It’s easy to lump RSS into the blog category, as another way to have people interact with your blog. Subscribers are valuable, and signing subscribers to your RSS feed is important. But here at Internet Retailer Conference 2008 I witnessed a speaker tout the wonderful benefits of Web 2.0 technologies for e-commerce retailers - and he completely left out RSS for products.

Some sites have begun providing RSS subscription links in their shopping cart technology. This is a method of leveraging RSS that is underutilized. As a differentiator it’s a great way for someone shopping for a particular product to find out when discounts are available, or new products in their category, or just to tout the latest thing they picked up from their favorite brand (this would be great for threadless.com, apple.com, nike.com, and many other brands that have evangelists more than customers.)

Why rely on the always unreliable email to reach customers? Intersperse company news or updates into the product RSS stream, and if you have a company blog why not put a feed of your top products for the day in your blog sidebar. Using this method of self-promotion on your blog will help keep you from incorporating too much sales-pitch into your blog post while still capitalizing on the visits. RSS is at the heart of everything in Web 2.0, it’s time to get creative with the technology and extend your RSS marketing strategies further.

Tags: RSS, rss-channel, RSS-Communications, RSS-feeds, rss-marketing, RSS-readers, rss-technology

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:02 am and is filed under RSS Marketing Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.