Educating Your Customers About RSS
RSS feeds subscription is one of the biggest mysteries surrounding business
blogging. That makes since because it’s one aspect of a blog that isn’t
“natural” to us.
If you follow the, admittedly correct, line of reasoning that there’s little
ostensible difference between a blog and a piece of content on a web page, then
building an online audience should make sense.
If your company has invested in building a content-rich website, which it
should have. Then acquiring readers, monitoring them, and ensuring they return
should be second nature. Similarly, on the readers’ side, finding content online
and bookmarking it so you can find it later shouldn’t be a mystery.
RSS supplements your readers’ natural online reading habits by creating a way
for them to always know what’s up-to-date on your site. You no longer have to
worry about whether or not they’ll remember to come back. You can notify
them—banners waving proudly in the air—the moment you publish new content.
The advantage of instant notification should be obvious. It helps guarantee
that your readers return; that they don’t forget about you. The only problem,
though, they have to subscribe to your site with a
href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss_reader” target=_blank>feed
reader.
Well, I’ve just learned of a new service that should help accelerate the rss
subscribing learning curve. Rather than convincing your readers to download a
new piece of software, or to subscribe to an online service, you can tell them
how to receive their subscribed rss feeds in their current email inboxes.
The service is called
href=”http://www.kbcafe.com/Rmail.aspx” target=_blank>R|Mail, and all your
readers have to do is input your feeds’ url and the email address where they
want to receive your feed. Then, voila, instant notification by email! As far as
I can tell, the service is currently free.
Eventually you’ll want to move them away from this service by demonstrating
why a standalone rss aggregator, or reader, is the best option. But why swim
upstream if you don’t have to?
Tags: feed, r-mail, RSS, rss-aggregator, rss-reader, R|mail, subcription, subscribe