Although many people are now turning to blogs for information and opinions, blogging has been around for about ten years. If you blog, you know that one of the benefits of blogging is the RSS feed that alerts your readers to a new post. Depending upon your niche, you and your readers may benefit from microblogging.

If you the term is unfamiliar to you, microblogging consists of very short posts – some as small as 150 characters or less. The posts are published usually via a mobile phone and can include video and photos in addition to text.

For some organizations, microblogging won’t be of much use, but if your blog offers time-sensitive information, or you want to send near real-time reports to your audience, microblogging may offer just the platform. For example, if you attend a trade show, you can post images and video from the show floor with information about new products and services related to your industry.

Twitter, Tumblr and Pownce are the most popular microblogging platforms today, and are demonstrating the value of microblogging. Many people use microblogging as a way to catalog their day, but you can also find ways to deliver important, relevant business information using one of these platforms. And as with microblogging’s big brother, you get the same RSS feed advantage. Your readership will be alerted when you post new information.

Again, microblogging isn’t for everyone, and you’ll need to contend with the small message size, but it’s a great way to post video and photo files quickly. If it complements your niche, microblogging may be worth a closer look.

Photo Credit: Steve Woods

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has been around for about ten years and it is used to syndicate data that is published on a Web site. Today, many Web sites are built with RSS marketing in mind. Most blogging platforms also routinely publish an RSS feed, which Web browsers and news readers will recognize. (You’ll often see a rectangular RSS symbol on the far right of the location bar or a square, orange symbol, when the browser locates an active RSS feed.)

When you activate RSS feeds for your web content, you provide an easy way for visitors to determine when your content has changed. It’s an active invitation to revisit a Web site. Each time you publish new content, the RSS feed automatically updates visitors who subscribe to your feed. They will know instantly that you’ve put new material on your site.

One of the prime benefits of RSS for the reader is that they can organize the blogs they want to read inside a browser or news reader. Each time the blog content is updated, the reader is notified. He or she doesn’t have to remember to visit the blog, because the blog automatically issues an invitation to come back.

One of the prime benefits for the blogger is that once someone subscribes to your blog, they will return again and again. It provides you with ample opportunity to develop a relationship with that reader. You’ve got his or her attention. As long as you generate quality material, your reader will return. Regular readers are also more likely to recommend your blog to other readers, based on your content.

RSS can also automate email and IM contact with your readers. Your RSS feed can let them know instantly that new content is waiting for them using the tools they most prefer to use.

RSS marketing can really invigorate your Web marketing strategy and cement your relationships with your visitors. If you’re not using RSS marketing in conjunction with your blog and Web site, you’re missing out on some excellent relationship opportunities.

Photo Credit: Svilen Milev

Creating value is key to an online marketing strategy. Most Web sites are sales pitches, and what’s the value in that? Some businesses look at their Web sites like they’re electronic billboards. You can do that to your Web site if you want to, but the problem with doing that is that once your potential market sees your site, there’s no reason to return. Why should they? They’ve seen it already.

On the other hand, if you use your Web site to generate value for your visitors, they will want to come back to your site. Again and again. Those return trips are what you’re looking for. It’s the consumer’s way of reaching out to your business. Which would you rather have: consumers who come looking for you, or consumers whom you’ve gone out in search of?

Making your Web site attractive and valuable to your consumers and potential consumers is a much better strategy because it puts you in a stronger competitive position. The consumer who has a relationship with your business, or perceives added value from what you have to offer will be less likely to leave your business for a competitor’s, even if your competitor offers a similar product or service at a lower price. If the consumer perceives additional value in their relationship with you, you reduce the likelihood that they will look for alternatives.

One of the best, most economical and most productive ways to create value for your audience is to add a blog to your site. It sound simple - maybe even simplistic – but it works. A blog creates a opportunity for your audience to participate in your business. It allows them to gain insight, share their own knowledge and provide valuable feedback.

Blogs also offer a built-in RSS feed, which is like a beacon for your site. It calls your audience back to your site over and over. It increases traffic to your site and reminds your audience of your value. That call-to-action is an essential part of a viable online marketing strategy. If you aren’t using a blog right now, or you think a blog for your site would offer nothing to your audience, you’re losing a major opportunity to build long-lasting consumer relationships. In today’s economy, that’s a mistake you can’t afford to make.

What is the difference between a search engine and an RSS feed? Search engines and RSS feeds are two different tools work together - like a set of gears - to drive different parts of your marketing strategy. A solid approach uses both search engine visibility and RSS marketing to get visitors to a site and let them return.

The primary purpose of a search engine is to take in a keyword or phrase and use it to locate and return relevant online resources. Search engine technology has changed quite a bit in the last ten years, and the move toward semantic searches means that search engines will get much better at locating and ordering relevant search results.

The primary purpose of an RSS feed is to notify a particular user that new content is available on previously visited sites. RSS feeds can be managed by a newsreader, either run separately or integrated into a browser or similar application.

The search engine and the RSS feed do two different things, and a good promotion approach doesn’t make anyone choose between the two. The search engine leads visitors to the site and the RSS feed entices them to come back by notifying them of new or updated content.

RSS marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to notification, however. Not all RSS aggregators are compatible with each other, and can cause distribution difficulties. The technical competence of your readership may also play a role in the effectiveness of your RSS marketing strategy.

RSS Applied is a leader in RSS marketing, and can help you establish and maintain RSS feeds that support your site and blog promotion strategies.

Photo Credit: Sophie

Small business owners are developing a big interest in RSS marketing. Business blogging is just hitting stride, and on the horizon are other exciting tools that can improve search engine visibility and draw customers to your site.

Drawing customers to a site is one thing, but how do you keep them coming back? A good RSS marketing strategy will provide timely notifications and alerts to customers. It’s a solid way to keep a prospect’s interest. Using next-generation Web reach and hold niche customers is an additional approach that’s also gaining steam.

Useful, easy-to-use functions that are added to your site will be another draw for your visitors. Widgets fit this bill. A widget is a bit of programming code that’s embedded into your Web site, a user’s desktop or mobile phone. Widgets enable a visitor to do something at the touch of a button. For example, a widget might immediately take a customer to a reference tool you have on your site, or email a link to a friend. As part of a blog or Web site, a widget can deliver functional advertising that will enable you to connect with your user. Check out PageFlakes for some good widget examples and to get a better visual idea of what widgets can do for your site.

RSS marketing strategies can enable your clients to subscribe directly to information on your Web site. RSS marketing is an efficient communications tool in a comprehensive strategy to improve search engine visibility.

An RSS marketing strategy will supply your customers with the latest information about your business. You provide an RSS feed on your Web site, which can distribute news articles, entries from the business blogging you do, and other regularly updated information. Additionally, RSS feeds can supply periodic information like press releases, job openings, and event calendars or event reminders. If you use your Web site to sell products, you can use an RSS marketing strategy to publicize new products and provide product reviews.

Your RSS marketing strategy will allow you to reach out to interested customers and prospects to provide content that they value. This regularly updated content will not only prompt your readers to return to your site, it will also improve your search engine visibility over time.

RSS subscriptions are widely used and understood by the consuming public. Many low-cost and no-cost tools for subscribing to RSS feeds are available to users. Their ease-of-use makes RSS feeds an ideal part of your overall marketing strategy.

Though RSS Feeds are an amazing technology, enabling customers to receive up-to-date news from various resources in real time fashion, they can all be, well, pretty overwhelming.  Subscribing to feeds can be somewhat of an addiction.  The little orange button is nothing less than a quick invitation to begin receiving daily (and often multiple times daily) updates to their favorite websites.  Next thing you know, you have more posts than you have hours in the day to peruse them.

There are ways to filter your feeds so as not to overwhelm, while still receiving exactly the subject matter that you wish to.  This gives you the opportunity to have, at your fingertips, all the news on your industry that you need to then reinvest back into your own business blogs for your customers, and potential customers, viewing.

Some variations of feed filters, like Feedhub, have humanlike capabilities in that they begin to offer post suggestions through the behaviors they have learned from your feed use.  The usual trend, however, is when feeds allow the user to filter by using keywords that define what types of content that person wants to receive.  An example of this type of feed filter is Feed Sifter.  You can either sort out your specifications using a single keyword, or you can type in a key phrase.

Using RSS is almost imperative in today’s business blogging world.  It never fails to amaze me to go to a blog and scroll up and down the screen to find something that allows me syndicate the content to my email program, only to be sorely disappointed when no option is available.

At the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference last week, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg threw around some interesting numbers and provided some cautionary advice to corporate bloggers.

The interesting statistic he provided is that WordPress supports more than 2.5 million blogs. That’s a huge number, but it doesn’t distinguish between corporate bloggers and personal bloggers. The more interesting statistic he provided indicated that WordPress has removed more than 800,000 “splogs” or “spam blogs” that simply republish content extracted from an RSS feed in an effort to improve search rankings and AdSense revenue.

If you do the math, nearly one-third of WordPress’ blogs are effectively spam. Do Mullenweg’s comments signal the beginning of a concerted effort to derail RSS marketing in an effort to preserve natural search engine results or protect legitimate advertising revenue? More importantly, if you have an RSS marketing strategy, should you change it for fear of being shut down?

The advice Mullenweg provided answers these questions. To avoid the appearance of RSS abuse, Mullenweg suggests that corporate bloggers simply need to be authentic and focus on the work and the site’s users. As reported in The Social, Mullenweg said:

“If you don’t look like you’re hard-core about your company and its users, he said, you won’t build up a following.”

For the authentic blogger, proper RSS marketing has substantial value. It connects your readers to your message and helps you call together your community, but it is just one element in a comprehensive strategy to add value to your site.

Although in the grand scheme of things, RSS feeds are novel additions to the World Wide Web, the fact of the matter is that they are not going anywhere anytime soon, if ever.  They have become a welcome aid to many businesses because they offer a way to get significant information to customers fast.

Remember the days of sending customers email updates regarding the “latest happenings” in your business?  Or, having to wait a whole month, in some cases, until the monthly newsletter came out?  Those days are a thing of the past in this ever changing technological world that we live in.  Now, thanks to the invention of RSS feeds, your customers can receive the important company reports that you choose to include in your blog.

Because search engines thrive on relevant and fresh content, your business updates will help you achieve higher rankings within the major search engines if you include these two factors within your blog.  This is one of the crucial steps to achieving the blog promotion that you seek from even utilizing a business weblog.

The icon to the right is fast becoming standard on the majority of blogs you may see as you browse other company’s blogs.  The reason for this is not because it is such an attractive symbol.  Au contraire!  It is because the importance of applying RSS feeds as a standard option with one’s blog is increasingly being realized.  By not offering this option, you are doing your customers, as well as your business, a disservice.

RSS publishing is a powerful tool for disseminating your content and increasing your traffic and search engine visibility. Personally, I have become a feed glutton, my reader serving up a full banquet of research and reading entrees from the blogs I have found to have a hearty serving of relevant content.

As soon as I discover some tasty content, I look up at the URL for the RSS feed and if it isn’t there, I might look for your RSS icon, hopefully located above the fold. If I still can’t find your feed, and if you are really worth it, I add your site to one of my monitoring applications that notifies me if there are changes in a page.

But that’s me. I’m not sure how many of your customers will take any extra steps. It’s a simple mistake to make, but failing to use RSS auto-discovery tags in your header will render your RSS efforts less potent.

“It is extremely important that RSS auto-discovery tags be placed in the header of every page within a website that has feeds available. By doing so you will provide users and search engines alike with a simple method of being notified that you have RSS feed(s) and it will allow immediate subscription without fuss. In contrast simply having a RSS logo hyperlinked with a feed provides little or no benefit and does not provide auto-notification that a feed is available.

Furthermore it is recommended to create a unique auto-discovery tag for each available RSS feed and place them all in the header. If you think you have too many then I would recommend choosing the feeds that are most relevant to the page content.”
(source)

It is a given that bloggers who set a scant table by only posting infrequently won’t merit daily visits. If your feeds show infrequent updating, you can expect subscriptions to drop off. More so, if your feed doesn’t offer images and full text, you’ll have set a less attractive table for your potential readers.

Your feeds serve as a type of preview of your blog. Just like you aren’t likely to visit a restaurant whose ads failed to pique your appetite, your readers won’t take the extra click to your site if your sparse feed content suggests that they won’t find a satisfying meal.