RSS Marketing Diary
Amazon Soft-Launches RSS Feeds for Product Tags
Just got a notice from Amazon (thank you) that they soft-launched RSS feeds for tags.
But first, how do their tags actually work?
You can tag any product you like, including your previous purchases, with a keyword that best describes the product. Easily search and access products tagged by others, using the keywords you're interested in. Tags are also used as a way for Amazon to provide you with personalized recommendations.
The good part is that Amazon now added RSS capabilities to their tags, available through most tag pages.
Subscribe to RSS feeds for the tags you're interested in, and get latest product releases that match these tags. Use the RSS feeds to display Amazon products on your website, using the appropriate tags, to earn affiliate commissions. Share RSS feeds for tags with your friends, as a recommendations vehicle.
An excellent RSS e-commerce application from Amazon!
[Link]
The NewsGator Interview: RSS in the Enterprise - Manage Internal Information More Easily
In part 3 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how Enterprise RSS makes information management easier within a corporation.
What will happen in the RSS space in 2007, for marketers and business?
Will RSS become integrated into every enterprise application? How will that change how information is used?
Will RSS i mprove information management within an organization?
What challenges do RSS management present to IT departments in larger organizations?
Will centralized RSS tools help solve the internal information management crisis?
What is Attention XML and how will it help you get more of the content you need and less of the content that is not relevant specifically to you?
Are smart RSS Readers only for corporations, or can consumers also take advantage?
What are NewsGator's plans for 2007?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 13 min.]
[Link]
The 10-Step RSS Marketing Plan
While RSS has certainly become well-established with most marketers, few are using it to its full advantage.
Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.
The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).
Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.
But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.
1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy
It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.
2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.
3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy
Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.
4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.
5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level
Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.
6. Promote your RSS feeds internally
Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.
7. Promote your RSS feeds externally
After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.
8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.
9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.
10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand
Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.
[Link]
Unleash RSS Marketing in Japan
Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July.
It’s great to finally go international:)
Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book … and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly.
I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it.
But, I do believe it will be worth the wait.
I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books.
Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:)
[Link]
How Google's Acquisition of FeedBurner Will Change RSS Marketing
While the original plan for the RSS Diary blog was leaving on hiatus until the 2007 edition of the RSS Marketing e-book is done, the FeedBurner acquisition by Google is a story just to important to pass up … especially all the implications it might bring into the world of RSS Advertising, and RSS Marketing as a whole as well.
So, yes. FeedBurner, a leading RSS metrics and RSS advertising company was just acquired by Google. Finally confirmed after weeks of speculation. I won't go into the details of the acquisition, as you can read more about it at the FeedBurner blog and just by following the news at Google News.
Here, we'll take a look at the implications this brings to the world of RSS Marketing. Just my predictions of course:)
1. RSS Metrics Will Finally Become Integrated With Web Metrics
In my book, all marketing/communications channels should be judged using the same metrics, such as conversions, cost-per-order, cost-per-subscriber, sales etc.
Although you could already do all of this with RSS, it required some tinkering.
But, as FeedBurner gets assimilated into Google Analytics, tracking the key marketing metrics should become a breeze, giving everyone access to crucial internet optimization data.
2. RSS Metrics Moving Closer to the Mainstream
With RSS Metrics being integrated directly into Google Analytics (which I'm sure will happen very soon), marketers might finally start actually measuring their RSS feeds.
Means better RSS Marketing, finally.
3. RSS Advertising Going CPC
Although FeedBurner is cautions to provide any details about how their CPM pricing model might change with the integration of their ad services into Google, I'm quite certain that RSS advertising will move the way of cost-per-click.
Means less revenues for RSS feed publishers, but better ROI for you, the advertiser.
4. RSS Advertising Moving Closer to the Mainstream
RSS Advertising will finally reach the mainstream, utilizing Google's massive advertiser database.
Prices will go up, and RSS content monetization will again start becoming the talk at industry events.
On the plus side, it also means Google will be able to attract more RSS feed publishers, meaning more RSS ad inventory for you. Your RSS advertising reach potential is about to explode, finally enabling you to reach the masses using RSS Advertising.
5. Trouble for Other RSS Advertising Companies
I love Pheedo, another leading RSS Metrics and RSS Advertising company, but the FeedBurner acquisition makes me wonder what's in store for them as Google starts pushing RSS advertising to their massive database of advertisers, especially as part of an integrated online advertising service.
It’s certainly not the end of other RSS Advertising companies, but they might all soon see themselves transforming from RSS ad networks to RSS media planning & buying consultants.
Which would be a shame, especially considering the advancements in RSS Advertising developed by Pheedo.
6. Better Targeting for Google AdWords Advertisers (We Wish!)
Advertiser demand seems to be growing quicker than the inventory offered by Google.
The obvious choice for Google (in addition of course to increasing ad inventory through additional reach, media expansion through the content network, and expansion to new ad channels, like RSS and banner inventories) is to offer better targeting, for a premium price.
As a marketer, I clearly want to place my ads in front of the most relevant prospects. Keyword targeting is OK, but adding behavioral on top of that introduces another filtering element to my media planning, enabling me to really pin-point the users I want to see my ads.
How about displaying search ads only to people who have already visited my website, but haven't made a purchase? Google AdWords and Google Analytics integration could offer exactly this.
How about displaying search ads only to people that respond to marketing content banners on other websites? Integrating Google AdWords with one of the latest Google acquisitions, DoubleClick, can get us exactly this.
Of course, I might also want to target my ads to people who are subscribed to X e-mail newsletter. What do you know, Google already has that information through their Gmail service.
And then, how about displaying search ads only to people who are subscribing to other RSS feeds about RSS marketing? Integrating Google AdWords with FeedBurner would make this possible.
Now just take these concepts, put them all together, and expand them to banner advertising, feed advertising and any other online ad channel Google develops/acquires in the future.
This may either be science fiction or Google's actual long-term masterplan. As more advertising budgets rush to the internet, available quality ad inventory will continue shrinking.
By introducing such targeting, integrating the metric and capabilities of all of their properties, Google could come as close as possible to total ad targeting, the holy grail of marketing we are all striving towards.
Things will get much more interesting … and soon.
If I were an ad agency, I'd start developing a targeting department, focusing on targeted media buying.
[Link]
Amazon Soft-Launches RSS Feeds for Product Tags
Just got a notice from Amazon (thank you) that they soft-launched RSS feeds for tags.
But first, how do their tags actually work?
You can tag any product you like, including your previous purchases, with a keyword that best describes the product. Easily search and access products tagged by others, using the keywords you're interested in. Tags are also used as a way for Amazon to provide you with personalized recommendations.
The good part is that Amazon now added RSS capabilities to their tags, available through most tag pages.
Subscribe to RSS feeds for the tags you're interested in, and get latest product releases that match these tags. Use the RSS feeds to display Amazon products on your website, using the appropriate tags, to earn affiliate commissions. Share RSS feeds for tags with your friends, as a recommendations vehicle.
An excellent RSS e-commerce application from Amazon!
[Link]
The NewsGator Interview: RSS in the Enterprise - Manage Internal Information More Easily
In part 3 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how Enterprise RSS makes information management easier within a corporation.
What will happen in the RSS space in 2007, for marketers and business?
Will RSS become integrated into every enterprise application? How will that change how information is used?
Will RSS i mprove information management within an organization?
What challenges do RSS management present to IT departments in larger organizations?
Will centralized RSS tools help solve the internal information management crisis?
What is Attention XML and how will it help you get more of the content you need and less of the content that is not relevant specifically to you?
Are smart RSS Readers only for corporations, or can consumers also take advantage?
What are NewsGator's plans for 2007?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 13 min.]
[Link]
The NewsGator Interview: RSS for Online Media and Branded RSS Readers
In part 2 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how online media can take advantage of RSS beyond publishing RSS content.
Why should online publishers care about branded RSS Readers?
Does it still make sense to provide a branded RSS Reader, especially with the wide adoption RSS is getting through Internet Explorer 7?
What kind of value can publishers bring to RSS Readers?
How can online media enhance the user experience through third-party content via RSS?
Is visitor ownership still a possibility, or are services like MyYahoo! owning the game? How can online media compete?
How can small businesses compete with large portals and large media sites?
Does syndicating your content via RSS mean that you’re giving up content?
Is RSS becoming a significant traffic driver?
How can companies profit from pulling together relevant content on a specific topic from third-party sources?
Is there a difference in how summary and full-text feeds drive visitors to your website? When to use which?
Best practices for re-publishing third-party content on your website
Can you put ads next to re-published RSS content on your site? How to do it?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 14 min.]
[Link]
The NewsGator Interview: How are Vista and IE Changing the RSS Landscape?
I interviewed Greg Reinacker of NewsGator end of January, as part of the interview series for the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book.
NewsGator is one of the leaders in the Enterprise RSS space, a provider of top-breed RSS Readers and also a branded RSS Reader vendor.
So, you can imagine we had alot to cover.
In part 1 of the interview, find out about how Windows Vista and Internet Explorer are changing the RSS landscape …
How are Vista and Internet Explorer changing the world of RSS marketing and RSS content consumption?
How much and how quickly will they make an impact?
Are they really the game changer every marketer expects them to be?
What changes can we expect?
How can marketers take advantage of the advances Vista offers for RSS?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 8 min.]
[Link]
Flying to Boston for the ACCM Conference
Only a few more weeks until the ACCM (Annual Catalog and Multi-Channel Merchant Conference) event in Boston, one of the best DM conferences of the year.
If you're in Boston or are coming to the conference, drop me a note.
I’ll be speaking on RSS and other new internet marketing media, together with Scott Voight of Silverpop.
If you're at the conference, definetly reserve the Monday 3 PM slot to come hear us. The last presentation we did together with Scott in London was a huge hit, and we promise not to dissapoint:)
[Link]
Bryan Eisenberg RSS Interview, part 2: RSS Marketing Best Practices
What works best in RSS marketing? How are RSS subscribers different than e-mail subscribers? RSS publishing best practices if you want to sell?
These and other practical questions are all revealed in the 2nd part of the RSS interview with Bryan Eisenberg. Without doubt, this is one of the best and most practical RSS marketing interviews we've done so far.
In part 1 of the Bryan Eisenberg RSS interview we focused on how the GrokDotCom.com is going beyond traditional RSS Radars by employing intelligent content aggregation tools, instead of relying just on contextual filtering, and what kind of results they are achieving.
In part 2 of the interview we move beyond RSS Radars to their overall RSS marketing strategy.
In this interview find out about …
1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why?
2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds?
3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds?
4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership?
5. What's the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content?
6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?
Click here to listen to the MP3 file [8:33 minutes; 2 MB]
[Link]
Amazon.com Discussions and Reviews via RSS
I have to apologise to Amazon for missing on two of their RSS content delivery options, which I previously missed.
Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.
1. Product Discussions
Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement … especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.
The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.
2. Customer Reviews by Author
Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.
[Link]
Bryan Eisenberg RSS Interview, part 1: Making RSS Radars Work to Increase Your Sales
Part of the upcoming 2007 edition of the RSS Marketing e-book are also the interviews we are doing with various internet marketing experts and RSS practitioners. In the following days and hopefully not too many weeks, we'll be posting those interviews here.
I’m sure most of you have heard of Bryan Eisenberg before. Bryan is the leading worldwide authority on internet marketing optimization and website persuasion architecture. He was also one of the few marketers that got on the RSS Marketing bandwagon early on.
Recently, Bryan started exploring RSS Radars as a tool to increase the traffic to their optimization portal GrokDotCom.com, increase visitor loyalty, position the website as the key news source for internet optimization … and naturally facilitate online sales of their books and consulting services. Take a look here.
But while most RSS Radars are based on contextually filtering content from selected third-party RSS feeds, the GrokDotCom.com RSS Radars go far beyond anything else we have seen on the market so far.
Instead of relying only on contextual content filtering to select the most relevant third-party content, they are employing a number of additional filters, such as the amount of linkage the story is receiving, source relevance and credibility, and so on … and they're calling it a discovery engine.
What are their RSS Radar marketing goals? How their RSS Radar is different from what you can generally see online? What concrete results are they achieving? What you can learn from their RSS marketing?
All of these answers, and more, available in the audio interview.
Click here to listen to the MP3 file [14 minutes; 3 MB]
[Link]
Using RSS Radars in B2B CRM
RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.
Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.
David’s idea is simple:
Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated
This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
“The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."
But, there are two problems:
Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David Tagging relevant articles every day takes time … time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients
This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.
Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.
More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book 
[Link]
The 10-Step RSS Marketing Plan
While RSS has certainly become well-established with most marketers, few are using it to its full advantage.
Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.
The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).
Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.
But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.
1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy
It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.
2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.
3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy
Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.
4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.
5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level
Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.
6. Promote your RSS feeds internally
Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.
7. Promote your RSS feeds externally
After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.
8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.
9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.
10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand
Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.
[Link]
New Marketing Thinking Required for Second Life?
Mobil Avenue accuses me of 20th century marketing thinking. I'm not quite sure what he has in mind, but it seems that my Second Life posts ticked off some people.
Now, don't get me wrong, I see alot of development potential in virtual worlds, but Second Life as it is simply does not cut it.
I won't go into the details again, but the sheer lack of economy of scales shows that something is wrong when you compare the investments in Second Life and the actual virtual world penetration. Not to mention the difficult user interface.
Second Life is a good beginning, but virtual worlds have a far way to go before they deserve to be treated as seriously as some are treating them today. Yes, Second Life should certainly be treated as a marketing/communications playground, but not as a high importance marketing channel.
If you want to call this 20th century thinking, go ahead. It is. As are economies of scale, profitability, sales conversion, cost per order and other business “relics”.
And as you'll notice, 20th century thinking still works, even in 2007. We've all heard stories of the demise of advertising, the death of PR, the death of e-mail, the death of postal direct mail and so on … but they're all alive, well and kicking still today, and will remain so.
Actually, intrusive direct response TV advertising is still one of the most effective tools to generate sales. And it gives you more bang for the buck than almost any other marketing channel, including online.
Do I like this? No. I'd love to believe that the internet is the alpha and omega of marketing. But it's not. It's the key connector, but not the key driver. That's the way things are, and as markters we need to employ 20th century thinking and use what works best … and the numbers tell us that.
But this doesn't mean we shouldn't play and test. Quite on the contrary.
OK, this conversation is getting somewhat beyond the original topic, and it's quite possible I'm not even getting what Mobil Avenue is trying to say:)
And please don't get me started on 3D virtual webstores …
Of course, I might be wrong. And if I am, I'll be the first to change my stripes the next day. It's what marketers do. If a new thing comes up and works better than what you're doing, change. But every change first demand proof. Unless you're just testing … because when you're testing, the rules of the game change.
[Link]
What You Can Do With Amazon RSS Now?
If I keep this up, I might actually get the reputation of picking on Amazon.com as a hobby [just take a look at Is Amazon Missing the RSS Advertising Opportunity?, Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity? and Get the Most from RSS Marketing … Take Your DM Hat Off!].
It’s just one of those things. You see a company that could really go above and beyond with RSS and really use it to drive revenues, but they just don't do it.
But at least they're showing some activitiy lately …
[in addition to removing their list of relatively useless category feeds, which used to be available here]
a) Gold Box
Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It finally has an RSS feed with your daily deals.
But, unfortunatelly, the RSS feed only provides brief information about the product, instead of also giving you a direct purchase link, some of the latest product reviews and other information that could facilitate the sale. Also, there's no personalization, or so it seems. Why not give me an RSS feed with just the special deals for me, based on my previous purchases?
b) Plog
This is one of the genius Amazon ideas. Each Plog is personalized to the individual user, giving him the latest blog posts from Amazon's authors (just from the authors' whos books you've purchased), and it also comes with a targeted RSS feed, matching the Plog content you see when you're logged-in. You can also subscribe to additional blog content manually.
Also, Amazon is promising that we'll be soon able to track latest releases, changes to our orders and "much more" through our plogs, which will presumably also come be published in our targeted RSS feeds.
Amazon, please keep this up. Make us happy:)
c) The Amazon API
But let's be fair to Amazon. Even though their end-user RSS feed offering is poor, they do provide developers with the ability to create their own RSS feeds from Amazon, by integrating with their API.
Here are some examples:
RSStalker.com - provides a variety of Amazon product tracking options via RSS, such as a 10% price drop feed that lets you know when a product that RSStalker is tracking via Amazon drops 10% in price; RSS feeds from your wishlists; last 25 price changes in a selected Amazon category, and more.
Baebo - provides a persistant search RSS feed for Amazon products, based on your keywords.
More great examples floating around …
[Link]
Quick RSS SEO Tips
WebProNews has a short summary from Amanda Watlington's tips for SEO optimization of your RSS feeds:
1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati
2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme 3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters 4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly 5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters 6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item 7. Provide email updates for the non-techies 8. Offer an HTML version of your feed 9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed
Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering:
10. Full text, not summaries
11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10) 12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post) 13. Keyword-rich item [title] 14. Your brand name in the item [title] 15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container 16. Compelling site [description] 17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss) 18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines
And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site:
19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course]
20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories
21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords
22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts
23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]
Do you have more tips?
(a) Post them in the comments form below.
(b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview
[Link]
RSS Marketing With Christopher Knight: Use E-mail to Promote RSS
How does EzineArticles.com, one of the largest websites to help you syndicate your content, use RSS for their marketing?
To answer this question, we interviewed Christopher Knight for the 2007 edition of the RSS marketing e-book (coming shortly). But if you want to know more, click here to read Christopher's summary.
BTW - did you know that EzineArticles.com publishes more than 40,000 RSS feeds?
[Link]
F Trains: Another Example of Getting RSS Wrong
RSS Specifications point to the F Train from NYC and their RSS feed, which lets you watch traing schedules and changes.
The essential idea of course is good –> use RSS to get your latest and most important content to your prospects and customers. Train schedules certainly seem relevant enough for someone in NYC to subscribe to them.
But again, someone is missing the point.
If I want to know about traing schedules and changes, I don't care about all schedules and changes. I just care about the routes I take.
If I'm only taking the Queens-bound route, don't talk to me about Manhattan-bound trains.
F Trains, great idea, but now makes this a little more usable and allow people to select which routes they're interested in and then give them an RSS feed just for those.
[Link]
I'm Not Spamming You!
… but someone certainly is, using a non-existant MarketingStudies.net e-mail address.
If you receive an e-mail with the subject "Got It, I Think" from tahaseggdzf@marketingstudies.net, or something simillar, it's spam. Not from us though …
This is how it works:
(a) The spammer finds a number of open relay e-mail servers, which allow the spammer to send e-mail using an e-mail address that's not "hosted" on the e-mail server and often without even having a user account at the server provider.
(b) He or she then uses your e-mail address as the "Reply To" e-mail address in the spam messages and sends out the spam blast.
(c) Everyone receiving these e-mail messages will now think they are coming from your domain, unless of course they have enough knowledge about the subject to check the headers of the e-mail messages received. Those show that the e-mail is in fact not coming from MarketingStudies.net.
The funny thing about this spam is that the spammer didn't include any links in his spam e-mail.
Looking for ways to stop this, but I'm affraid it might be impossible …
[Link]
MarketingStudies.net Back Online and Comments Working Again
After a rather painful week, MarketingStudies.net is back with its full functionality, including comments.
As already noted, we started the move to a new hosting provider about a week ago, when the comments on this blog were again turned off by the old hosting provider without notice.
The move went relatively smoothly, thanks to the great MovableType architecture and excellent cooperation from both the old and the new hosting providers. Plus, we're now running on MovableType 3.3, which really is light years ahead from the old 2.x versions.
The only thing that really went wrong with the move were the sub-domains. Everything else was smooth.
Quick Steps for Changing Your Hosting Provider and Installing a New MovableType Version
If you're thinking of doing the same, here are the quick steps:
a) Sign-up for your new hosting package and contact your new hosting provider. Contact them in person and explain to them what you're doing and that you might need a little more assistance from them to finalize the transfer.
b) Make a replica of all of your files from the old hosting provider and upload the exact folder structure with all the files to the new hosting provider.
c) Export the SQL database with your MovableType data, directly from the SQL interface. You want a full copy of your database with practically everything.
d) Install your current MovableType version on the new server. Do not just copy the files from the old MovableType installation, rather do the installation again on the new server.
e) Import your old SQL database from the old server into the new SQL database on the new server. Make sure you import it into the new database created by MovableType.
You should now have all of the data and settings from MovableType on the old server in MovableType on the new server.
f) Log-in to MovableType on the new server. You will probably need to modify the server paths for storing files, so open the settings for each blog and change the server paths if needed.
g) Rebuild your files on the new server.
h) Install a new MovableType version on top of the current one, of course on the new server.
i) Once everything is working, ask your domain host to point your domains to your new server IPs.
This is it. Good luck!
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Directly Grabbing RSS Subscribers and Getting Syndicated Through Pheedo RSS Advertising
Pheedo just released a new RSS advertising concept, called FeedPowered Advertising, that helps you generate new subscribers to your RSS feeds using RSS advertising, through Pheedo's RSS advertising network or through other ad networks.
The Key Facts
Their new RSS ad format …
[a] Displays the latest content items from your RSS feed, including video content with direct "watch" links
[b] Allows the user to also add your content (directly from the ad) to del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Furl or e-mai it to a friend
How the New Format Integrates DM, PR and Brand
The implications of this are quite strong.
[a] The ad format allows you to syndicate your RSS content to targeted online media, displaying your content there directly to generate more brand awareness, build your credibility and get new readers by actually demonstrating your value
[b] Furthemore, the ad itself contains further syndication options that will virally spread your content through the key social networking sites
[c] The ad functions as a direct subscription generation tool, enabling you to quickly capture new subscribers through other sites … and actually works towards increasing your conversion rate by first demonstrating the content and so making the subscription decision easier and more educated, thus generating better qualified subscribers/prospects
In essence, the ad format integrates PR, direct marketing and brand advertising.
Is it perfect? While it is an amazing idea, it does need some further refinement.
Further Improvements Needed
[a] Looking at their example on their site using Internet Explorer 7 shows that the feed subscription option in the ad is not highlighted through the IE7 native RSS Reader, making it less intuitive to subscribe
[b] The existing example is clearly targeted to RSS Aware users. But data shows that more than 80% of RSS users are not actually aware of using RSS. The ad format also need to include other subscription options, in addition to the RSS button, such as Add to MyYahoo!
[c] The ad also needs some space at the bottom to better entice viewers to subscribe, using enticing copy and perhaps bribing the viewers to subscribe by offering them a free whitepaper
[d] For direct marketers, the ad format should also allow an in-between data capture window, allowing the direct marketer to capture prospect information prior to being given access to the feed
[e] The next step would be for Pheedo to add additional metrics for advertisers, such as new subscriber retention and long-term customer conversion, and perhaps even the CPO.
If you want to check it out yourself, here's the screenshot (working version available here):
I’m a little biased here, because I've always dug Pheedo work, but in my opinion this is the best RSS advertising development yet … and finally an RSS advertising tool to generate real results by taking advantage of the power of RSS.
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Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity?
OK, I admit it. I'm on a fighting streak today. Just one of those days.
After discussing how Yahoo! Pipes may facilitate content theft and unfair use, and bashing against Amazon for not taking better advantage of RSS advertising, it's time to take on e-retailers, online service providers and basically anyone that does transactional messaging.
Let’s take a look at my inbox. Today I received …
A transactional e-mail “from PayPal" A transactional e-mail “from eBay" A transactional e-mail “from Amazon" And some other brand names as well
Of course, none of these e-mails were actually from PayPal, eBay or Amazon. Simply spam, as every other day, intended to capture my private data.
Even if PayPal really sent me an e-mail, I would never read it or respond to it, simply because I would consider it spam and would never believe that it's actually from PayPal.
As I'm sure you've noticed as well, transactional e-mail messages have become a horror story for the big brands, with spammers constantly trying to take advantage of their well-known brand names.
But here's the catch …
There is no SPAM with RSS, at least not in this form When you receive content from an RSS feed that you proactively subscribed to, you can be 100% certain that the message is legitimate and from the publisher to whom you subscribed RSS is perfectly capable of delivering personalized transactional information RSS is perfectly capable of delivering protected personalized transactional information, granting access only to those with the required username/password combination RSS transactional capabilities are easy to implement, if your user database is in order
So why aren't any of these guys using RSS to deliver transactional information?
PayPal, eBay, Amazon … I really want my transactional messages from you. But when I receive them, I don't believe them. Please start delivering them via RSS and make me a happy customer … a happy customer that actually trusts messages from PayPal, eBay and Amazon.
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Is Amazon Missing the RSS Advertising Opportunity?
Is Amazon missing the RSS opportunity?
Yes, in almost all regards. A company of their size, financing and almost unlimited content could be the poster child for smart RSS marketing uses, but insteady they choose to almost ignore the channel.
But today I would like to touch-up especially on the RSS advertising segment, where many marketers still seem to ignore the various opportunities offered by the channel.
Even more specifically, this is about RSS advertising in RSS feeds for blogs.
What Are the Key Advertising Issues Faced by Bloggers?
Bloggers like to keep their act clean, and in many cases that means either completely evading paid advertising or at least completely evading non-contextual paid advertising. Even when bloggers do decide to offer advertising, they are hard-pressed to find advertisers offering high-context advertising that would closely relate to the bloggers' content, especially their individual blog posts. There are still few RSS advertisers, making it difficult for many bloggers to monetize on their every post. However, if bloggers were to monetize their every post, the ads would need to be so highly contextual that they would not feel that they are betrying their readers. In essence, the ads would need to be an extension of their content, but at the same time clearly marked as third-party content. Following this line of though further, bloggers would prefer ads that provide real contextual value to their readers, instead of simply pushing blatant advertising messages.
Where’s the Opportunity for Amazon?
Before I explore this further, please take a look at any post at MasterNewMedia. Or just click here and take a look at this one.
Robin Good is a master at taking advantage of the functionality offered by the Amazon affiliate program. Each of his posts concludes with recommended books, related to the overall topic of his in-depth articles.
For Robin's readers, these book ads are not just ads, but rather extensions of Robin's own content, giving them the opportunity to further explore the topic.
What’s the opportunity for Amazon?
Create and promote a program that would make it easy for bloggers to publish contextually related book ads directly in their RSS feeds, enabling them to at least somewhat monetize each of their content items with relevant book ads.
Providing Valuable Context Advertising
But, to some bloggers providing book ads just as ads might not be contextual enough.
Now go to A9.com and do a search for "RSS marketing". In addition to displaying relevant books, the A9 search engine also displays quotes from these books.
How about if Amazon enabled bloggers to post RSS ads in their feeds, displaying a paragraph from each book that most closely matches the topic of the article, with a direct link to the page for that book on Amazon?
Or in the case of blogs about music, why not provide an automatic direct link in the ad to a 1 minute or 30 second demo of the song or group, mentioned in the blog post, which Amazon already has on their website?
Picking on Wikipedia
We all love Wikipedia, right?
Many of Wikipedia users love them so much that they constantly promote the website. So why can't the people at Wikipedia make this easier for bloggers?
For example by allowing them to automatically insert references to Wikipedia in the form of inline RSS ads, providing additional contextual content, related with the topic of the blog post?
No revenues for the blogger, but at least a good way for them to extent their content and provide more value to their readers.
Perhaps not a good RSS advertising example, but certainly one that can get you thinking about the various opportunities provided by this channel.
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Will Yahoo! Pipes Increase Content Theft?
First of all, I was want to emphasize again that I strongly believe that Yahoo! Pipes is a dream come true for marketers, finally offering us a tool to easily conduct business intelligence and create RSS Radars.
However, the more you think of it, the more obvious all the dangers become obvious.
Sure, these were here before, but never before have they been accessible on a mass scale, for free, and with such ease of use.
Just consider it …
Yahoo! Pipes gives anyone, with some time on their hands to learn how it works, the power to remix, filter and manipulate third-party content. In essence this means that you can easily take someone elses RSS feed and repurpose their content to best suit your needs and at the same time ignoring the needs of the publisher who is investing time, money and other resources into his content creation.
1. Creating Third-Party RSS Feeds with Your Standalone RSS Ads
Let’s get started with something easy. Yahoo! Pipes allows you to combine any amount of XML data sources and filter them to create an output that best matches your needs.
For example, you could take 100 RSS feeds that talk about search engine marketing, combine them, deduplicate the posts, and filter the posts by various keywords to really create a highly focused content stream, for example on optimizing your site for Google.
With the power that Yahoo! Pipes gives you, you could now add your own content, via your own RSS feed, and create an output that mixes all the above feeds on SEM with standalone ads for your SEM services.
Now just promote the RSS feed on your site and start grabbing subscribers. If the RSS feeds you're using as inputs are offering full-text content, your subscribers will be able to read third-party SEM tips from your RSS feed, directly from their RSS Readers, without even taking notice that these articles weren't written by you. But at the same time they would be exposed to your ads, offering your own SEM services.
In essence, using this approach you could leverage the content written by third-party experts, without their permission, to directly build your own brand as an expert and directly generate sales.
The other possibility would be to use the same third-party content, but instead of also publishing ads for your own services, rather publishing paid ads. Again, you would be using third-party content to fuel your own revenues, without the publishers' permissions … actually directly stealing from them.
2. Adding Ads into Content Items / Removing Native Ads in Content Items
Now, I'm not really 100% certain this is doable (haven't played with the service enough yet), but articles floating around the internet seem to indicate so.
Again, imagine taking the same SEM feeds and creating a new remixed output using them. But this time, you also use Yahoo! Pipes to remove the ads their content items already contained, replacing them with your own.
The result would be a full-text article from an SEM expert, with your SEM services ad directly below the article, taking direct advantage of the article to sell your services … perhaps even miss-leading the reader that you are the author of the article.
3. Creating Spam Sites
Spam sites are becoming an increasing problem, with unethical webmasters taking advantage of third-party RSS feeds to fully fuel their own sites, in the hopes of targeted content increasing their search engine rankings and serving as a vehicle to drive Google AdSense clicks and revenues.
Yahoo! Pipes now makes this even simpler, actually enabling these webmasters to build full websites of highly relevant and smartly remixed content that will actually provide their visitors with some value and thus even further increase their AdSense revenue potential.
How Can Your Protect Your Content?
Yahoo! Pipes lists 3 ways for publishers to protect their content:
Configure your web server to block the user agent "Yahoo Pipes" Add a "noindex" meta to your RSS feed: E-mail pipes-optout@yahoo-inc.com with a list of the feed URLs you want blocked
Of course, the dillema here is that by blocking Yahoo! Pipes in fear of unethical practices you are also blocking acceptable uses of your content by legitimate users and are thus decreasing your content syndication opportunities.
Is It the Tool or the Users?
The four examples are just the tip of the iceberg. With the power of Yahoo! Pipes the "opportunities" for content theft are becoming nearly unlimited.
Of course, this isn't the fault of Yahoo! Pipes. It's just a tool … and it's in the hands of users what they do with the tool.
Unethical webmasters have actually been doing this for quite some time now even without Yahoo! Pipes. But now they have a stronger tool in their hands, and it's only a question of time when this will hit "the black market mainstream".
What Can Yahoo! Do?
Yahoo! Pipes isn't a problem yet, but when it reaches "the black market mainstream", publishers will start taking notice, and that my create a backslash against Yahoo.
But what can they really do?
Somewhat limit the level of manipulation you allow with third-party feeds, at least preventing the removal of inline ads Create a new RSS element that will allow the RSS feed publisher to request an e-mail notification of Yahoo! Pipes use of his feeds, by simply placing that element in the RSS feed Allow the RSS feed publishers to mark their feeds as "Yahoo! Pipes syndication available only on-request", enabling them to authorize the use through the Pipes user interface [this one might be going a little far:)] Implement a stringent "no unfair use" policy, immediately blocking users that exhibit such uses
On the other side, adding all of these administrative hurdles to the pipes creation process for the user would greatly dimish the service's mass appeal.
So what's the right way to do it?
Please comment below …
[you can now post comments, but you will receive an error message after you submit them … but they will still be published]
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Comments Off Again
I just love my hosting company.
They again disabled my comments script on the server, of course without giving me any kind of notice.
Usually I'm patient, but what's too much is too much.
So, I apologize for the inconvenience. Comments will be back up as soon as we find a new hosting provider and implement the website there.
In the mean time, please e-mail your comments to info@marketingstudies.net
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