RSS Marketing Articles

What information and content can you publish via RSS and how can you market with it?

by Rok Hrastnik, author of "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS"

Comment: this article was first written in 2005 and is by now heavily outdated. So, instead of using it as a "how to" piece, rather look on it as a piece of internet history. This is how we saw RSS marketing more than 6 years ago!

RSS provides marketers with many opportunities. Take a look at just a few of them ...

• 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, even PowerPoint presentations.
  
  
• 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.

To discover even more RSS marketing opportunities and how to take advantage of them in praxis, take a look at "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS".

Download the e-book for free!

Learn how to take full marketing advantage of RSS and get all the expertise, knowledge and how-to information for implementing RSS in your marketing mix, from direct marketing, PR and online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and customer relationship management.

"Unleash" starts with the basics, but also goes beyond to advanced RSS marketing topics not covered elsewhere, such as using RSS for direct and affiliate marketing, RSS metrics, RSS promotion and SEO and even internal communications.

Click here to download the e-book now or browse this site to find out more about RSS marketing and the contents of the e-book.

Just don't forget - it was written and published so long ago, that many things have changed since. While it still has its uses, look at it first as a piece of internet history and not as a reference guide for 2011 and beyond.