RSS Marketing

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What is this RSS anyway?

RSS is a fast and powerful way to get news out to an audience. RSS readers inform their users of any new postings on news sites, newsgroups and weblogs. If you need to keep up to date on the latest news articles, or you need to track the postings on Wiki or your favorite weblog, then you really need to use an RSS reader. RSS is widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files. (called  podcasting, broadcatching and MP3 blogs.)

Technically, RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

The acronym stands for one of the following standards:
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.9x)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.x)

Usage


RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML based web content syndication format. RSS has become the defacto feature on weblogs and many news sites. Almost all major news sites and weblogs provide an RSS feed for their audience. An RSS-aware program (a.k.a. RSS reader) can check these RSS feeds for changes and display the updates in a human readable format.  A comprehensive list of news aggregators can be found from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The first online news site to use RSS feeds was Variety.com in June of 2002. In 2004 and 2005, after several years of use by early adopters, use of RSS spread to many major news organizations, including Reuters and the Associated Press. Under various usage agreements, providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds.

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled webpages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.

Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs like web browsers. Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access. Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed. There are also search engines for RSS feeds like Feedster, Technorati or Plazoo. RSS feeds are typically linked to with an orange rectangle with the letters XML ( ) or RSS ( ).

RSS has become the de facto feature on weblogs and many news sites


Almost every computer geek visits Slashdot.org once a day. But UberGeeks prefer to be always up to date with the latest articles. So instead of visiting every 5 minutes, you can subscribe to the Slashdot RSS feed. As soon as there is a new article on Slashdot, my RSS reader notifies you of it. This allows you to logon and make the “First Post” (reply) to the article. URLs to RSS feeds from some popular weblogs and news sites:
• Slashdot
• National Public Radio

However there are other areas where the power of RSS has not been fully realized. Wikis, Usenet and web based discussion groups come to mind. But this is changing fast.


Firefox: a powerful RSS reader


An RSS Reader is an application that polls RSS feeds and displays them in a human-readable format. The reader allows you to browse the newly available items in the RSS feed. RSS readers come in many flavors. As soon as there is a new article on your feeds, my RSS reader notifies you of it.

One powerful RSS reader, that often goes unused by many, comes built-in with Mozilla Firefox browser. It is called the Live Bookmark. Live Bookmarks is a new technology in Firefox that lets you view RSS news and weblog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu. It enables you to quickly see the latest headlines from your favorite sites. Clicking on any of the live bookmark will take you directly to the page referenced by that RSS item.  Microsoft's next version of Explorer is supposed to have RSS reading capability included.

Firefox’s Live Bookmark lets you see the latest headlines from your favorite sites. Clicking on any Live Bookmark opens up the full article in the browser window

You can download Firefox from the Mozilla web site. Some other Freely available RSS readers using a variety of systems such as Unix, Linux etc.:
• RSS OWL (Java based)
• FeedReader (Windows)
• DSSBandit (windows, written in C#)
• LifeArea (GTK/GNOME)
• Straw (Python/GNOME)
• Syndigator (Perl/GTK)
• Blam (Mono: C# and Gtk#)
• Snownews (Console based, ncurses)

(excerpts from Free Software Magazine, June 2005, by Saqib Ali, under GNU free documentation license 2.1.)

The Marketer Perspective - RSS Marketing


RSS is a content delivery channel, and us marketers have the tendency to use every such channel to do what we are doing: market. As a marketer I can understand those not wanting to be marketed at any more, but no marketer can overlook the marketing perspective of RSS advertising. It's targeted, it can be highly relevant and it reaches forward-thinking individuals that have actually opted-in to hear from a specific publisher.

New times bring new marketing opportunities, and RSS is the leader in this area as well. Here are some of the features of RSS Marketing being advertised:

  • Use it to increase the sales of your affiliates by providing them with RSS feeds to better promote your products.

  • Launch your own RSS product feeds and digital catalogues (Amazon started publishing those not long ago) that bring your products directly to your recipient's desktops. Amazon is doing, but not many other people yet. Be among the first and get a lion's share of your target market.
     

  • Market through branded RSS aggregators and establish a constant connection with your subscribers. It's just like having a branded e-mail client that your customers and prospects are using every day ... but much cheaper.
     

  • Find innovative ways of delivering your ads and direct marketing messages directly to your audiences, making sure they are actually read.

  • Autoresponders are a great marketing tool, but are becoming ineffective because your prospects just don't want to give you their e-mail addresses. RSS gives you this very same power, but without the fear people have with e-mail..
     

  • Use RSS to market to your existing customers, affiliates, business partners and employees/team members.
     

  • Publish your own "podcast", a special RSS feed, which carries audio. Perfect for your own audio "radio station" or for getting your voice to your readers, without having to worry about too large e-mail attachments. Podcasting got so big that not only every respected internet marketers is using it, but also huge corporations like GM.
     

  • Use RSS to deliver latest posts and topics from your forums directly to your readers, to increase forum popularity and the quantity & quality of conversations.

 
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