SMB Marketing via RSS Feeds

Internet Marketing Is Going To The Feeds
By Jack Humphrey (c) 2006
Tale Chaser Publishing, Inc. 

This change is permanent: Marketing your website without taking advantage of RSS feeds will be the biggest mistake you can make in 2006 and beyond.

Microsoft is unleashing a new OS (Vista) that will plug into the web via RSS in a very profound way. If you haven't been keeping up on Vista (formerly Longhorn) developments because you thought it was of no consequence to you as a marketer, think twice.

Vista will revolutionize the way everyone syndicates their content and markets their websites forever.

RSS is fast becoming the backbone of the web. Sites are organically syndicating content around the web through RSS search engines like this one: http://rssfeeds.contentdesk.com.

Feeds in RSS directories then get picked up by publishers looking for good headline content for their sites.

The major search engines also pick up those feed listings and often discover new sites and spider them faster than any other förm of content syndication including articles and press releases!

How To Create A Feed For Your Site

First off, if you are not blogging, you need to. Every type of site imaginable can produce a relevant blog with topics related to your main content.

It doesn't matter if you simply sell furniture on your site - you need a blog!

Imagination is all that is required to create a blog featuring the almighty promotion power of an RSS feed. In the furniture example you can blog about interior design and any number of topics.

Notice that the big sites (that were formerly simple shopping cart sites with little content) are now putting up articles and blogging about the topics surrounding their products.

They are not stupid. They know that creating content and feeding it around the web is a major traffïc source and they've been switching to richer content models for well over a year en masse.

Most any major shopping site you land on nowadays has rich content somewhere on the site. And they have a feed their visitors can subscribe to and that they can market with.

For the smaller mom and pop shop, a Wordpress blog is all you need to plug into the RSS world and fill your site with rich content (not just product descriptions and salës letters) that the engines are looking for, as well as the major part of your market who want more information before making purchases.

A review site is a very popular model. Lots of surfers want to read about 3rd party experiences with products before deciding on purchases.

Again, this model is not new and it is not an afterthought marketing ploy. It is major business to the sites who have mastered the art of filling direct salës sites and shopping cart-run sites with deep content.

With Microsoft Vista, all PC users are going to be able to detect feeds on every site they visit and subscribe to those feeds.

Very soon the days of "Give me your email address and other private information" will be a thing of the past.

Smart marketers are going to adopt the RSS information delivery model because surfers will quickly begin to ignore email subscription forms while looking for the simple and completely anonymous RSS subscription model.

So if you haven't started planning a marketing campaign utilizing RSS delivery of newsletters and updates over email, you had better get started understanding RSS and its eventual replacement of the traditional email list.

Critical mass tolerance of sp@m and giving out email addresses has been reached in all markets. Only in very tight niches in special circumstances where there is instant trust and credibility conveyed by a site will you find decent optín rates.

Everywhere else the optín rate for any kind of email notification list