RSS Feeds Can Boost Your Internet Marketing Strategy
RSS, (Real Simple Syndication) has many powerful applications for your
Internet Marketing Strategy
. RSS has been around for over ten years, but many marketers often fail to make effective use of this versatile technology.
RSS can be use for content delivery to push your fresh content to your web site visitors, subscribers, and prospective customers. This is a simple and reliable way to communicate useful information and sell to your audience. Using RSS in this way greatly expands your reach beyond your web site.
If visitors to your site find your content relevant and useful, they can then opt-in to your
RSS Feed
in the same way that they would subscribe to an email newsletter. Whenever you add new content to your site, subscribers will be automatically be updated, and your content will appear in their feed reader.
If you are not already familiar with how other web publishers are using RSS, you might want to subscribe to a few feeds yourself. Try one of the free, web based RSS aggregators such as Yahoo.com, Bloglines, Google reader among the many that are available.
Now that you’ve subscribed to a few feeds and gotten some ideas on how you will use RSS to push your content, you need to have a battle plan. What kind of content do you already provide on your site? If you have a blog you probably already have a feed for your blog posts, but you’ll want to set up a feed for your email newsletter, site updates and any news features that you offer. When you are developing the content for your feeds, always keep in mind that readers will be skimming and scanning to find only the most relevant text and glossing over the rest. Keep your text tight, concise, on topic and relevant to your reader’s needs. Create tip sheets with bullet points, and shape the content to suit the reader’s need for quick, actionable information.
Now that you have your content ready to go, you’ll need to publish your feed on the web so that you can start getting subscribers. There are several online tools that will manage and automate your feed for you such as, feedfire.com, myrsscreator.com and feedburner.com to name a few.
Next, you’ll need to promote your new RSS feed both on your site and through other external channels. Design an RSS page where you clearly show your visitors what rss is, how they will benefit from subscribing to your feeds, and where they can find a free reader. Along with the familiar orange RSS button, be sure to include links to the relevant RSS subscription services such as Yahoo, Google, Feedburner, Bloglines, etc. Mention your
RSS feeds
in your email newsletter and on all of your online and offline marketing materials.
Promote your
RSS feeds
externally by submitting your feeds to search engines and directories. Be sure to submit them under the appropriate category so that you are reaching your intended audience.
Author, Tia Jones, is the Online Marketing & PR Specialist at Expansion Plus. In addition, Tia writes and contributes articles on Internet Marketing and Social Media. For more information on how businesses can use Social Media to improve their Internet Marketing Strategy visit http://www.expansionplus.com/
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