Diets (quick & tips that provide fitness & diets product tips with quick results results) quick results with little with quick results and Æ Relate the tips with work little work actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Business prospects: Fitness & diet products Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide fitness & diet Fitness & Diets (ready to & tips that provide long- comprehensive fitness tips with long-term work for it) term results; the package with proven results prospect is willing to long-term results Æ Relate the tips with work hard to get the actual company products results he wants Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Business prospects: Kitchen & household Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide practical Kitchen & Household tips to make household Kitchen & household kitchen & household tips chores easier and product Æ Relate the tips with quicker actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Business prospects: Fitness & diets products Make the first sale by Æ Provide fitness & diet Fitness sweepstakes & tips providing a compelling tips participants offer to move the Æ Relate the tips with prospect from the actual company products "freebie hunter" status Æ to customer status Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Æ Expose time-limited discounted offers to generate the first purchase Existing clients: Fitness Fitness & diets products Make an up-sell related Æ Provide fitness & diet appliances (first-time & tips with the first purchase tips related with the up- buyers) sell product for the product the client already owns Æ Relate the tips with actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for
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appropriate products Æ Expose time-limited discounted offers to generate the up-sell purchase Existing clients: Fitness Fitness & diets products Increase purchasing Æ Provide fitness & diet appliances (loyal & tips frequency tips customers) Æ Relate the tips with actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Æ Loyalty-scheme discount offers Business partners: Fitness product Facilitate fitness Æ Provide customer Fitness product information product innovation & feedback for existing suppliers increase the relative products & customer importance of the ideas company to improve Æ Provide sales reports business terms & activity reports Business partners: Overall product Increase overall order Æ Pre-announce Retail store chains information quantities upcoming products, with detailed information Æ Provide customer testimonials Æ Provide lists of bestselling products Æ Provide sales tips for the products the retail store chain carries Æ Make special volume order offers Business partners: Fitness product Increase fitness order Æ Pre-announce Fitness specialty stores information quantities upcoming fitness products, with detailed information Æ Provide customer testimonials for fitness products Æ Provide lists of bestselling fitness products Æ Provide sales tips for the fitness products the stores sell Æ Make special volume order offers Internal audiences: Fitness product group Increase overall product Æ Provide fitness Fitness product group information group effectiveness and project updates profitability Æ Enable team collaboration Æ Provide third-party information from the
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fitness product category Internal audiences: Internet marketing Increase overall internet Æ Provide project Internet marketing department information sales updates department Æ Enable team collaboration Æ Provide third-party information on internet marketing The media: Sports Sports information Improve media Æ Provide sports related media positioning of sports content (product products releases; interviews; opinions; …) The media: General General information of Improve overall Æ Provide general media interest to the general company brand image company news public
As you can see, even with these seemingly similar target audiences there are several nuances in our goals and strategies for each of them, which also need to be translated into the actual content that needs to be delivered to them.
Also keep in mind that this is a fairly simplified example, which we will expand on further in the e-book.
You could however decide that having different content strategies for these different target audiences might not provide the additional business benefits to justify the added costs, so you could combine your different audiences into larger audience groups, such as in this example:
Target Audience Primary Audience Final Company Goal Content Strategy Interest Business prospects: Fitness & diets products Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide fitness & diet Fitness & Diets & tips fitness & diets product tips Æ Relate the tips with actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Æ Expose time-limited discounted offers to generate the first purchase Business prospects: Kitchen & household Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide practical Kitchen & Household tips to make household Kitchen & household kitchen & household tips chores easier and product Æ Relate the tips with quicker actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Existing clients: Fitness Fitness & diets products Make an up-sell related Æ Provide fitness & diet
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information from the fitness product category Internal audiences: Internet marketing Increase overall internet Æ Provide project Internet marketing department information sales updates department Æ Enable team collaboration Æ Provide third-party information on internet marketing The media: Sports Sports information Improve media Æ Provide sports related media positioning of sports content (product products releases; interviews; opinions; …) The media: General General information of Improve overall Æ Provide general media interest to the general company brand image company news public
Or, if even this seems too much, which it is for small business with just a few employees or perhaps even just one employee, you might elect to cover only your most important target audiences from the sales viewpoint and so completely decrease the needed investment:
Target Audience Primary Audience Final Company Goal Content Strategy Interest Business prospects: Fitness & diets products Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide fitness & diet Fitness & Diets & tips fitness & diets product tips Æ Relate the tips with actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Æ Expose time-limited discounted offers to generate the first purchase Business prospects: Kitchen & household Make the first sale Æ Æ Provide practical Kitchen & Household tips to make household Kitchen & household kitchen & household tips chores easier and product Æ Relate the tips with quicker actual company products Æ Mix product testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Existing clients: Fitness Fitness & diets products Make an up-sell related Æ Provide fitness & diet appliances & tips with the first purchase tips related with the up- & increase purchasing sell product for the frequency product the client already owns Æ Relate the tips with actual company products Æ Mix product
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testimonials with tips Æ Include ads for appropriate products Æ Expose time-limited discounted offers to generate the up-sell purchase Æ Loyalty-scheme discount offers The media: Sports Sports information Improve media Æ Provide sports related media positioning of sports content (product products releases; interviews; opinions; …)
Even if you elect to completely minimize your content strategy from the segmentation viewpoint, you will still need to at least break down your audiences by general interest to achieve the desired impact.
Your ultimate task Æ create the RSS content needed to both satisfy the needs of your target audiences and your own business goals with the audience. D. Planning Your RSS Publishing Model
Once you have dermined exactly who you want to communicate with and what content you want to deliver to them, you also need to think about your RSS publishing model.
The possibilities available to you include:
• One-Size-Fits-All and Topical RSS Feeds
• Customizable RSS Feeds
• Search-Based RSS Feeds
• Personalized RSS Feeds
• RSS Feeds With Content Targeting
• Autoresponder RSS Feeds
Your choice now will decide how you actually prepare individual RSS feeds. Do you prepare individual feeds, or do you allow different target audiences to customize or even personalize the RSS feeds they receive from you?
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4. Define Your RSS Marketing Requirements & Select Your RSS Marketing Vendor
To publish your RSS feeds, you need an RSS marketing & publishing tool that's capable of fully supporting your RSS strategy. A. Define Your Requirements
Answer these questions:
a) Do you want to integrate RSS publishing with your existing content management system?
b) What RSS metrics you’ll want to watch? For example, are you satisfied with just a rough idea of how many people are reading your RSS feed, or are you interested in more precise subscriber counts, clicks and even individual content item popularity?
c) Do you need feed personalization, such as personalizing your RSS content with the recipient's name and other details?
d) Do you want to provide your subscribers with the ability to precisely select the content they want to receive in your RSS feed (customization), such as by content topic, keywords, authors and so on?
e) Do you want the RSS feeds to be hosted on your own server?
f) Do you need the ability to target promotional messages or other content to your individual RSS feed subscribers, for example based on their previous clicks and reading habits, or even their subscription data?
g) What’s your budget?
h) Do you want to use RSS for lead generation, also capturing additional data from your subscribers?
h) Etc. B. Make Your Choice
Now, based on your requirements, create a short-list of RSS publishing & marketing tools and select the one that best meets your needs.
You will have a choice of many different solutions in different RSS vendor categories.
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Desktop feed generation tools
Desktop software you can use to inexpensively, quickly and easily generate RSS feeds, but doesn’t allow for more advanced features such as content targeting.
Solutions: http://www.feedforall.com
Basic hosted online RSS publishing solutions
The basic hosted online solutions work quite similar to desktop tools, but are generally allow for a more streamlined publishing experience. Their key problem is that they usually require the publisher to host the feeds on the vendor’s server, thus decreasing the SEO impact of RSS.
Solutions: http://www.myrsscreator.com
Advanced RSS marketing solutions
These will cover more advanced RSS marketing capabilities, such as metrics, scheduled autoresponder messages, database building capabilities and similar.
Solutions: http://www.simplefeed.com, http://www.nooked.com, http://myst- technology.com, http://www.rssautopublisher.com, http://www.press-feed.com/, http://www.market-soft.com/bypass/
High-end e-mail integrated solutions
E-mail integrated solutions are the recent new-comer to the RSS industry, being provided by some of the best reputable e-mail vendors, and providing marketers with full integration with their existing e-mail marketing solutions.
Solutions: http://www.silverpop.com
Other options
There are many other options as well, one for example using your existing content management system to publish RSS feeds, or using a blog publishing solution, which allows for some basic RSS publishing features, but not much in terms of RSS marketing.
Solutions: http://www.movabletype.com, http://www.wordpress.org, … C. Start Publishing
The final step in this process is implementing your new solution and starting the RSS feed publishing process, according to your RSS content strategy.
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5. Promote Your RSS Feeds Internally
Promoting RSS feeds on a website in order to generate subscriptions is still one of the weakest points of the various RSS marketing programms implemented by RSS marketers across the globe. Different On-Site RSS Promotion Strategies
There are several on-site RSS promotion strategies you can choose from, and many of these now fully depend on the RSS publishing model you chose earlier in your RSS marketing process.
Direct Full Access to RSS Feeds
The direct full access to RSS feeds is the most used strategy, providing your visitors with direct subscribe links on your website.
“Primary RSS Link” RSS Presentation on Site Page
“Topical Direct RSS Links” / Site
Subscribe
This is a strategy to be used if you're publishing One-Size-Fits-All and Topical RSS feeds.
Primary RSS Feed Subscribe Button In this case, you provide your visitors with a main RSS subscribe button in a highly visible position on your website, giving them direct access to subscribe to your "Primary RSS Feed" from anywhere on your website, simply by adding the RSS feed URL to their RSS Reader.
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The "Primary RSS Feed" is that "default" RSS feed that carries your most valuable content for most of your visitors, simillar to promoting a general newsletter on your website. Even if you have multiple RSS feeds for multiple target audiences, you will need a "Primary RSS Feed" to deliver your "best of" content via a single RSS feed, to capture the most visitors.
Topical RSS Feed Subscribe Buttons Topical RSS Feed subscribe buttons need to be provided next to the corresponding topics on your website that these feeds cover, promoted directly next to the topic headline on the topic main page.
Screenshot: SitePoint.com topical RSS feeds
RSS Presentation Page However, next to the "Primary RSS Feed" subscription button, as well as next to your Topical RSS feed buttons, you also need a link to your RSS Presentation page, which fully explains RSS to your visitors and provides them with a list of all the different RSS feeds available on your site.
Use the RSS Presentation Page to explain all the benefits of RSS for the end-user, giving him step-by-step instructions for his RSS usage.
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Screenshot: SitePoint.com RSS Presentation Page
Adding a Customization Layer
If however your chosen RSS publishing model is providing customizable or personalized RSS feeds, you will need to provide an additional customization layer to the subscription process, allowing visitors to customize your RSS feeds.
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“Primary RSS Link” on Site RSS Presentation Page Customization Layer
“Topical Direct RSS Links” / Site
Subscribe
The customization layer usually hides behind the RSS subscribe button, requesting users to select customization parameters prior to being given access to the RSS feed.
But even if you decide to do customization, it is still a good idea to still keep the Primary RSS Feed and the Topical RSS Feeds, and only offer customization as an additional option.
The reason for doing so is that most internet users unfortunatelly do not want to take the extra time to customize their subscription, reducing your opportunity to capture a subscriber if you force them to do so without giving them a simpler option.
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Screenshot: Cisco RSS customization layer
Adding a Registration Layer for Lead Generation
And finally, you may also want to add an additional registration layer for lead generation, which will require your users to give you their personal details before being granted access to your RSS feeds.
This works almost the same as the Customization Layer, with the only difference being that you request additional information next to the customization criteria.
The problem in this case, however, is that many users will not be willing to give you their data to access your RSS feeds. It is so a good idea to offer them a stronger incentive, such as:
• A free whitepaper if they subscribe
• Getting additional content access if they subscribe
• Free access to your experts
• Discount coupon
• ...
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But even with a strong incentive, we still recommend that you make at least your teaser content available without registration and without the customization layer, to capture as many visitors as possible as subscribers, and then get the additional data later on, once you have already won their trust. Increase Your Subscription Conversion Rate
There are several other things you need to do as well to increase the number of your subscribers.
Here are the most important ones.
Where to Place Your RSS Subscription Links?
• Promote your e-zine related RSS feeds or primary RSS feed directly below your e-zine subscription box, and always "above the fold".
• Promote your RSS presentation page (telling your visitors that’s where they can subscribe to your feeds) on the most prominent locations of your site
• Promote direct links to topical RSS feeds directly next to their topics on the website.
• Promote your RSS subscription links in your e-mail communications
Adding a Quicker Subscribe Option
Most of the popular RSS Readers also come with easy subscribe RSS buttons that marketers can place on their website to enable visitors to subscribe to their feeds with a single click.
The problem is that there are so many of these available today, that it's really impossible to promote all of them on your website.
You need to do two things:
• Place easy subscribe buttons for MyYahoo!, Google Reader and Bloglines next to your standard RSS Subscribe button on every page.
• To cover the other RSS Readers, use a tool like QuickSub, which opens up a longer list of the available easy subscribe links (when the user hovers with his mouse over your RSS icon) for many different RSS Readers, enabling your visitors to simply select the one they use and subscribe quickly.
Use RSS Autodiscovery
RSS Autodiscovery is an essential feature that allows certain RSS Autodiscovery- enabled browsers to find a feed on your site and promptly offer the subscribe option to the visitor.
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Since FireFox and Internet Explorer 7 subscribe feeds on your website using RSS Autodiscovery, it is crucial you implement it on your website.
Using RSS Autodiscovery can't substitute the other options above, but it will serve you well for the small part of your audience that's using RSS Autodiscovery-enabled browsers.
How to use this?
Simply place the following piece of code in to the HEAD section of the HTML code of your webpages:
Do this for all the RSS feeds accessible from any given webpage of your website.
Transform an RSS Feed in to XHTML
Having a link to an RSS presentation page right next to your RSS subscribe button does aid visitors in learning about RSS and helps them to subscribe, but it still doesn't solve the problem of a user actually clicking on an RSS feed button. That will still result in the visitor getting heaps of code he really won't know what to do with.
Going one step further, you can use XSL Transformations to make sure that the feed can in fact also be displayed in a browser (without making it useless for an RSS reader as well) ... and that with some additional information and instructions, such as a brief overview of RSS and a quick explanation on how the user can subscribe to this feed via an RSS reader.
To see what I mean simply click on this link (via FeedBurner): http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2
This is basically an RSS feed, which has been transformed in order to be displayed in a Web browser with some additional information, but can still be subscribed to via every RSS reader as well.
Some feed maintanance and publishing services such as FeedBurner already provide this functionality "out-of-the-box", without you having to do practically anything. All you need to do is register for their free service, enter your feed and then get this link, which you will place "behind" the RSS subscribe button on your site, as a link, instead of a direct link to your RSS feed.
If you don't want to use a third-party service like FeedBurner, you can actually do the XSL Transformations by yourself. More information on how to do this is available at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xslt).
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Use Strong Copy
E-mail marketers have long ago learned that the only way to get people to subscribe is to entice them with strong copy next to their e-mail subscription boxes to "sell" the free subscription to the visitor. With the high number of online marketers offering their own free subscription online content, this has now become a must for RSS marketers as well.
Do not simply tell your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed "just because it's there and available", but use strong copy to actually convince them to subscribe, right above your primary RSS subscribe button. And if possible, add a free bonus whitepaper to the subscription as well.
6. Promote Your RSS Feeds Externally
To get the most from your RSS feeds you also need to promote them externally, beyond your website. Submit Your RSS Feeds to Search Engines and Directories
You already know about the various RSS search engines, blog search engines and content aggregation sites. To increase your online visibility and the number of your RSS subscribers, submit your RSS feeds to all or most of them.
How and Where to Submit Your RSS Feeds?
There are more than a 199 different websites where you can submit your RSS feeds, so submitting them by hand make take a while. If however you decide to do it, Robin Good's Top55 list will help you with the most relevant list of these sites and submission instructions for all of them.
But, if you wish to save on time, use a tool like RSS Submit that will automatically submit your RSS feeds to the most important websites.
Making the Most From Your Submissions
To get the most from your RSS submissions make sure that you abide by basic SEO and copywriting principles:
• Use your most important keywords (those that your prospects will use to search for your RSS feed) in your RSS feed title and description.
• Write a compelling title and description of your RSS feed, which will convince the search engine user to click through for more information or subscribe immediately. Focus on the key benefits of subscribing to the feed.
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Optimize Your RSS Feed for the Search Engines
Make sure that your RSS feed is optimized for the search engines, as you would optimize your website:
• Use your most important keywords in your RSS feed title and description, as well as in your RSS feed content items.
• Customized and personalized feeds are great for users, but not good for the search engines. So make sure that even if you do customized and personalized feeds, that you also prepare standard topical feeds and make them available on your site and that you submit these feeds, and not customized feeds, to the RSS search engines. It is also important to really do topical feeds instead of just one primary feed, since a topical feed carrying content of a similar topic will be of greater relevance to the search engines for a specific set of keywords to be used for this topic.
• To measure click through from RSS feeds to the website, often various URL parameters are used next to the links that either identify a unique RSS subscriber or a unique RSS campaign. The feeds you submit to the search engines should not include these tracking parameters.
• In your content items, make sure that the links pointing to your website contain your most important keywords (describing your website) in the anchor text.
• Tag your RSS feed and your individual RSS content items with identifiers that will help the news engines better classify your content and make it more easily accessible. Instructions can be found here: http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html Pinging
Pinging is a process of notifying content aggregation sites, search engines and directories that the content on your website has changed and is ready to be indexed. While pinging is usually associated with blogs, it can actually be used to notify these websites of changes to your RSS feed.
To ping the most important websites you either need an RSS marketing solution or a Content Management System that already has this capability built-in, or you can use a pinging service, such as Pingoat or Pingomatic, which will ping all of the most important websites.
When using these two websites, you need to specificy the title of your blog, the URL to your blog and your RSS feed URL. But, although the websites say "blog", it actually doesn't have to be a blog. As long as your website or a webpage on your website carries a list of most recent content, you can ping other sites when the content there is upadted.
Use these pinging services everytime the content in your feed is updated.
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7. Measure and Optimize Your RSS Feeds
After you have started with your RSS publishing and have your RSS promotional strategy under way, you need to start measuring and optimizing your RSS feeds and your RSS strategy.
There are several measurement methods available, for all of the key measurement areas. Introduction to RSS Metrics: How We Measure It?
RSS measurement has long been a subject of marketing mythology, with many marketers still believing that RSS measurement is inferior to e-mail or Web measurement.
In reality, RSS is a fully measurable marketing channel, although it is true that RSS marketing metrics have not been fully standardized yet. But nonetheless, RSS can be fully measured.
However, certain limits exist depending on the actual measurement method used.
Basic Metrics Through Web Analytics & Content Item Link URL Parameters
The most basic RSS measurements can be done by anyone using a Web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, WebTrends or ClickTracks.
These metrics include:
• "Unique" RSS users in a given time period and unique RSS user trends [unique RSS users are difficult to track using Web analytics tools, since many users access your feeds through RSS Readers that cache your RSS content and distribute it to multiple users, or provide access to multiple users through a single user session on your site; with Web analytics you can measure how many "people" accessed your RSS feed in a given time period]
• Clicks from your RSS feed to your website per content item [the number of visitors from the RSS feed to the various articles on your website]
• Most popular content on your website, as accessed by your RSS subscribers [which content items do your RSS subscribers click the most on]
• Traffic sources that generated RSS subscribers [which websites did the visitors that eventually subscribed to your RSS feed come from]
• Conversion tracking for your RSS subscribers [the % of your RSS subscribers that come to your website and then perform an action, such as a purchase]
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• On-site behavior tracking of your RSS subscribers [analyzing what your RSS subscribers are doing on your website, after clicking-through to it from the RSS feed]
On the most basic level, these can all be tracked without doing any modifications to your RSS feed, simply by using the standard Web analytics features offered by your web analytics solution.
To enable more precise tracking that would allow you to also track which webpages are viewed on your website by RSS subscribers clickingthrough from the RSS feed to your pages directly, you will need to add a unique identifer to the links in your RSS feeds, linking to your website, such as ?src=rss.
This is how a link within your content items in the RSS feed, pointing to a webpage on your website, might look like prior to adding the tracking parameter:
http://www.marketingstudies.net/article.php
After adding the tracking parameter, it would look like this:
http://www.marketingstudies.net/article.php?src=rss
While these are only the most basic metrics, they will allow you to at least get a basic overview of what content your RSS subscribers are most actively reading and how they are interacting with your website, for example whether they are converting into customers or not.
Basic Metrics Through Pixl and URL Tracking
Pixl tracking is a special measurement method, where an invisible image (pixl) is inserted into the RSS feed. Whenever the RSS feed is accessed, that pixl is loaded, sending the server information about the RSS feed user.
This is coupled with URL tracking, where each link in the RSS feed is given a special tracking code, which enables the server to track how many clicks by how many unique users were generated by RSS subscribers.
These two methods are utilized by mass market RSS metrics vendors, such as FeedBurner and Pheedo, who both offer a basic free service and a low-budget paid service.
The basic metrics provided include:
• Number of RSS feed subscribers [this is very different from the metrics you can get from your Web analytics solution; in this case these are actual subscribers to your feed, not only "people" that accessed it in the given time period]
• The RSS Readers used by your RSS subscribers
• How many people are accessing your feed right now and what are they reading
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• Click per content item in your RSS feed
• Uncommon uses of your RSS feed, through which you can identify whether other websites are republishing and perhaps abusing your RSS feeds to publish your content on their own websites
The paid services also include the following metrics:
• Reach [the number of people that viewed or clicked on your content]
• Historical data on your RSS content item usage
Combined with Web analytics, these two models together should give you enough information to optimize your RSS feeds.
Advanced Unique URL Metrics
However, all of the different metrics we discussed up to now are measured on an aggregate level, not on a unique user level.
To achieve that, a different approach to measurement must be applied.
With both of the above examples, each RSS subscriber gets access to the same RSS feed URL. But, if you add a unique identifier to your RSS feeds and to your individual RSS content items, you can in fact track your RSS subscribers individually, also enabling you to target and customize your content and marketing messages, based on direct activities by your subscribers.
While there are no specialized online analytics tools offering this type of metrics, they do come out-of-the-box with RSS marketing vendors such as Nooked, SimpleFeed and SilverPop.
Advanced Unique User Access Metrics
The second approach that allows you to track your individual RSS users is based on providing each subscriber with his own set of unique access credentials, giving you the ability to individually measure each subscriber and his RSS activities. Measure and Optimize! Your RSS Lead Generation Practices
The most important thing when it comes to RSS metrics is not how it's technically done, but what you as a marketer and publisher can do with it.
RSS lead generation practices include all of your activities aimed at generating more RSS subscribers. There are two key elements that need to be optimized.
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Your RSS Subscriber Sources
Different sources of online traffic, such as different search engines and different keywords used to come to your website, different blogs that link to you, different advertising campaigns and so on, all bring very different types of visitors of different quality levels to your website.
It is so essential to track:
• How visitors from different sources and campaigns are converting into RSS subscribers
• How visitors from different sources that converted into RSS subscribers are on the long-term converting into your customers
The ultimate goal is removing the advertising campaigns and keywords that are not producing enough subscribers and ultimately enough customers, and increasing your ad spend on campaigns that actually are generating the best results.
To track this, you will need a Web analytics solution that's capable of analyzing your website log files, such as WebTrends or ClickTracks.
To be able to measure this you will need to set your Web analytics tool so that it tells you how many visitors from which campaigns accessed your RSS feed after coming to your website, and how many of these eventually went on to make a purchase.
Then, based on this information, it will be easier to identify which campaigns are working and which are not.
Your RSS Lead Generation Approaches
Your RSS lead generation approaches are all about the exact procedures you use on your website to generate RSS subscribers. These include:
• The copy & visuals you are using to entice visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds
• Where on your website you are promoting your RSS feeds
• Above or below the fold
• Next to your e-mail e-zine subscription
• Promoting topical feeds right next to their corresponding categories
• Which RSS subscribe buttons are you using
• Are you offering your visitors a bonus for subscribing, such as a free whitepaper
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All of these can have a profound impact on your visitor-to-subscriber conversion rates. The only way to find the best approach is to test them all. Just make sure you are only testing two different elements at the same time, otherwise you will never know what really caused the difference.
There are two basic ways of testing this:
Split-testing
Equally splitting all visitors to different version of your website with the exposed differences. If you are doing this, you need to attach a unique identifier (such as src=test1, src=test2 etc.) to each of the RSS feed subscription links on your website, to be able to measure how many visitors to each of the versions actually subscribe.
The splitting part can be done with a script such as the SplitAnalyzer. The actual unique identifiers that you add to your RSS feed subscription URLs can be added manually.
To analyze the results you will need to use your Web analytics tool to measure the actual number of visitors to each of the split sites and the actual number of visitors to these sites that then went on and accessed the RSS feed on that split site. The version with the greatest conversion rate (formula: total number of conversions / total number of exposures) will be the winner.
Sequential Testing
If you do not want to invest in a split-testing tool, you can use the sequential testing approach, where you measure your existing version during week #1, for example, then make a change and measure it during week #2, then do another change during week #3 and so on.
The key problem with this approach is that the circumstances in which your visitors came to your website might have changed from one week to another, making the comparison less relevant.
However, this approach is still better than doing nothing, and the calculation part is even easier.
Simply measure the number of new visitors during this week and the number of visitors that accessed the feed through the unique subscription URL identifier, and then calculate the conversion rate. Measure and Optimize! Your RSS Feeds
Measuring and optimizing your RSS feeds is all about seeing how subscribers are interacting with your RSS feed and what they are reading, thus enabling you to optimize your RSS feed content strategy.
This is also the part where you need an RSS metrics solution and where your Web analytics software won't be enough.
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Here are some of the most useful measurement and optimization tactics to use.
Readership Trends
Is the number of active readers of your RSS feed increasing or decreasing? What is the trend week by week?
If the number of readers is decreasing, it’s a sign that your content is not meeting the needs of the target audiences your site attracts, consequently meaning that you need to consider improving your content strategy.
Optimization possibilities include:
• Start providing more practical how-to articles
• Change the length of your articles
• Start publishing different topics, more relevant to your audience
• Implement a more "personal voice"
• Increase or decrease your publishing strategy
• Publish less articles or more articles in the same time frame
• Provide more relevant news coverage
• Etc.
Click Trends
Are my subscribers actually clicking on the content items in the RSS feed?
If you find that your subscribers are actually opening the feed, but not clicking on individual content items it’s a clear sign that either your content item headlines need to be improved, made more attractive, or that the actual content is not strong enough to entice readers to clickthrough.
Knowing your feed-to-website clickthrough rates will also enable you to introduce gradual changes in your content strategy and actually see how they improve or hurt your key success metrics.
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8. Use RSS to Syndicate Your Content to Other Media
RSS can also be used to easily syndicate your content to other internet media, for publication on their web sites, using the very same feeds you are using for delivering content to end-users, even providing customization (allowing other internet media to precisely customize what content they want to receive from you and publish on their web sites). Others can then take your RSS feed and display its contents on their web sites, providing you with links to the full-text version of the content on your web site. The benefits of syndicating your content cannot be disputed, but syndication does have its difficulties, as you will need to balance the various content, technology and promotional aspects related to it. Of course, anyone can take your RSS feed and use it to publish your RSS content items on his web site. If they find it beneficial to them, they will do it, no matter how you wrap your syndication. This chapter is not about this type of cases. It's about the other side of the story, where you actively work to get others to publish your syndicated content, moving them from apathy to valuable syndication publishers. The Content Aspects
The first question is what content is appropriate for content syndication anyway? Can just about any kind of content be syndicated? In theory yes, but in the real world no web site will publish content from other media that is not of exceptional interest to their readers, of exceptional quality and is unique at least to a certain extent. What kind of content you can't expect to get syndicated on other web sites?
● Low-quality content and content with no apparent value.
● Content that can be easily accessed through a variety of other web media and through large numbers of other internet publishers Æ this is the content that is available practically "everywhere" and as such is not interesting to other web sites, since it doesn't provide any real added value to their visitors.
● Content focused on your company and your web site; unless you want to syndicate it to web sites that specialize in providing such in formation.
● Your promotional content; unless your syndication partners are actually your affiliates that would want to publish your syndicated content to easier increase their sales and commissions.
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● Un-appropriate content types, but in relation to your target web sites. For instance, a web site that offers only short and punchy news won't publish long syndicated articles. Most web sites will find no value in publishing your "forum" feeds, and so on. The key characteristic of easily syndicated content is unique content that cannot be easily accessed from almost anywhere else; this might include unique news, unique articles or even unique commentary or blog postings from well- respected authors. Some of the reasons for publishing such content might be: • Increasing the content value of the web site to its visitors. • Positioning the web site as an internet starting point for a specific target audience. • Filling the web site's content gap, which needs to be filled to satisfy the needs of the web site's target audience, but the web site cannot fill on its own. • Increasing revenues by earning commissions from syndicated product feeds. • Improving the positive perception of the web site by associating with a respected brand (providing its content). • Providing additional services to visitors. • Increasing web site traffic. • Increasing the frequency of web site visits. • Increasing the time-spent on the web site. The above are only concepts, so let's take a look at some examples of what content could be syndicated: • Frequently updated breaking news. • Latest downloads and software from different sources. • Specific news items, such as the latest and most dangerous computer viruses. • Financial updates, for instance price changes of certain stocks. • Forum updates, if the web site wants to provide access to a strong community, but cannot build one itself. • Aggregated news from many different sources, covering one or a few key topics. • Etc. You have to view your content syndication as a service you are providing to other web sites; a service that needs to meet their needs and help them increase their value to their visitors.
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When determining what kind of content to syndicate, your first need to precisely determine your target web sites: • What audience is your content most appropriate for? • What kind of web sites reach and cover that audience? • What kind of web sites are you targeting? • What do these kind of web sites need in terms of content you can provide? • What are their reasons for needing syndicated content? • How can you specifically help them increase their value to their own visitors? • Can you specify at least a few concrete target web sites? • Are you a good match for them? • Are you their competitor or could your content harm them in any way, such as lead their customers away from them? Can you answer all of these questions? Only after doing so will you be able to determine what kind of syndication RSS content feeds to prepare Æ consequently the key question after determining all of the characteristics of your target web sites is how to package your content in to RSS feeds that best meet their needs. Yes, syndication, especially if you publish much content, does mean you have to prepare a separated set of RSS feeds, which might not be the same as the feeds you are offering to your own visitors. You need to differentiate between your own visitors and your syndication target web sites. This, naturally, doesn't apply if you only publish smaller amounts of content, such as a few content items per week or even only a few content items per day. In that case you can just try and go ahead offering your existing end-user feeds to web sites as well. But if that is not the case, careful feed packaging is crucial to successful syndication of your content. Now go ahead and create a list of content types and topics you are going to offer for syndication, carefully matching the characteristics you defined for your target web sites. Just list everything you are going to syndicate. This might include: • News from certain topics (such as Search Engine Optimization Industry News; Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Industry News; Content Management Software Industry News; Corporate News; etc.)
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• Blog postings (such as a syndicated RSS feed of a renowned expert's blog, or commentary feeds on various industry topics from different experts; etc.) • Articles from certain topics (such as RSS Marketing Articles; E-mail Marketing Articles; etc.) • Updates on latest forum posts on certain topics (such as forum posts on the topic of Asian financial markets) • Specific data feeds (such as a feed providing latest hard-data on selected financial papers from the Asian financial markets) • Specific product feeds (such as feeds on your latest books in the marketing category) • Etc. How might these be different from the RSS feeds you prepared for your own visitors? First off, the needs of your visitors might be totally different from the needs of the web sites you target. For instance, your visitors might be interested in getting all of your internet marketing industry news in a single RSS feed, while your target web sites cover only very specific niche internet market industry segments, and naturally only want to publish that content, and not everything you are offering to your own visitors. Or, your web site visitors might be interested in receiving content updates for all of your resident experts' commentary articles, while your target web sites could only be interested in one or two of them. Wouldn't it then be best to just segment your feeds as widely as possible and just let your visitors and target web sites choose what they like best? We already covered this subject when talking about segmented feeds and discovered that offering too many feeds to your visitors might confuse them and not meet their needs and capabilities at all. By all means, if the RSS feeds you publish for your visitors also precisely match the needs of your syndication target web sites, do use the same feeds for both. But if they don't, invest some extra time in re-packaging your feeds to meet the needs of possible syndication partners as well. Granted, close to none internet publishers put this additional effort in to preparing syndication feeds other web sites might use to display their syndicated content. You can and should be different and take that extra step. As more and more web sites will start providing content for syndication the game will go to those willing to do more to meet the demands of the market.
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The Technology Aspects
After preparing your content types and topics syndication list, you need to start packaging this content in to appropriate feeds, and this is where technology first comes on to the scene. Are you going to provide pre-made RSS feeds for your syndication partners to choose from, or are you going to provide them with an option to customize their feed to their liking (in this case, you can just use the same customization process you are using for your visitors). • If there aren't many different options to choose from, namely if your content is not very segmented, you can easily just prepare a few pre-made feeds. • But if your content is highly segmented, it's best to offer customization that will best meet your audience's needs. The process for feed customization can be just the same as with feeds for your visitors, and you can use any of the customization approaches we mentioned in that chapter. The next step, after making the above choice, is making your feeds easily accessible to your possible syndication partners. The problem is that many webmasters can't easily plug-in your RSS feed in to their web site, at least not without some programming expertise or help, because RSS feeds need to be parsed in order to be displayed on web sites. For those that have that capability, just provide the URL of the feed; they'll know what to do with it. Your problem are the web sites that do not have this capability, and they won't have a clue of what to do with your feed or how to implement it. You need to provide them with an easy way to do so. So the question is how to take the content within the RSS feed and turn it in to workable HTML on a web site. You need a way to convert the content from RSS in to HTML and then display it on the actual web site. The "displaying" part usually involves preparing some sort of "box" that includes the content titles and links. You can: • Use an already prepared RSS parsing script. • Write your own RSS parsing script. Writing your own RSS parsing script will require programming experience, but you can easily hire a programmer to do it for you, and it won't cost you much. You can find a variety of programmers that will do this kind of thing for you for almost nothing at Elance.com. If you want to use an already prepared RSS parsing script, here are some sources you can use to find it: • Hotscripts.com • ScriptSearch.com
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• FreeScripts.com • ASP Resource index • NeedScripts.com These resources will give you a variety of scripts to choose from, in different programming languages. Just choose the one you are most comfortable with and also the one that your target web sites will be comfortable or capable of using. The scripts you will be looking for will probably be in the XML category. After finding the script you will need to modify it so that is displays your RSS feed the way you want it to be displayed. Most scripts will come with some documentation that will help you do so. The modifications you might want to make include: • The source RSS feed to parse • The number of RSS content items you want to display (recommended from 5 to 10) • What elements of the content items do you want to display (such as title, description etc.) • The display presentation Æ how it all looks on your syndication partner's web sites; you might also want to consider pushing your logo on top of the box that displays the content etc. (this will depend on the uniqueness of your content and the power of your brand, which will naturally effect your negotiating position Æ if your content is highly desirable for other web sites to publish, you won't have any problems forcing your logo on the top of the display box; if it is not, you might not want to push the subject). Why should you do all of this anyway? You need to prepare a "tool" that your syndication partners can easily include on their web sites, if they don't know or can't parse your feed by yourself. This "tool" should be a piece of code or a script that your target syndication partners can easily include on their web sites, preferably simply by pasting your code in to their web pages. If your target syndication partners are capable of at least basic code modification you could allow them to change some characteristics of how your content box is displayed on their web sites, such as changing the border colors etc. Also, if your target web sites use different programming languages, you will need to supply them with appropriate scripts for each of them, or simply use JavaScript. If you packaged your syndication content in to more than one feed, you'll need to do this for every feed.
Example: Finance http://www.finance-on.net
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Web site type: Business news site The Finance-on.net web site provides its users with two different content syndication options. The first one is simply customizing their own RSS or XML feed, using the exactly same system they use for end-user RSS feed customization and exactly the same feeds, and then parsing these feeds on their own on their web sites. Because this is too complicated for most webmasters, the Finance-on.net web site also provides a content syndication "Javascript service". The users of this service can customize what content from Finance-on.net they want to publish on their web sites by pasting a short line of code on the web site. Customization works just the same as the RSS feed customization (even the user interface looks and works almost exactly the same), giving the users the following customization options:
--> Content type (articles / news, short reports, commentaries, press releases)
--> Content topics (General business news and affairs, Real estate, Careers, The new economy, Marketing, Personal finances, Financial markets, Tourism, Europe etc.)
--> Content with specific keywords: users can also select from hundreds of keywords from the web site's "glossary" (company names, authors, people, ideas, concepts etc. ) to further reduce the number of hits from the above to customization parameters, receiving extremely targeted content.
--> The number of content items to be displayed
--> The width of the box in which the content items are displayed
After customizing the content they want to display on their web site they are given a short piece of code to include in the web site's code, where they want to display the content. When the code is entered in to the web site it displays a branded Finance-on.net "box" that displays the content items, already customized.
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Screenshot: an example of how the Finance-on.net content syndication box might look like The above box is displayed by the following piece of code, which also includes the parameter that defines how to display the content, based on the user's settings: The webmaster only needs to include this code on his web site, where it could look something like this:
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Screenshot: an example of how the Finance-on.net content syndication box might look like on a web site Whenever someone clicks on the link in the box they are taken to the Finance- on.net web site, more precisely to the web page that contains the appropriate article. If the article is open-access, the visitor gets immediate access to it. But if it is not, the visitor is immediately taken to the login page and is asked to either log-in or register. Consequently, the Finance-on.net web site also benefits by generating new registered web site users. As you can see from both of the examples posted the Finance-on.net content syndication box includes the Finance logo Æ the business daily Finance provides unique content and as such can afford to push the logo next to its syndication logo, in addition to being a powerful Slovenian brand. Because of its strength, marginal web sites that display their content additionally profit simply by associating themselves with such a recognized and respected brand. The syndication users cannot remove the logo from the syndication feed, but they can modify the box's size (in their personal settings) and the outlook of the content background and borders, by including and modifying the appropriate CSS style on their web site. The above piece of code needs to be entered in the
section of the web site's HTML code and modified, if the user wants to use a different background or border.293 [Unleash the Power of] RSS Marketing
Terms of Use In addition to not allowing users to remove the logo from the content syndication box, the business daily Finance also reserves the right to prohibit anyone from using this service. Certain rules also apply for those that parse the RSS or XML feeds by themselves:
--> Article titles can be published only if the Finance logo is in direct proximity to the article titles in such a way that it is apparent that this content is from Finance.
--> Links behind the article titles must lead to the location of the article on the Finance-on.net web site and not to any other web sites.
--> Content items must be displayed in full, without any changes.
These terms of use assure that other web sites use the Finance-on.net syndicated content in such a way that it is apparent that this content originates from Finance and that the syndicated content actually benefits Finance by generating more exposure and prospective users. The JavaScript Problem While all of this is in fact very simple to do, making their content syndication very easy for the users, it does come at a cost. The syndication box uses JavaScript, which is considered as potentially harmful content by the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, which means it blocks the JavaScript by default, but gives the visitor the change to allow it to run. Yes, it can be used on any web site that uses any kind of programming language, but that doesn't help much if it is blocked when visitors enter a web site that uses a syndication box prepared like this. So it still might be better to prepare a true RSS parsing script or scripts for your possible syndication partners.
Syndication Customization Remember the discussion we were having about packaging content in to RSS feeds at the beginning of this chapter. Since Finance-on.net publishes huge amounts of daily content, it would be nearly impossible for them to provide pre-packaged RSS feeds that would satisfy the needs of all of their possible syndication partners. Consequently, their best choice was providing customization, where each syndication partner can precisely specify what kind of content from Finance he wants do offer on his web site. Promotion How does the business daily Finance promote the syndication services on its web site?
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Like most other web sites, they aren't doing much to present this possibility and its benefits to their users. This, and examples from many other web sites, shows that content syndication is still very low on the priority list of most internet publishers and marketers. Finance provides access to its syndication services only through the user's personal Settings page, after he is already registered and log-on to the web site. After accessing the Settings page, two of the many links available to customize the web site experience are available for content syndication, one promising easy and simple (which it is) content syndication on other web sites and the other being focused more on advanced users that already know what XML and RSS are and how to use them. Is this enough? If you want others to publish your syndicated content, you might want to do a lot more than this. And remember, just if someone uses an RSS aggregator it doesn’t mean that they know they can use RSS to display your syndicated content on their web site … even if perhaps that's just the thing they'd want to do. You have to tell them it’s possible, you have to promote it to them and you have to show them exactly how to do it. How much does all this cost? Reading this example might make you wonder how much all of this really costs … and make you worry that you just don't have the resources to pull all of this off. Yes, RSS customization does not come very cheaply, but that isn't the only option you have at your disposal. --> You can provide segmented RSS feeds that will meet the needs of your target syndication partners, instead of giving them the power of customizing the feeds. Offering segmented RSS feeds won't cost you a dime.
--> You can provide a simple RSS parser (or a few parsers, if you want all web sites, regardless of their programming languages, to be able to use them) for your visitors to help them display the syndicated RSS content on their web sites. If you know at least a little something about programming you can quite easily customize pre- written and free scripts and offer them to your visitors. If you'd rather not do any programming at all, you can still hire an inexpensive programmer to help you out. It shouldn't cost you more than a hundred or few hundred Dollars, depending on the kind of programmer you get.
The point is, everyone can provide syndicated content, you just need to be a little resourceful. You don't need to precisely follow the steps of large internet publishers; you can do it your own way, and get away with a much much smaller investment.
Example: The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com
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Web site type: General news site The New York Times web site takes a somewhat different approach to content syndication than the business daily Finance. They do as well provide two general options for web sites that want to display their syndicated content, but they do it in a slightly different manner. The first option users have is using one of their pre-made segmented RSS feeds, made available for end-users, and parsing it by themselves on their web sites. While the New York Times primarily promotes the RSS feeds as a personal content consumption channel, they also offer the opportunity to display the content from the feeds on non-commercial web sites or blogs. They also require attribution whenever New York Times content is posted and reserve the right to prohibit anyone from using their content. Just like Finance-on.net they as well do not provide any parsing instructions or anything similar that would help people display their syndicated content on their web sites. And just like Finance-on.net, they also offer a separate "headline syndication service", which as well is simple to set-up, although it does take more time. As the first step to using this service, they require that you apply by filling out a form that asks for your first and last name, country, e-mail address, web site URL and web site category (you can also check a special box in order to be updated on New Your Times affiliate programs). You are taken to a separate web site directly after filling out the form, where you can set-up your headlines service in a few steps. • Choose your content Æ here you can first select the content category you would like to display on your web site. You can only select one category, as there are no more advanced customization options (just like providing segmented feeds instead of customization). Here you can also modify the look and feel of your syndicated content box (you can choose from 6 slightly different designs, specific the box width and the number of content items in the syndication feed). You can preview your syndication box (they call it a "Webfeed") in the right column of the user interface, which is a really nice feature. • After you are done you can request the code for your Webfeed, by entering your e-mail address and web site URL in a new form. • The code to display the headlines is delivered in an e-mail and can also be accessed through the web site you used to set-up your Webfeed. The e-mail and the web site include precise tips on how to implement the syndication code on your web site, which was a good move, since the code is quite complex. • You now only need to implement the code on your web site and you're done. This entire process is well-explained and easy to do. But again both the RSS service and the headline service are quite under-promoted on the web site, with the links to both services being displayed only at the bottom of each web page of the web site.
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Example: Lockergnome http://www.lockergnome.com Web site type: Specialized news site Lockergnome builds its syndication service on the fact that it enjoys a strong commitment and praise from its users, which is apparent right from the start of their syndication service presentation: "You are free to use any of these graphics on your Web site, email newsletter, or blog. Enjoy - and please keep spreading the word about us! Without you, none of this would be possible. We also syndicate content in RSS and JavaScript for your convenience." Their visitors can choose from three different content syndication options: • Displaying images with dynamic content that show article headlines from specific categories, chosen by the user. These can be placed on web sites by simply copying and pasting a few lines of code. And they are actually "powered" by RSS (they use RSS as the content source). Anyone can use this approach by using the free service provided by FeedBurner. • Parsing their RSS feeds. As opposed to other most other web sites Lockergnome does offer additional help and instructions on how to do this. • JavaScript feeds, which can be implemented on web sites by simply copying some code in to them. Lockergnome as well decided to go the RSS segmentation route.
The Promotional Aspects
The promotional aspects of taking advantage of RSS content syndication include: • Promoting your content syndication service on your web site • Convincing your visitors of how they'll benefit from using your syndication service • Helping your visitors use your syndicated content • Actively promoting your content syndication service It all starts with promoting your content syndication service on your web site. How can anyone even start to think about using your content syndication service if they don't even know about it? It's not nearly enough to simply provide an RSS feed and expect everyone to know they can use it to display your content items on their web site in addition to consuming it in their RSS aggregators. And come to think of it, RSS feeds as well aren't very hugely promoted on web sites either.
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First decide on how you are going to lead your visitors to your syndication service (the service should be explained in detail on an individual web page) on your web site. Select a prominent spot where you'll "advertise" this service, and make it show on every page of your web site, preferably somewhere at the top and definitely "above the fold" so that visitors don't have to scroll down to see it. Also don't forget to promote the syndication service in all of your e-mails. Then think about how you'll attract the visitors to clicking through to find out more. Think in terms of powerful headlines, naturally tailored to what your visitors expect from you, that will grab their attention. Don't just say "Display our article headlines on your web site", but try to motivate them by providing them with a strong benefit, such as • "Increase your web site traffic and credibility by providing our content headlines and summaries to your visitors" or • "Increase the value of your web site and make your visitors stay longer and come back more often, generating more exposure for your products" or • "Turn your web site in to an internet starting point for your visitors -- provide them with daily news items they can look forward to and come back to read every day" or • "Generate more credibility for your services by providing top industry news from our content syndication service". The point is, you have to make it attractive, and then of course also deliver on your promise. Getting your visitors to click on the link that promotes syndication is only the first step. You now have them on your presentation page, already interested but still not convinced. • Explain to them what content syndication is. • Explain to them how they can benefit from it. The difficult part will be helping them use your syndicated content. • Even if the syndication options you offer them are as simple to use as copying and pasting some code in to the web site, even this might prove a little too challenging for many web site owners Æ lead them step-by-step, even help them by providing screenshots that exactly show what they should do. • If you plan on providing them with direct access to your RSS feeds to use your syndicated content you are probably expecting that they already know how to parse RSS and display RSS content on their web sites. You are probably quite wrong. Provide them with a tutorial or with links to tutorials on other web sites.
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• If your syndication is going to be powered by a parsing script your users will need to upload on their server, providing a good tutorial will be crucial. Don't forget any details. What might make perfect sense for you probably doesn't for most of your visitors. All of this takes care of your web site visitors, but getting your content syndicated on as many places as possible will also demand some active promotion of your content syndication service. • Make a list of all of the web sites you believe would profit from your content and also reach your target audience. • Actively approach their owners, webmasters or editors and start personally discussing with them how they might use your content to their advantage. • Make agreements with them on a case-by-case basis, which might even mean preparing a special feed just for one web site, precisely taking care of their needs. Are you up to the task of promoting your syndication service as it deserves to be promoted?
9. Use RSS to Enhance Your Website
And for the last step, RSS is also about enhancing your website by providing additional third-party content to your visitors, which you aggregate & filter from other RSS feeds, as was already explained in the Business Case for RSS chapter.
Furthermore, this is the same as using RSS to syndicate your content to other media, only that in this case you are in the role of the media, instead of the syndicator. The Process
There are two basic possibilities to displaying third-party RSS feeds on your website:
• Displaying Individual RSS Feeds on Your Website Displaying individual RSS feeds is finding a few of the RSS feeds that best compliment your website content and republishing their headlines or the feeds in full on your website. To do this, first find the appropriate websites to republish their content, get in touch with the webmaster to check whether they allow you to republish their content; get their RSS feed URL; and use one of the tools discussed in the previous chapter for displaying RSS feeds on your site.
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• Creating RSS Radars In the case of RSS Radars, your aim is to turn your website into the most relevant source of latest news, commentary and information from your industry, by tapping into the thousands of other online content sources. The most important element of creating RSS Radars in this case is that you really create highly topical and focused streams of content that really provide only the most relevant content from your selected topics and sub- topics. To do so, use the same approach as presented under Using RSS for Business Intelligence and then simply display the output feeds from the RSS aggregation & filtering tool using an RSS parsing script. Another important point to be made is that RSS Radars should never republish syndicated content in full-text, but only headlines and short summaries, linking back to the source for the full story. Copyrights Protection
If content is available in an RSS feed it does not mean that its owner allows anyone to republish its contents on their website. Simply taking that content is in essence the same as stealing.
Before you republish anyone's RSS content on your website, first check their terms of use on their website, and if those are not clear enough, contact them personally prior to using their content on your website.
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