Tag Archives: rss feeds

Profiting from RSS

RSS opens a new gateway to ever-flooding effective business strategies, never existed before, and creates a new dimension in the way you reach out to the public. When you, as a marketer/ businessman/company, decide to promote your business through the marketing strategies of Internet, try to take the maximum advantage of this interactive medium. When your website does not engage visitors, then your web-based promotional efforts have been crippled. What are the means to attract visitors to your website, when there exists a million dollar question – whose website to visit? Given innumerable choices, just think of the visitor’s plight to decide which one and whether he wishes to really come back after his first visit.

RSS has a lot of advantages over the other existing methods, to turn it into the most sought-after, powerful, influential tool, which will take over the Internet world very soon, if understood fully and properly. It is basically a ‘push-based’ communication method, which can be published and subscribed to easily. It can be explained as a file containing the latest information and accessed by subscribers who are interested.

Consider a website as a real-world conversation. We need to adopt the same things just like while trying to sell our product to a sales prospect in person. RSS has wonderful features, which embody the techniques of conversational marketing in a very flexible way. Don’t you go through the following while reaching out to the visitors? Glance through and see how RSS helps:

• First, you decide your goal and try to analyze what kind of audience your website can get.
• What do the visitors get on visiting your website? Interview customers for their feedback, do a research and make changes to your website accordingly. The last part can be done very easily done using RSS feeds (which we will see in detail in the later chapters).
• The look of your website is very important. RSS has made it very easy to understand, see and feel your message for the visitors by mixing video and audio channels to your contents. Also, keep in mind that not only is it enough to have a good website but an appropriate one to your business also, to catch your visitor’s eye.
• Make your website work well in all the browsers. Your website is open to a variety of visitors who can prefer browsers of their choices. RSS is a convenient way since it works on all platforms. Most of the browsers may not face hurdles accessing RSS.
• Your website is the gold mine of information on how the public respond to what you say. RSS provides an unbelievable platform to discuss the views of the public without wasting time. Instead, you can spend your time on crafting quality contents. RSS has got many special features such as dialog facilitators, RSS radars, and automatic responders to enhance the significance of conversational marketing.
• You can collect a lot of information such as the number of subscribers, their interests, their reading frequency, the topics they are more interested in etc using RSS feeds. These are definitely going to be vital for improving your standards of business.
• Your search engine ranking reflects how good your website is! RSS increases the search engine ranking remarkably and well, again helps develop your business.

And do not think it’s a super-techie thing that you cannot use! Once you are familiar with the tool, you are open to the amazing world of RSS and one day, sure to find yourself hooked to it! Its going to be the beginning of an unbelievable era, exploring deeper and deeper the many faces of RSS and of course, the web world, through it! Though it can’t be an all-out replacement for other technologies, it can be a standard to optimize your Internet experience.

Profiting from RSS

RSS opens a new gateway to ever-flooding effective business strategies, never existed before, and creates a new dimension in the way you reach out to the public. When you, as a marketer/ businessman/company, decide to promote your business through the marketing strategies of Internet, try to take the maximum advantage of this interactive medium. When your website does not engage visitors, then your web-based promotional efforts have been crippled. What are the means to attract visitors to your website, when there exists a million dollar question – whose website to visit? Given innumerable choices, just think of the visitor’s plight to decide which one and whether he wishes to really come back after his first visit.

RSS has a lot of advantages over the other existing methods, to turn it into the most sought-after, powerful, influential tool, which will take over the Internet world very soon, if understood fully and properly. It is basically a ‘push-based’ communication method, which can be published and subscribed to easily. It can be explained as a file containing the latest information and accessed by subscribers who are interested.

Consider a website as a real-world conversation. We need to adopt the same things just like while trying to sell our product to a sales prospect in person. RSS has wonderful features, which embody the techniques of conversational marketing in a very flexible way. Don’t you go through the following while reaching out to the visitors? Glance through and see how RSS helps:

• First, you decide your goal and try to analyze what kind of audience your website can get.
• What do the visitors get on visiting your website? Interview customers for their feedback, do a research and make changes to your website accordingly. The last part can be done very easily done using RSS feeds (which we will see in detail in the later chapters).
• The look of your website is very important. RSS has made it very easy to understand, see and feel your message for the visitors by mixing video and audio channels to your contents. Also, keep in mind that not only is it enough to have a good website but an appropriate one to your business also, to catch your visitor’s eye.
• Make your website work well in all the browsers. Your website is open to a variety of visitors who can prefer browsers of their choices. RSS is a convenient way since it works on all platforms. Most of the browsers may not face hurdles accessing RSS.
• Your website is the gold mine of information on how the public respond to what you say. RSS provides an unbelievable platform to discuss the views of the public without wasting time. Instead, you can spend your time on crafting quality contents. RSS has got many special features such as dialog facilitators, RSS radars, and automatic responders to enhance the significance of conversational marketing.
• You can collect a lot of information such as the number of subscribers, their interests, their reading frequency, the topics they are more interested in etc using RSS feeds. These are definitely going to be vital for improving your standards of business.
• Your search engine ranking reflects how good your website is! RSS increases the search engine ranking remarkably and well, again helps develop your business.

And do not think it’s a super-techie thing that you cannot use! Once you are familiar with the tool, you are open to the amazing world of RSS and one day, sure to find yourself hooked to it! Its going to be the beginning of an unbelievable era, exploring deeper and deeper the many faces of RSS and of course, the web world, through it! Though it can’t be an all-out replacement for other technologies, it can be a standard to optimize your Internet experience.

How to Engage in RSS Marketing (Page 1 of 2)

RSS marketing is quite different and unique as compared to most of the other internet marketing tools or technologies. In RSS marketing, success or failure lies in the hands of the consumer or the internet user. Although this may sound scary from a business perspective but at the same time there are certain advantages.

There are some online businesses that have garnered a good click-through-rate varying from 7% to 10% using RSS feeds and this means that it has actually outperformed various other mediums of online advertising. Of course this number can’t be reached overnight. There has to be a strategy in place and the execution has to be perfect to derive such a high click-through-rate.

For those who have not been able to capitalize using RSS marketing and for those who are new to RSS marketing, here are some tips that will definitely help you in leveraging consumer control in RSS. The tips are as follows:

Feed characteristics There are many websites who have their feeds while others don’t. It is not necessary that the feeds in the websites that have them will be created equally. There are quite a few variables that have to be considered during content delivery using RSS feeds. Let us look at an example: Some websites like My Yahoo is able to display only the headlines of their RSS feeds while websites like Bloglines are able to show almost the entire feed or complete article content. So there are some publishers who will provide only partial feed while others might provide entire content in the feed.

In marketing terms, this means that you should know how you will present the content and what the marketing message will look like. If you are not aware of the various characteristics of a feed, then RSS marketing can be a risky proposition. It is important to hence understand the feed characteristics and identify the methods of distribution. You need to think and imagine in advance how your consumer will receive this feed, and how it will help them to make an informed marketing decision, which will help your business in the long-run.

One of the prevailing issues is that of full feed vs. partial feed. Let us take another example. If an online publication has 5,000 RSS feed subscribers and the publisher is offering only the first paragraph of each of their articles in the RSS feed then the reader will have to click through each of the feed to view the entire content. There are many internet readers or users who will skim quickly through the feed content click through directly to the website. In such a scenario, if the publication has placed any advertisements in their feed then the consumer will miss it completely. So the online publication might get a high readership rate but will be a bad option for RSS advertising because the click-through-rate is low.

Hence it is extremely important to evaluate the various feeds where you would want to advertise.

Make content interactive If your content is not interactive or engaging then it will not attract too many RSS consumers. Consumers are not looking for saleable content; they are looking for useful and relevant information. For example if you are running an advertising campaign for the launch of a new paint then you need to target the different home improvement blogs and websites as a part of your RSS advertising & marketing campaign. In a home improvement blog, you will find the audience who will be interested about the various aspects of home improvement and how it can be done and what all they can use. This will boost your advertising efforts.