Market Your RSS Feed With Microsoft Windows Live

Writen by Marc Liron

“RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” And that is exactly what it is… a great way for content publishers (including you) to distribute your content for free.

Over the last year you can not have escaped those RSS buttons all over the Internet, inviting you to sign up for the website owners RSS feed(s)

Apple, Microsoft, CNN, the BBC, even the owner of your local pet shop uses these RSS buttons on their website.

With Internet Explorer 7 now containing a built in “RSS reader” complete with a button that turns orange when it detects an RSS feed on a webpage – RSS is big news for Internet Marketing.

Among the popular RSS buttons seen all over the Internet are the ones with Yahoo and MSN branding on them. Simply click on one of those RSS buttons and if you are registered with either My Yahoo! ( http://my.yahoo.com ) or My MSN ( http://my.msn.com ) you can instantly add that website’s RSS feed to your account – Nice and simple.

Well the ever growing Microsoft Windows Live “service” is offering the same thing and with millions of Live.com service users, providing your RSS feed as a simple subscription button is a real no-brainer!

See it in action at:

http://www.updatexp.com

…just click the Windows Live button on the left hand and side and see it in action. As of writing this article you do NOT even have to have an account with Live.com to see it working.

On clicking the Windows Live RSS button you will see the “UpdateXP.com Newsletter” RSS feed added to the Live.com website.

Simply click on one of the news items “[more]” links and you will see it open up gracefully on the screen – no new window opens.

Now check out the “Send to a friend” option – powerful viral marketing for your website with just one click.

And the code?

Simply right click and view my source code remembering modify with your own URL!

(PLEASE download the Windows Live image and upload to your own website though.)

Here is the link:

http://www.updatexp.com/image-files/addtolive.gif

Why should I bother?

As I have already mentioned RSS is a great free tool for promoting your website, Blog or newsletter.

But Microsoft literally has a market place of tens of millions of users. Now with every user of Microsoft Windows Live services (that includes: Live Messenger, Live Mail, Live Search, Live Local etc…) being encouraged to create a free personalized Live.com home page, combined with the massive investment in Live.com and the goliath that is the Microsoft marketing machine, this is one free marketing tool your website can not afford to ignore.

Marc Liron is a Microsoft MVP and full time Digital Media Evangelist. He has created many Microsoft technology releated websites and is the creator of the popular utility SHERLOCK – The Codec Detective. Marc’s main website is at http://www.marcliron.com where you can access his articles and software.

RSS is Not Only for Blogs

Writen by Rok Hrastnik

Contrary to popular opinion, RSS is not only good for delivering content from your blog, although blogs are what made RSS so popular.

In fact, RSS can be used to deliver a great variety of content and content types. If you can break down your content in to individual stories or individual pieces, you can deliver it via RSS.

Just to give you an impression of the power of RSS, here are some examples of content you can publish using it

–> MarketingVOX is using RSS to deliver internet marketing news to their readers as it becomes available. Instead of having to wait to receive all the news in a single e-mail newsletter, RSS users get them as soon as they are ready.

–> Amazon.com is using RSS to announce their bestsellers and to help their users keep track of releases they are most interested in.

–> Some affiliate managers already communicate with their affiliates using RSS. You can of course use it to communicate with any other target audience as well, such as your employees or team-members, and even your company owners.

–> FindSavings.com uses RSS to deliver savings coupons and related information.

–> Lockergnome uses RSS to provide visitors with the latest downloads and relevant software. Yet again other companies are using RSS to deliver product updates and patches directly to their customers, just as they become available.

–> A few hundred content publishers are using RSS to deliver audio content, such as .mp3 interviews and even “radio” shows.

–> Textamerica.com allows people to post pictures, videos & text from their mobile phones and then make this content available via RSS feeds.

–> Other companies are using RSS to deliver whitepapers and other educational content.

–> One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation.

–> Many internet publishers are using RSS to deliver their newsletters, as a supplement to their e-mail delivery. Since many people no longer want to give their e-mail address away to publishers, this is a great way to keep your e-zine readership growing.

–> Publish living digital catalogues of your products and provide your customers with your latest product releases, broken down by the categories they’re interested in, and make it easy for them to order.

–> Provide your affiliates and marketing partners with RSS feeds they can promote to their visitors to better promote your products and still make a commission. Amazon.com is already doing it. When are you starting?

–> Create RSS autoresponders with scheduled messages, to keep in constant “marketing” contact with your prospects and slowly get them to the point of purchase.

–> Provide limited-access content to your customers, employees, team members and even investors, without fearing other unwanted eyes. Use RSS for internal communications, teamworking and other needs.

–> Provide your customers with easy access to software updates, delivered to them exactly as they become available, without the fuss of having to visit your web site or deal with huge e-mail attachments, which would get blocked by spam filters anyway.

–> Newsreporters are constantly bombarded with e-mail, so why not instead deliver your press releases via RSS? Or even better yet, why not deliver some of your releases as video comments, interviews or statements from your company managers or owners?

–> Help your visitors keep up with what’s going on in your web forum, by publishing your latest forum posts or whole threads via RSS.

And yet these are still only a few examples of what you can do with RSS today, since something new comes up almost every day.

Are you as well already among those taking advantage of the marketing & publishing power of RSS?

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

Rok Hrastnik is the author of

Email Marketing Lesson: RSS Feed Me

Writen by Joan Pasay

Every so often I take time out of my busy Email Marketing Consulting schedule and steal an afternoon just for myself. A few months ago I decided to take one of those days. With five glorious hours ahead of me I pondered how best to enjoy my break. I really wanted to do something memorable, something that would inspire me and something that would last long after my special day was over. So I did what everyone does on an afternoon off – I got a tattoo.

I had never gotten a tattoo before and did not know which shops were the best but I was on an e-newsletter list of a shop called Brave Tattoo. I had joined the list while they were running a contest to win a Harley. I didn’t win but stayed on the email list because I was impressed with how creative the tattoo shop was with their e-zine. There was always two or three professionally written articles about tattoos and a whole bunch of tattoo design suggestions. I really looked forward to their bi-weekly e-zine because their e-newsletter approach really communicated their passion for their product and store. I sort of felt like I already knew the shop because of their e-newsletter. This week’s email special was a little odd but it worked perfect for me and I took it as a sign. 21 characters for the price of 20.

I arrived early for my appointment and got all setup with an artist named BeeBee. She was painted from head to toe and had earrings, nose rings and studs everywhere imaginable (she told me about the ones that were not visible and I took her word for it). We got started right away with the cleaning and stenciling. All those needles looked a little unnerving so I turned away and tried to clear my mind of work and everything else I was thinking about.

Just as my first character was about to be stenciled, a rowdy group moved into the booth next to me. Six people. Three of women and two of the men looked like they had just stepped out of a cloning machine. Same clothes, similar hair and similar gestures. The sixth guy was obviously the leader. Dressed in a William Fioravanti suit, this guy looked like a million-and-a-half bucks. His teeth were bleached white and gleaming. His face looked like he had shaven so close he was glowing. He almost looked too perfect or something. “Probably due to a fake tan,” I thought. I knew I had seen the guy before; he looked really familiar. Oh well, it was my afternoon off and I decided to not waste my time paying attention to Mr. Nice Suit and Super White Teeth. I closed my eyes and let BeeBee go to work.

I must have dozed off because when I came to I already had ‘EMAIL MARKETING FOREVER’ stenciled on my shoulder. It looked pretty good so far. The little flying envelope was really cute too. BeeBee mentioned that the next step was the point of no return. I eagerly nodded and told her to get going with the permanent ink. We started chatting about my tattoo choice and I told her the history of Email Marketing and how I had chosen to have my tattoo done at their store because of their creative e-newsletter. She told me that a fellow name Buzz took care of all the marketing but he was out on an errand right now.

Throughout our conversation BeeBee and I had to talk louder and louder because of the group in the next booth. It sounded like they were having a party. The five clones must have been the guy’s groupies because they weren’t calling him by a name, just his initials. I asked BeeBee who the guy was. Maybe he was a rock star or something and that’s why I recognized him.

“He is the new cat’s meow,” BeeBee said. I thought ‘cats meow’ was code for ‘new lead singer in a rock group’ so I tried to act smart and answered casually, “Oh? What club are they playing at?” I got really excited at the prospect of getting a tattoo AND meeting a rock star all in the same day. What a great way to celebrate my Email Marketing Forever tattoo! Who knows, this guy might be a great performer. The glowing skin was a little too perfect and I’d pass on the groupie thing but who knows where this guy might be in a few years. I got giddy at the thought of meeting Mr. Nice Suit and Super White Teeth and hearing his group.

BeeBee didn’t seem to hear my question about the club and started humming Bob Dylan’s hit “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. I always liked that song. I hummed along too and decided to go introduce myself to the suit and teeth after my tattoo was done. I would find out the address for the club first hand.

I could hear the clones squealing at the suit and teeth’s every word. “He must be something special to get so much attention,” I thought. I closed my eyes and was only half listening but I think they were calling him RSS. I lay there with my eyes closed wondering what RSS stood for.

Ricardo the Super Stud?

Maybe RSS was the short form of his heavy metal band. What could the band be called? All those bands had such weird names. Could it be Rotten Salmon Sushi? Or maybe it was a country band called The Raunchy Smoking Smiths. Who knows. I was only half paying attention because the tattoo needles where starting to sting. I tried to clear my mind and focused on going out clubbing when all this was over.

Suddenly BeeBee stopped humming and looked up from her needles and ink. “Buzz, is back from his errand,” she reported. “You can meet him after he’s done getting the catering set up.” Catering? What kind of a tattoo parlor was this? BeeBee noticed my query and motioned to the group next door. “I think it’s to keep the groupies quiet so RSS can get his tattoo done in peace,” she giggled, earrings swaying to and fro as she laughed.

My mind wandered to thoughts of dancing at the club with my new Email Marketing Forever tattoo permanently sitting on my shoulder. I could hear the clones expressing awe over the tiny sandwiches and little cakes. Then I heard it. There was a lot of sandwich squealing going on but I knew what I heard.

I heard it again. “RSS feed me! RSS feed me!” Seems Mr. Nice Suit and Super White Teeth, or RSS as they called him, was making the rounds with the cloned groupies and aiding them in tasting all the culinary delights. RSS was tossing crackers and caviar into the open mouths of two of the women. I gagged and quickly realized that I did know this guy. He wasn’t a rock star like Bono; he was an Internet rock star! You can’t go anywhere without hearing about this guy. The suit and teeth was none other than RSS Marketing! How could I have not recognized him? I guess my MyYahoo! aggregator would have helped but the perfect good looks and groupies should have been a clue.

I took a deep breath, looked to see where BeeBee was at with the permanent ink and said, “I think you had better stop.”

‘Email Mark’ was as far as BeeBee had gotten.

Great, I was now the only person on the planet with a ‘to do list’ tattooed on my shoulder! Well at least it sort of made sense. My brother’s name is Mark so I thought I could make up some little story about how my brother and I had matching tattoos to remind us to keep in contact with each other.

A vision of Johnny Depp and his ‘Wino Forever’ tattoo raced across my mind. I said a quick prayer to Johnny and asked him if I could join his club of botched tattoos.

I got all bandaged up and went over to the RSS party and introduced myself. The clones looked a little worried but I assured them they could keep all the little sandwiches for themselves. RSS was quite personable and really nice, however I quickly realized the guy had a bit of an identity complex. We were all laughing and joking when RSS whispered in my ear, “They all have so many expectations” Those bleached white teeth so close to my ear sort of startled me. RSS’s voice sounded like the kid who saw dead people in ‘The Sixth Sense.’

“Who?” I whispered back, surprised I was having a whispering conversation with a person I had just met.

“Everyone.” RSS whispered. He motioned to the clones: “They are all marketing executives eager to dump every other kind of digital marketing and ride my back into the RSS Feed golden sunset.

“First they blogged me and I thought I was stretched with that. Now they want to personalize me and individualize me. Some of them even want me to pretend I’m email and go right into a customer’s email inbox!” RSS sounded a little freaked. I started to think he might need a Valium. “What if I they take me all the way into the bedroom and I can’t perform?” RSS pleaded.

“Cute analogy,” I thought. Forget the Valium, this guy needed some marketing Viagra just to make sure he could go all the way, regardless of who decides to hop into his digital bed with him.

I finally left the tattoo parlor that day only after RSS Marketing made me promise to email him. We meet quite regularly for coffee and I think he is slowly getting more comfortable with his stardom. He realizes that he probably won’t make everyone happy but he is trying his best. Those marketing executives have him going day and night. He was right; some of their expectations are pretty high.

I wonder where RSS Marketing will be a year from now? Will he be washed up with caffeine-stained teeth and a fraying designer suit playing in some Internet bar? Not likely, but will he be around ten years from now with a greatest hits album? Who knows.

I think the bottom line is that personalized digital marketing will progress and RSS Marketing will be part of it just like Email Marketing, Podcasting, Blogging, Text Messaging and everything else savvy marketers are trying. I think most people are being realistic and realizing they have to stock their toolbox with a variety of tools built with their specific customer group in mind. You can’t build a marketing strategy with only one tool and RSS Marketing is not the key to everyone’s fiscal salvation. Should marketers use RSS Marketing? Of course they should. Should marketers dump Email Marketing in the north river with a concrete block around its neck? I guess they can if they want to. But they may find their decision is shortsighted. Just like my Email Mark tattoo, the use of Email is in our bloodstream and getting it out will take more than an RSS Feed transfusion. Why not get smarter and acknowledge the landscape has changed and change Email Marketing accordingly? We did it with TV, magazines and the radio.

“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin
‘Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.”
-Bob Dylan

The last time RSS Marketing and I met he was kind of down as he had pulled another all-nighter. He asked me what he should do if his Internet gig didn’t work out. Where would he hide and spend his retirement without living in shame? I told him not to lose another ounce of sleep. If RSS Marketing doesn’t work out according to Internet Marketers’ expectations RSS could fade into the sunset without a care. RSS didn’t seem convinced. I assured RSS he had nothing to worry about. If RSS Marketing doesn’t meet the expectations of corporate marketers everywhere, everybody will be sending the blame up the Pacific Northwest coast into the misty air of Redmond to Bill Gates, to Microsoft and that new browser of theirs.

Joan Pasay is a dynamic e-marketing coach & author.

RSS Marketing is something savvy Email Marketers will want to learn about and consider for their Marketing toolbox. Email Marketing Made Easy can help. You can learn all about our services, including incorporating RSS Marketing into your Email Marketing mix here: http://www.emailmarketingmadeeasy.com/pages/services.asp

Need help getting started with Email Marketing? Why not take our free Email Marketing JumpStart E-course? http://www.emailmarketingmadeeasy.com/jump_start/mini.asp

Want to just learn all about Email Marketing at 2am, while you eat left over chocolate cake and sit by the fire in your pajamas? Buy our Email Marketing Made Easy Ebook: http://www.EmailMarketingMadeEasy.com

Copyright — Joan Pasay 2005

What is an RSS Aggregator or RSS Reader?

Writen by Dave Taylor

I keep hearing about RSS, XML and RSS feeds. I just barely have a clue what they are, but when people then start talking about RSS aggregators, what are they talking about and why would I want one? Do you use an aggregator, and if so, which one?

Ain’t jargon fun? RSS is Really Simple Syndication and it’s a simple data-only version of a Web page or, in the case of a weblog, Web site. Why is that interesting? Because it’s then easy to write programs that track this XML formatted data stream and let you know when there’s new material added to the site.

For example, if you were tracking the Ask Dave Taylor RSS data stream then when this article “went live” on my site, you’d receive notification and be able to read it within minutes of it arriving. Maybe not so critical for my tech and business Q&A, I admit, but I also track a number of different business newswires and was reading about the Proctor & Gamble acquisition of Gillette at least a day prior to my colleagues. How do I know that? Because they’ve told me that it was my own article on the subject (P&G buys Gillette for $57 billion, but how much is that in human terms?) that alerted them to the $54 billion transaction).

Helpful Hint: If you’d like to track an RSS feed and you have a browser with RSS support, you can click on the cute little XML button you find on many different Web sites. If your browser doesn’t know what to do with that and instead shows you a cryptic page of text, you’ll need an RSS reader or aggregator. Keep reading, but remember that you can also “right click” (or Ctrl-click for you Mac folks) and copy the link address to your buffer, then paste it into a ’subscribe’ field in your reader.

The problem is, I don’t want to check 100 RSS feeds any more than I want to visit 100 Web sites every day, and that’s where aggregators come in. Whether they’re standalone programs, plug-ins for your favorite Web browser or email program, or Web-based services, RSS aggregators remember your subscription list, check each site on a periodic basis, and alert you to any new articles that have been published.

If you’re not thinking “wow, very cool” then you are spending too much time visiting Web sites! To scan the headlines of just a dozen sites on an hourly basis would probably be a full time job and if you need to keep abreast of your industry, as I do, then you wouldn’t have any time to actually do anything, which would obviously be deleterious to your career long-term!

So there are programs you can download that are RSS aggregators (or RSS readers, basically synonymous) for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix systems. A few of the most popular are BlogExpress and FeedReader for Windows, NetNewsWire and NewsFire for Macintosh and Lifera for Linux.

Don’t like having yet another application running? You can graft RSS capabilities into your Web browser (or run Firefox or Safari / Tiger, both of which have elegant built- in RSS capabilities) or your email program. Notable entries in this category are NewsGator (grafts into Microsoft Outlook on Windows), Pluck (grafts into Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows) and Safari Menu (add-on for Apple’s Safari browser that includes some RSS support).

Finally, you can subscribe to an RSS aggregator Web service which gives you a custom Web page that includes the newest information from your hand-picked RSS feeds. The highest profile solution to this is My Yahoo, which recently announced support for RSS feeds as additional personal home page information sources, though it just shows you a rolling ‘latest five articles’ from each source, so it doesn’t work for me because I’d still be left trying to remember which I’d read or not. Other possibilities include AmphetaDesk, Bloglines, and Feedster.

Instead of those, however, I use a great Web-based product called NewsGator Online, which gives me the ability to track as many feeds as I like (fellow blogger Robert Scoble tracks over 1200 in his NewsGator Online account) along with the flexibility of keeping in sync at home, in my office and on the road.

Whichever solution you choose, I promise you that once you start traveling down the road of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators, you won’t turn back. In fact, you’ll find that every time you go to a Web site that you like, you’ll immediately start hunting for the “syndicate” or “rss” or “xml” button. i certainly do, and I’m more plugged in now than I could ever have been in the past.

It’s a rolling sea of information out there, and an RSS aggregator gives you a sail and GPS navigation system. It might just save your life out there!

Dave Taylor has been involved with the blogging community for years and is widely respected as an expert on business blogging, among other areas.

Time Saving Uses For RSS

Writen by Allan Burns

RSS is an underused and underappreciated technology by a majority of internet users. There is a small minority who are just starting to appreciate the benefits RSS can have on there personal and business lives. It is hard to define RSS, you cannot really get it until you see it in action.

The primary use for RSS is content syndication, but this can realise itself in many different uses. The most popular use for RSS is as syndication format for blogs, blogs and RSS are very closely aligned as RSS feeds are a built in option for most if not all blogging software. Due to its close integration with blogs and the ease with which you can make a feed available on your blog means many blogs have RSS feeds. Blogs offer the content from their site in RSS format. Search is also becoming a popular use for RSS, take a look at Yahoo. Type in any search at Yahoo and you will return the top 10 results, you can now subscribe to the feed for that search. Admittedly they don’t make it obvious but if you look in the bottom right of your Firefox browser you will see an orange button. The orange button shows that an RSS feed is available on this page, subscribe to it and you have constantly updating results for your search.

Social bookmarking, the newer and more trendy brother of traditional search also makes use of RSS. If you take a look at del.icio.us you will see at the bottom of every results page is an RSS link to subscribe to the feed for that tag. You can subscribe to tags relating to your interest to keep abreast of what is new and recently happening or popular. This is useful as you can get results quicker than they appear in the traditional search engines.

It is not just search and blog syndication that are benefiting from RSS. What if you need to keep a look out for new content for your site without having to constantly trawl the internet. With an RSS feed subscription at ezinearticles for any specific topic you can be made aware of new articles as they are added. This is useful not just for new content but also as a research tool for you area of interest.

I have covered only a few example of how RSS is being used now and how it can benefit you by having content from various sources delivered to your RSS feed aggregator. Imagine how much time you would save in having to search this content out. Conversely for the RSS publisher they have a contented subscription base of users who they may not have been able to attract previously without making it so easy to digest their content.

Allan is the webamster of a site about RSS, an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.

See RSS Feeds from Your Website

Writen by Sanjay Johari

RSS feeds have made it so convenient to gather current information. If you have an RSS Reader on your desktop, then from this one window you can get up-to-date information from any sources of your choice, such as:

1. Latest news from news agencies

2. Last articles published on ezines such as this one

3. New products at retail outlets

4. New movie reviews

5. Recent entries in blogs

The list is endless, but you get the idea.

How would you like to give this convenience to the visitors of your website? Your visitors can see RSS feeds with latest info right on your web page instead of going from site to site. And it is very easy to install.

Before you start I suggest that you see some sites which display RSS feeds just to get a feel of it. You can see your My.Yahoo page from where you can subscribe to any RSS feed you want. Or, if you like, you can see some popular feeds on my website:

http://sanjay-j.com/feed.html

Ok, let’s get started with these easy steps.

1. Click open this page :

http://www.feedroll.com/rssviewer/

2. From “Step One” of this page select just one RSS feed out of the dropdown list.

3. Lower on the page in “Step Two” you will see some options. In these options you can fill in your values or leave them at default setting.

4. Click on update button.

5. A similar looking page opens. Down below on this page in “Step Three” there is a code which has to be installed on your website. Copy this code and paste it on a text editor. On right side of the page you can see how the feed will look on your page.

6. Go to step 2 and select some other RSS feeds. Repeat steps 3 to 5 and you will have a collection of codes to be installed on your website.

7. Select the web page where you want to install RSS feeds. I would suggest creating a new page exclusively for RSS feeds.

8. Decide the location on the web page for installing RSS feed. In the HTML code of the web page, paste one of the codes of RSS feeds at the location you have decided.

9. See how RSS feeds looks on your page. You will need to be connected to the net to see the feeds. You can make necessary corrections until you get the right appearance.

10. Add all other RSS feed codes below the first one. Separate each code with breaks. This will put all the feeds in one column.

So that’s it. Simple steps. This will display some popular RSS feeds on your web site using Java. From this starting point you can think of installing other Java scripts or PHP scripts to display any RSS feeds of your choice.

Sanjay Johari regularly contrubutes articles for several ezines. See his site for useful information for benefit of small business owners.

http://sanjay-j.com

RSS Feeds Have Revolutionized the Internet

Writen by Gunnar Berglund

RSS feeds have revolutionized the Internet for one very good reason: they have provided and end to Spam. With RSS feeds, you can say good-bye to mass emails and distributions that do not meet your news needs and clog up your mailbox and hard drive.

RSS technology provides a way to sort through the vast amount of information available via the Internet and to select only that information that will best suit your needs.

RSS technology is easy to use and available to the general public, and assists web masters and designers every day in their attempts to fine tune website to the specifications of the goal audience. RSS feeds provide a simple approach to the perplexing problem of Spam, and are accessible at your fingertips.

An RSS editor or reader reads RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a small package of information that you can use to select the larger article or content.

RSS feeds contain the title of the article, and a synopsis of what the article is about. The RSS feed significantly cuts down on the time you spend sorting through articles to pick the ones that meet your specific needs.

An RSS feed also sometimes contains a snippet of the actual article, which will allow you to understand the feel and style of the article. An RSS editor or reader can sort RSS feeds. This technology can be fine tuned to select RSS feeds for your perusal You can select based on title, content, or based on the origin of the article.

You can subscribe to certain news groups or can keep your RSS feeds more generalized. An RSS editor can be used to generate RSS feeds. You can use RSS marketing to distribute your information to the public and be sure it will be treated as important information rather than as Spam.

Traffic to your website will increase when you incorporate the kind of information your target audience in most interested in. You can specify your content areas on your RSS feed, and generate return readers by continually providing the most up-to-date and applicable information.

You can get your product information into the hands of the kind of people who invest in RSS technology and who appreciate innovation.

An RSS feed allows you to market directly to the customers you seek, and decreases the aggravation of mass email. Mass email, another form of Spam, is often filtered before your future clients ever have a chance to look into what you have to offer.

RSS feeds provide an opportunity to reach a multitude of people while ensuring that the information you are dispersing is not Spam oriented.

Original, fresh content will keep you Internet site interesting and attractive to new and old readers alike. Check into RSS feeds and see how RSS technology has revolutionized the Internet.

© 2005 Gunnar Berglund

Gunnar Berglund has been a “internet- hardworker” for the last five years. He publishes The meonit Gazette http://gazette.meonit.com and runs http://www.meonit.com and http://www.visualxmleditor.com.

How Can RSS Feeds Help Your Online Business?

Writen by Hong Brandon

So who should I use RSS Feeds? How can it help with my online business?

1. RSS Feeds allow you to deliver your newsletter/message directly to the desktop of your subscribers and readers, BYPASSING email. As you might have read or heard, email is not getting through to a lot of people, especially now with CAN SPAM law in place, ISPs are filtering a lot of emails with certain subject lines in them.

Imagine if you have a 10,000 list and 20% of your emails doesn’t get through.

That means 2,000 mails are not being delivered.

How much sales are you losing from this alone?

It is also costly to hire services that help you do the monitoring and ensure your autoresponders/emails get through.

Your readers and subscribers themselves are getting numb to the constant bombardment of emails from other parties, bear in mind they are not just subscribing to your newsletter.

With RSS Feeds, you can get your readers to subscribe to your news feed using a newsreader software or online web service for reading rss feeds).

This way you can bypass all the email SPAM and reach 100% your readers.

And with some good headlines, you can bet your message gets read.

2. Get your site listed by YAHOO within 24 hours and save $299

With RSS Feeds, you can get your site listed in Yahoo within 24 hours and save $299. Yahoo is currently building an RSS directory and as such has inadvertently opened a “back door”, allowing people to list their website with RSS feeds.

This secret is revealed in my multimedia ebook, with video tutorials showing you how to do it. Each day more people are discovering this secret, and I’m not sure when Yahoo will pull the plug.

3. Dominate niche market with RSS feeds

You can create multiple RSS feeds centered around targeted keywords and submit them to RSS directories. There are people who are actually looking for good content online and wants to read and subscribe to news feeds.

They might be searching for news on the keyword “cooking” for example. When someone performs a keyword search and you have your feeds built around that keyword, it will turn up and you get to have more subscribers when they subscribe to your news feeds.

4. More subscribers, more leads, more sales. RSS feeds give you a wider reach and gain more subscribers you otherwise would not have gotten.

More subscribers mean more leads, and more sales!

RSS allows your newsletter, messages, ads to be syndicated all over the web, giving you a wider reach you otherwise would not have.

Imagine a giant octopus with unlimited tentacles stretching all over the sea searching, looking…well, with RSS feeds, basically you’re doint the same thing.

You have to submit your rss feeds though, to the relevant directories, otherwise noboby knows about it.

5. Podcasting

Podcast is the latest application of RSS feeds. Have you heard of webcast?

With Webcast, you have to go to the website where the audio file (mp3 file) is stored.

Podcast take it one step further. It allows you to syndicate your mp3 audio files (such as a web cast or tele-seminar) all over the web and even allows you to download to Apple Ipod.

Your potential customer and readers can listen to your message even without being at the PC. Isn’t that fantastic?

Ride the RSS Wave TODAY! Learn more at www.marketing-rampage-with-blogs-and-rss.com

Brandon is Author of Multimedia Ebook “Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS”. Unleash the power of blogs and rss feeds to drive more FREE targeted traffic, gain more leads and sales. List in Google and Yahoo for Free and save $299. Dominate niche markets with RSS Feeds

brandon @ brandon-hong.com

http://www.Marketing-Rampage-With-Blogs-And-Rss.com

http://www.brandon-hong.com

Find Out How Microsoft’s Plans Could Make Your Subscribers Beg You for RSS Content!

Writen by Kent Thompson

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.

Many think the reason is because Firefox, the new popular browser, has introduced some key features that many surfers have come to expect. This probably has put pressure on Microsoft to respond with a browser with the same specs.

One of these key features is tabbed browsing, which allows you to browse to multiple sites using just one window with tabs rather than opening a new window for each page.

But tabbed browsing isn’t all…

I am really excited about the possibility of a new feature that could change the way web-surfers get their content!

Although there has been no formal announcement about this, there has been a lot of speculation about the new browser including a built-in RSS reader.

An RSS what???

Let me explain…

RSS has taken off like a rocket. Blog sites love it, and every major website out there now supports it including CNN, ESPN, Yahoo, Google, and MSN.

RSS is nothing more than a format for delivering article headlines that can be read and neatly displayed by RSS readers, much like an email program displays email messages.

But so far the popularity of RSS has been confined mainly to blogsites and tech-saavy individuals who know how to “tune in” to an RSS Feed. Though it is spreading like wildfire, many average web users have no idea what RSS is! (I’ve confirmed that by recently asking several of my friends, and none of them had ever heard of it!)

This is all about to change!

Microsoft has very good reason to include an RSS reader with their new IE version. If they don’t, surfers may have reason to switch to another that does. Firefox already includes an RSS reader.

If they DO include an RSS reader, think of the implications:

*You could browse to a webpage and IE could “discover” any RSS links on the page and notify you of them

*You may be able to Right-Click on an RSS Feed and have an option to “Add to RSS Reader”, which would instantly subscribe you to the Feed.

*Web developers may be able to write web pages that allow visitors to automatically subscribe to a feed by clicking a button or submitting a form.

Remember, Firefox already has all these features, but the vast majority still uses IE!

Once visitors learn how RSS works and figure out how easy and convenient it is, RSS will become the expected format.

Soon you will be FORCED to offer RSS content because consumers will not want to hand out their email address anymore!

The time will come…will you be ready to deliver?

Feel free to reprint this article so long as you include the resource box listed with the article.

Kent Thompson is the creator of FeedMagic, a full-featured sequential autoresponder program that allows your subscribers to choose between Email or a personalized RSS Feed for delivery. To find out how you can use the power of RSS for your website, visit: http://FeedMagic.com

The Death of E-mail Marketing and the Rise of RSS? What Can You Do?

Writen by Rok Hrastnik

The recent announcement that AOL and Yahoo! will start charging e-mail marketers postage per thousand e-mail messages delivered, via the pay-me-to-deliver-email Goodmail program, is rocking e-mail marketers all around the world and at the same time making die-hard RSS fans proclaim the death of e-mail marketing.

It’s certainly a fact that AOL and Yahoo! announced they’ll start implementing the above mentioned pay-me-to-deliver Goodmail program and charge $2.5-$10 per thousand emails sent to guarantee delivery.

But what does this really mean for e-mail marketers? Is it the end of the world as we know it? And is RSS really poised to take the throne for direct content delivery and direct marketing?

A] IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD AND CERTAINLY NOT THE END OF E-MAIL MARKETING

While e-mail postage will certainly increase e-mail delivery costs, it’s still too early to say whether it’s actually going to drive ROI down.

Depending on your own e-mail metrics, the increase in delivery might actually help you increase your ROI, even considering the increased e-mail campaign costs. This is by all means certainly a time to start carefully analyzing your e-mail metrics and calculating what these changes might mean specifically for you, before you actually start getting worried.

It’s now also finally a fact that website optimization, to ensure increased visitor-to-customer conversion rates, will become paramount to reaching online profitability.

The important point right now is that you start measuring and analyzing, finding ways to adapt to the coming changes in the world of e-mail marketing. It’s not the end of the world, but simply another issue to adapt your marketing to.

B] GET STARTED WITH YOUR RSS MARKETING PROGRAM

But adapting to the new rules of internet marketing is not only about optimizing your e-mail programs and your website conversion rates, but also finally getting started with RSS marketing, if you haven’t done so yet.

For those new to RSS, the simple explanation is that RSS is a tool that gives you the benefit of 100% content delivery, without any problems associated with spam and other filters, such as the one that AOL and Yahoo! announced they’ll start using. And the best thing about RSS is that it can even be free to implement and certainly free to deliver.

But if you haven’t started with your RSS marketing program yet, now is most certainly the time.

First, consider these tactics for integrating RSS marketing with your existing e-mail marketing programs:

1. Use RSS to announce each new issue of your e-mail e-zine, which you make available in full on your website.

2. Provide a separate RSS feed for the articles you publish in your e-mail e-zine and get them to your subscribers as soon as the articles become available, without them having to wait to receive them in your e-mail newsletter. The same goes for your news section, if you have one.

3. If you publish much content in different topic categories in your e-zine, provide a separate RSS feed for each of those topics. Take another look at the elements we listed above that a typical e-zine might include. Each of those elements could in fact become a stand alone RSS feed.

4. If you’re doing e-mail autoresponder marketing, provide those very same autoresponders as RSS feeds, allowing your visitors to subscribe either to the e-mail or RSS delivery channels to receive the very same content.

5. If you have your own affiliate program, make sure that your affiliates can also subscribe to your affiliate notices via an RSS feed, not just e-mail. Basically, all you will be doing is duplicating the same content you’re sending out via e-mail in an RSS feed.

6. If you’re sending out special notices or updates to your existing customers via e-mail, create a special limited-access RSS feed to deliver those same updates via RSS as well.

More information on integrating RSS and e-mail is available here: http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/content/rss_and_email_1_how_they_can_work_together.php

These are of course only some of the options for using RSS in your marketing. To get the most from this channel you will in fact need to implement the entire 7-step RSS marketing plan:

1. Start Using RSS as an End-User

2. Plan Your RSS Feeds

3. Create a List of RSS Marketing/Publishing Requirements

4. Use this List to Choose an RSS Publishing Tool and Create Your First Feed

5. Correctly Promote Your RSS Feeds through Your Own Channels

6. Promote Your RSS Feeds Through External Channels

7. Implement RSS Metrics and Your Own Content Syndication Program

You will get more free information on the 7-step RSS marketing plan with all the specifics here: http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/content/the_7step_rss_marketing_plan.php

C] BECOME A MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETER

And in the end, don’t forget that multi-channel strategies work best. This simply means that you shouldn’t use ONLY e-mail or ONLY RSS, but rather use them, and all the other channels, together.

Copyright 2006 Rok Hrastnik

Are you wondering how to best use RSS marketing, especially considering the new problems facing e-mail marketing? Find out immediately and for FREE how you can power your online business with RSS and use it in all of your marketing. Request the FREE 28-page Business Case for RSS report, with easy-to-follow instructions, examples and advice on how to get the most out of RSS in the shortest possible time. Get the free download here: http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/case/index.html?src=sa20