6 Reasons Why RSS Beats Email Marketing
A brand new marketing tool predicted to replace email is
currently sweeping the World Wide Web like a storm. The Internet is experiencing the so-called "orange" revolution
and there's no stopping to it. The online marketing world is
rigorously seen chanting a 3-letter mantra, R-S-S. Yes, RSS is here and it's got substance, material, style,
sophistication? In a word, it's got the 'X' factor. RSS, which stands for "Really Simple Syndication", is the newest
and the fastest growing technology online. Many publishers,
webmasters and marketers are adopting RSS. It has helped spam go
down to a great extent and made bulk messages a thing of past. No wonder spammers are shaking in their boots all over the web! Here are 6 strong reasons why RSS beats email marketing to the
core: 1. Kiss Spam Filters Goodbye - RSS can help you distribute your
content directly to your subscribers, without any spam filters
interfering. Your messages will never get blacklisted and
blocked and will always be delivered promptly, unless and until
your subscribers choose to end the relationship themselves. 2. Subscribing Is Easy - Your subscribers don't have to worry
about giving out any of their personal details to subscribe and
read your RSS feeds. All they need to do is, add your feed to
their online or desktop RSS reader and that's it. They are ready
to receive and read content from you without any hassles. 3. Un-subscribing Is Easier - Removing your subscriber's email
from your email list automatically has it's own share of
problems, and it doesn't work all the time. However, when you
talk about RSS, it's easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe
from your publication. They can stop receiving
messages from you any time by simply deleting your feed from
their RSS reader. Simple as that! 4. Get Your Message Out In An Instant - Whenever you have
something new to publish, all you have to do is update your
already published feed and your message gets updated everywhere
it's subscribed. No more worrying if your subscribers got your
message or not. 5. Never Get Accused of Spam - It's very easy to get accused of
sending unsolicited mail nowadays since people forget they even
gave you their email address. RSS solves this problem
completely, as the messages which you send out, will appear
directly in your subscribers RSS reader. So the question of
contacting them illegally does not even arise. 6. Build Long Lasting Relationships - Not only RSS builds a
strong relationship with your existing subscribers but also
helps in attracting new potent subscribers who are interested in
what you offer. People who subscribe to your feed want to
receive content from you and hence, can be regarded as
subscribers you can count on. RSS can work like a charm for your business and help you gain
thousands of quality subscribers and leads within a few weeks? You just have to become a part of the orange revolution! Mustafa Khundmiri is the co-founder of http://www.rapidfeeds.com
- A Free online service, which helps anyone, create, edit, publish
and track RSS feeds online. Sign Up for your FREE account on his
site and start publishing your own RSS feeds!
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What is a Blog? In Plain English Please
If you are fairly new to the Internet, you have probably heard the word "Blog" flying around. But what is a blog? How does it work? And how can I use it on my website? These are all good questions, which I hope to answer for you.
Choosing Your RSS Reader
If you want to be able to read RSS feeds then you are going to need an RSS reader. The types of RSS reader that are available to you come in two flavours. There is the desktop RSS reader and there are the online or web RSS readers.
What Blog Can Make Money?
How to blog to make money from it?
Start Blogging Now: 10 Reasons Why You Really Need a Blog for Your Business
1. It is perfect for creating a web presence for independent professionals who have something to say and who need people to get to know them and what they can do for them.
RSS Works: Hard Metrics to Prove It
Marketers are constantly asking if RSS marketing works and if this can be proved.
How to Create an RSS Feed
An RSS news feed can be used to communicate with your target audience. It is an ideal means of notifying people of new content on your website without the need for them to keep on visiting your site. You can send newsletters to your readership without having to use email and risk being accused of spamming. You will be comfortable in the knowledge that people who request your feed are actually interested in it because they have actively subscribed to it. This article will explain just how to create your own RSS news feed.
There are a couple of ways to create an RSS file, you can use an editor designed for the purpose or you can create a file using a simple text editor. The latter will require you to learn some XML whilst the former will do the hard part for you. First off I will describe an RSS file, there are several versions and I will be showing you version 2.0, the latest RSS version.
An RSS file looks just like an HTML file except it has different tags and the files end in .rss or .xml rather than .html. The file is made up of header information and item information, the item information contains the actual news items.
The first section of the file contains the header information. This states that the file is XML and which version, the encoding used and the version of RSS that you are using. This part of the file is mandatory. Next up is the channel tag, this encloses the whole of the rest of the file. This is followed by a title, description and link which explain the what the feed is about and what website it is associated with. The final part of the header is the optional image information. If you use this the software that is used to parse or read your file can display a small picture such as a logo.
Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.
[?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]The Widget news feed[/title]
[description]The latest news on widgets[/description]
[link]http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[image]
[title]Widget News[/title]
[url>http://www.widget.com/widget.gif[/url]
[link>http://www.widget.com/[/link]
[/image]
The body of the file is made up of the news items. Each news item is enclosed in the item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in the format shown in the example below.
[title]Which is the best Widget to?[/title]
[description]In this article we discuss the release of several new widgets, but which is the best widget.[/description]
[pubDate]Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT[/pubDate]
[link]http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html[/link]
[/item]
You can have as many items in the feed as you like but many webmasters just show the 10 most recent items to keep the bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm the end user with too many items.
Finally the file is ended with the closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.
[/channel]
[/rss]
I have covered the basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in the http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss (RSS 2.0) specification.
Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload the file to your server and then go to this validator to validate the file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file.
That is the basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article.
The Language of Blogs
I read over a lot of blogs each week, casually surfing one or two of the blog exchanges I belong.
Blogs As A Marketing Tool
Blogs are the biggest things to happen to the Internet since personal home pages. Blogging software has made it easy for the average Joe to create his own blog,and the thriving community of bloggers have spurred designers to release completely free, and professionally looking templates.
Find Out How Microsofts Plans Could Make Your Subscribers Beg You for RSS Content!
Microsoft recently announced that they will be releasing a new browser version sometime this summer. The new browser version was to be released with Longhorn, the code name for their next operating system to replace Windows XP, but they decided that they needed to release it sooner than that.
3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog
Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?
No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.
The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.
Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're
becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In
that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.
In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.
Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it's definitely a plus.
What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you.
Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method.
(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)
This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.
These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.
You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.
The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.
In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.
Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.
Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over
this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.
So why don't more people use Trackback?
One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away.
Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.
It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.
The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.
Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.
It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.
These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article.
To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.
That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published.
There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you'll soon find, that's part of the reason they are so effective.
RSS - The Making of a Feed
Everyday more and more websites, news services and blogs are adding RSS content. RSS is a method of syndicating content.The concept of aggregating content in one central location or repository is very appealing. Consumers have become tired of push technology, RSS allows users the flexibility to regain control of their content. RSS feed creators provide content without forcing it on consumers. In fact with RSS consumers are able to choose the content they wish to view.
Blog Construction
Blogs like all forms of writing are an art form that takes knowledge and practice to do well.
Use Blogging to Manage Your Entire Web Sites Content
Blogging is a term that means different things to different people. To some people it means keeping an online journal. To others blogging is about creating a community of people who can contribute to a growing discussion on a specific topic. To me, however, blogging is about creating and running an entire web site. That's because blogging can actually be used as a complete content management system for almost any web site.
RSS for Newbies; A Quick Tutorial
"RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a new way to distribute content. Any content: websites, blogs, forums, etc.
To explain what this means, for once let's start at the end.
What is a Business Blog?
Although Blog was the most requested word of 2004 as per Merriam Webster Dictionary Online, there are quite a few people, for whom the word Blog is still unknown.
Why Blog?
It seems everyone these days is talking about blogging. Everywhere I go, I find articles and forums devoted to this craze. I also have heard from many home business owners who are trying to figure out what a blog is and how they can use one to their benefit.
Creating A Basic RSS Feed For Your Site
The future of RSS Feeds and internet marketing is
looking bright and promising. It would be a wise
decision to get yourself up to speed on this developing
content sharing technology by putting together your
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Blog Your Way To a Successful Private Practice
What is a Blog?
Boost your Search Engine Rankings with an RSS Feed
I'm here to teach you about how RSS Feeds can boost traffic for your website. You may have heard of it, but I guarantee you are not harnessing the full power of the tool. RSS Feeds are very hot, and the marketing pro's are getting their websites listed in Google within 2 to 3 days.
How and Why to RSS
RSS feeds and blogs (and blog and pinging) are part of the latest hyper-frenzy in internet marketing. Tools and services are mushrooming all over. But there seem to be some rather distorted ideas about all this.
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