The RSS Advantage

I’ve just read an impassioned blog posting from Matt Ambrose about what RSS needs to do to reach the ‘tipping point’. In it Matt brings up some valid points. I posted my comments on his blog so I will not go into them here. One of the points that he brought up is the lack of awareness by the general public about RSS. I will admit that I couldn’t see the advantages of RSS until I actually started using it earlier on this year; today it has become an indispensable tool in my everyday life.

I have been ‘aware’ of RSS since 2004 so why did I wait until this year to look into it. Well first of all the acronym put me off! Three letter acronyms are rife in the Information Technology business. Talk to any techie and immediately he’ll start spouting off his little acronyms (HTML, XML, CRM, ERM, ERP, BI….. zzzzzz …. zzzz….) See what I mean? Just the use of the acronym implied complexity (and I am a tech guy). Consider the MP3 acronym. How many people do you know walk around and say, “Hey, checkout my new MP3 player!”? Very few, but you will hear them saying, “Hey, checkout this brand new iPod!” A further enforcement of this principle is the term “Podcasting”

The tipping point for RSS will come when one newsreader becomes prevalent and so popular that RSS will become synonymous with that newsreader application. Like Kleenex is to tissue paper, Hoover is to vacuum cleaner and more recently Google is to Internet search.

I can’t wait until that day, so what can we do to move it forward?

Technorati Tags: RSS Promotion

Bill Flitter from Pheedo.com has a new post on the Revenews blog called 5 Tips to Ready Your Blog & RSS Feed for Big Brand Advertising. In the post he provides you with five action items to follow to prepare yourself for the impending RSS advertiser explosion… that we are all anxiously waiting for.

The only thing that he doesn’t mention is traffic - the lifeblood of any website and blog. In RSS terms this translates to the number of subscribers to your newsfeed. In other words, RSS feeds have more in common with an email list than a website because we are dealing with interested subscribers. The more targeted and active subscriber base you have for your feed, the more interested people will be to advertise in your feed.

Even if you are only in the planning stage of your RSS strategy it is worthwhile taking a look.

Reading and digesting news about RSS is becoming a full-time job on it’s own! It is almost impossible to keep up with it, never mind blog about it, so starting from today I’ll be including a snippet with links to the RSS news items that I have found the most interesting.

1. RSS meets knowledge management by Martin LaMonica from CNet has a short article about a start-up company called Attensa that has an RSS reader that analyzes the content of the news items and the user behavior. If you are a conspiracy theorist or a George Orwell ‘1984′ fan this article will scare you…
2. Microsoft takes RSS to the Max .. if you’ll pardon the pun. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has a short review of the software in his article Microsoft Launches Desktop Feed Reader. This is a short article, but the comments on it are long, entertaining and numerous. Enjoy!
   Note: This is currently beta software but judging from the screenshots it looks pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: RSS Readers

The most frequent question I get asked if “What is the easiest way for me to implement an RSS feed on my website without spending a fortune on web developers?” And the answer is, “Create a blog”.

A blog is your quickest, easiest and least complicated way to get started with RSS. Why? Almost all of the mainstream blogging platforms create an RSS feed automatically for you as you add new content. The only technical experience you might need for blogging would be installing the software on your web server. And sometimes you don’t even need to even that because most of the reputable web hosting companies offer one-click blog installations from your control panel with your hosting package.

Blogging has become an extremely popular method for individuals to express themselves and post their thoughts and opinions online. However, the blogosphere is starting to change this year as more mainstream companies are launching their own blogs as a means to communicate and gather feedback from their customers.

If the idea of a blog ‘offends’ you or does not fit into your vision then don’t use the word ‘blog’ on your website and don’t call it a blog either. There are many free templates available that will enable you to completely change the look and feel of the blogging software. All you need to do is install one of these blogging packages, find the right template that suit your needs and take advantage of the technology to publish your RSS feed.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

As everyone knows email marketing has more than its fair share of problems. The biggest of these issues facing email is message deliverability.

The SPAM issue: Email messages are continuously being chewed up and rejected email daily through every phase of the delivery process, from ISP SPAM filters through to corporate firewalls and finally even on the receiver’s desktop. Anything from 30% to 70% of messages never reach their final destination, the percentages vary from one research report to another (depending on who you believe). Another problem with that lies with email is being accused of being a spammer. The penalties for this can vary from having your domain blacklisted to financial damages paying a hefty settlement fee. Some ISP’s even hold your domain for ransom if you are accused of spam (just search Google for ’spam domain ransom’)

Reluctance: Besides the SPAM issue, Internet users are becoming more reluctant to part with their precious email address now a days than ever before. You need to bribe Internet users with a ton of gifts to compel them into signing up to your newsletter. We have the continuous influx of junk email flooding mailboxes to thank for this.

So how does an Internet marketer or website owner overcome these problems? RSS!

• RSS has a 100% delivery rate. Every single item in your RSS feed will be delivered to your subscriber’s RSS reader, guaranteed!
• Because RSS offers anonymity and an easy unsubscribe mechanism your visitor will not be reluctant to subscribe to your news feed and ‘check it out’.

Delivering your marketing message or newsletter via the RSS has never been so convenient and easy.

• Your newsletter updates are received promptly and are available in an instant.
• You no longer have to worry about mail server availability, downtime or delays.
• Your subscribers receive your latest news on products and services too.

Another advantage is that your advertising becomes targeted because the people that are subscribing to your RSS feed are those who are truly interested in your message.

If you haven’t started planning your RSS strategy or looked into implementing it into your business yet, I hope that this blog and its content will encourage you to look into it.

Technorati Tags: RSS Marketing

With RSS you can get your content picked up and displayed to other audiences easier than ever before. Can you imagine having your quality article that you spent days preparing picked up and syndicated all over the Internet? That’s what syndication is! With RSS you have the opportunity of getting your content into more different markets and more audiences.

There are so many people on the Internet today that it is getting more difficult for people to find you and hear your message. You have a better chance of reaching these people if someone picks up your content and distributes it for you.

Here are some examples where your content could turn up:

1. On another webmaster’s front page
2. In someone’s email newsletter as an article
3. In an online magazine (eZine)

Each one of these avenues has its own information hungry readership that would be more than willing to click on your hyperlink and come visit your site for more of what you’ve got.

Do you get the message?

Everybody knows (well I hope they do) that to keep your visitors coming back to your site you need to provide your visitors with fresh content regularly - if not on a daily basis. Unfortunately not everyone has the time or the capital to employ people to do this. So how can you as a webmaster solve this problem? Very easily… with RSS.

The first RSS advantage is Fresh content for your website. The key here is to find other sites that can offer the relevant information that you would like to show your visitors with RSS feeds. Look for sites that offer their feeds as JavaScript and then copy that JavaScript code and embed it into your homepage. This is the easiest way of doing things.

The second RSS advantage is Search Engine Optimization. If you have a decent web developer or are handy at PHP or ASP yourself you can install an RSS parser script on your server. The parser script will download the other sites’ RSS feeds and convert them into HTML and will provide you with a snippet of code for you to insert into your site’s pages.

We all know that the search engines love fresh and relevant content so if you have someone else’s content automatically doing it for you, you are satisfying three needs: (a) your visitors get fresh content, (b) the search engines get fed and (c) the syndicator of the content gets a wider distribution of his content. Everybody wins.

Yesterday I mentioned the five advantages of RSS for end users. Today I’d like to cover three advantages of publishing RSS feeds on your website

1. Website Traffic Increase

Your traffic will increase because your visitors will not forget to come back to your site - your RSS feed and their RSS reader notifies them whenever you have new content. Your RSS feed adds value to your visitors and saves them time. You also gain the traffic boost from ‘lazy’ webmasters that are syndicating your RSS feed and displaying it on their sites.

2. Search Engine Optimization

RSS is a great strategy for getting incoming links to your website. You can do this by offering copy and paste code of your feed to make it easy for webmasters to syndicate your content. Note: This only applies to feeds that have been implemented as HTML and not JavaScript (which, at the time of writing, search engines don’t read). This technique will help you get your feed syndicated on more websites and provide you with those much-appreciated one-way incoming links. To make the links more effective you can place your chosen keywords in the title of your syndicated articles.

3. Improved Site Stickiness

Yes, the old term from the 90’s is back. RSS improves your site’s stickiness and lures your visitors to return and read your content - provided of course that you provide quality content. Without an RSS feed your visitors have no way of knowing when there is new content available and they will forget to return regularly.