Guerrilla Insight for Authors: Please Share the RSS Marketing Survey

Please help us make the RSS Marketing Survey as comprehensive as possible. All participants get the full survey report, and all the key data will be shared publicly.

1. Please take a few minutes and participate by clicking here.

2. Please share this URL (http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net) with as many people as you can. Post it on your blog, send it out in your newsletter, mention it to your RSS peers ... :)

Really, the more data we get, the better results we'll be able to provide to you.

The goal of the survey is to research the RSS marketing landscape, collect top RSS marketing case studies and best practices, and find which key factors make successful RSS strategies successful.

BTW - the survey is getting alot of support from many marketers, such as Christopher Knight, RSS Ray, Lee Odden and may others (full list will be published after I return from Chicago).

And today we've just been covered by MarketingSherpa as well:
"If you've tested offering RSS and have any results to share, author/researcher Rok Hrastnik is seeking your input for the second edition of his report on the topic. We like Rok -- he's a genuine and enthusiastic researcher on the topic and worth supporting so the whole community can learn together."

Great thanks to everyone that's helping make the survey a success!

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Syndicate IQ Shakes the RSS Advertising World With Advanced Ad Serving

Syndicate IQ just announced their RSS ad serving platform that finally brings RSS advertising closer to what "traditional" online advertiers want.

What they're telling right now is:

a] They're able to insert RSS ads into feeds on a per-user basis, regardless of what article the subscriber is currently reading.

b] They can display different versions/formats of the ad, depending on the RSS Reader the subscriber is using.

c] Their RSS ad server integrates with "traditional" online ad servers, centralizing reporting and stats.

More coming on this soon, but until then also read Syndicate IQ's view on the state of RSS advertising, which indicates why the above features are needed.

Use RSS To Increase Your Traffic Now, Part 2

Syndicate Your Content to Other Online Media

Yes, traditional search and news search will get you the visitors that are currently actively searching for specific content, no doubt about it. Those are the visitors that need something specific right now and will use the search engines to get it.

But chances are that your website won't be their first destination after their search, especially if you're not well ranked for the specific keywords these people are looking for. But, they might get to a website that at least partially covers the topic you're covering.

And not all online traffic comes from search.

Much traffic is generated by the e-zines that people subscribe to, by frequent visits to favorite online destinations for specific topics and so on.

The point is, every day online users are visiting websites that have something to do with your topics but these websites are not your websites.

Now consider this fact: Content is best served when contextually relevant to the current online environment of the visitor.

How can you take advantage of this fact?

You can work towards getting your latest headlines, content summaries or even full-text content published on these websites, to increase your online exposure and receive targeted traffic from these websites.

In short, online content syndication is all about delivering your content to other websites and having it re-published there.

Essentially, this is a concept adapted from TV syndication, where TV show producers and TV networks allow other TV networks to run their show for a price. The difference is that in the world of online syndication the coin isn't money, but rather the traffic and exposure you receive by syndicating your online content.

Here are some quick examples:

A cooking website provides an abundance of cooking tips, recipies, reviews and other cooking related content. You on the other hand wrote a book on exotic indian recipies you are now trying to sell online. It's a perfect match. The cooking website is (or should be) looking for new ways to get more credible content for its visitors for free, while you're looking for increased exposure. In this case you could provide that website with your latest selections of exotic indian receipies, perhaps with a new recipe every day. The website would publish your headlines and short summaries of the receipes, and their visitors would need to clickthrough to your site to read more giving you the opportunity to make the sale. Or, the other way to do it, would be to allow the cooking website to display your syndicated content in full, but with an ad at the bottom of your recipies inviting readers to order the book, with a link to the order page.

You're a direct marketing consultancy firm, specializing in direct marketing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Well, there are dozens of websites covering direct marketing, but none provide direct marketing tips on direct marketing in the CEE region. Although you're not in the publishing business, you could easily provide direct marketing portals with semi-daily commentary on direct marketing in the CEE, tips for marketing in the region, coverage of direct marketing events in the region, legal tips and so on. The portals would better satisfy its visitors by providing them with more unique content, while you could generate new leads from the people that visit your own website after clicking on your headlines.

You're an e-commerce site selling low-priced laptops. What you could do in this case is seek out websites that cover and review low-priced laptops and offer them to re-publish your latest laptop deals and releases, to direct people to your webstore where they can make the order or simply find out more about the laptops promoted, and the website would in turn receive a commission for every product sold through them. This same concept works for any affiliate marketing powered business. If you have affiliates, you can help them generate more sales by providing them with ready made content about your products, such as a list of upcoming seminars and similar.
No matter what industry you're in and what your goals online are, you are almost certain to have your own relevant content that you want re-published in whole or in part on other websites, and you will be sure to find websites that reach the same audience and cover the same or complimentary topics that could be interested in republishing your content.

The key, however, in making all of this work, is contextuallity and relevancy.

The content you wish to distribute must be highly relevant to the audience your prospective syndication partners reach.

The content must be in some context with the website you want it to be available at.

This tactic will not only generate new traffic for you and bring you highly relevant and targeted visitors, but will also help you increase your online credibility, increase your brand recognition and might even help you become established as a thought leader.

But what's the role of RSS in all of this?

RSS has become the de-facto standard for online content syndication.

All you need is to provide an RSS feed with the exact content you want to syndicate, and all the other websites owners need is a way to consume your RSS feed and display its contents on their websites.

Once you update your RSS feed, for example when adding a new news piece, the content on your syndication partners' websites is updated too. If you're syndicating content to a thousand other websites, all of them will receive the same updated version at the same time you update your RSS feed. Easy, simple, cheap and streamlined.

And because this is a standard there are now countless tools available to make this process easy for everyone involved.

RSS Really Starting to Move Towards E-mail Marketers

Email Reaction is another e-mail vendor following the certain trend of RSS going the way of e-mail marketing ... in terms of direct marketing capabilities of course.

Although they're just entering beta testing with their solution, they promise RSS feed personalization, the holy grail for direct marketers, as well as full RSS integration in their software, to make the move towards RSS easier for e-mail marketers.

The first to offer this type of integration and personalization were SilverPop, although it still remain to be seen how Email Reaction will compete with their feature set.

links for 2006-09-25
Results of New Influencers blogger survey (tags: research survey blogs) The Fifth Down - Sports - New York Times Blog New blog exploring fantasy football as a strategic pursuit, a social phenomenon and an all-consuming diversion. (tags: Football blogs newyorktimes)...

The What Blogs Are Lecture

Use RSS To Increase Your Traffic Now, Part 1

Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.

While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.

It will help you:

increase your traditional search engine rankings;
improve your online visibility by making your content available where people are increasingly searching for new content, such as RSS search engines and content aggregation sites;
drive traffic from other websites covering your topic, by helping you make your content available at these websites more easily.

Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites

The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.

Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.

Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.

But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?

Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.

The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.

Google and Yahoo! know it too their own news engines are among the top of breed.

But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?

Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.

And so on

Why this matters to you?

If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.

And the RSS connection?

Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.

In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.

And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.

Easy RSS Advertising From Pheedo: Ads for Feeds

Pheedo today announced their new service, Ads for Feeds, which allows RSS publishers to easily place ads in their RSS feeds, while at the same time gathering RSS metrics and without redirecting traffic to another domain.

If you've explored the RSS space in more detail you know that free services like FeedBurner allow you to easily place ads in your feeds and measure the feeds themselves, but they require you to direct your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server.

[Update / 2006-05-02] The above statement is actually not quite true, since FeedBurner does allow you to serve your FeedBurner optimized feeds via your own domain. Terribly sorry for the mistake!

What this means is that while you do get the ability to place ads and measure your feeds, you do lose some of the search engine optimization impact of RSS, since your RSS feeds are no longer stationed on your domain.

Pheedo's service on the other hand allows you to keep your feeds on your own domain and take advantage of the service by simply pasting their code in your feeds.

There's a premium + version as well, with more features and more in-depth analytics.

RSS Industry Night Roundtable II: About RSS Adoption

Pheedo, iUpload and PRWeb hosted the 2nd RSS Industry Night Roundtable last week, taking place next to the Ad:Tech event.

This time unfortunatelly I wasn't able to make it, nor will I be able to make the next one at the Syndicate Conference May 15th:(, since I'm speaking at the ACCM conference in Chicago next week and just don't have enough time to stay in the US for 2 weeks.

A pitty ...

Anyway, this time round the industry night focused more on RSS adoption and how IE7 is going to influence it.

The most interesting comment comes from David Gillmor who believes that people won't really use RSS via IE7, but will rather opt-in for web-based RSS Readers.

Also much discussion about RSS advertising, where the people from ClickZ shared concernes that RSS advertising just isn't worth selling ... yet.

For more coverage visit Pheedo's blog, ClickZ Blog and The 360 blog.

To get the scoup on the 1st roundtable, click here.

Nooked and Infacta Go the First Step Towards RSS and E-mail Integration

In terms of delivering content to your subscribers, RSS is best used as a supplementary channel to e-mail, making all of your e-mail content available via RSS as well.

It's no surprise that e-mail marketing vendors are starting to work with RSS vendors to help bring these two channels closer together.

The latest comes from Nooked, one of the higher-end RSS marketing tool vendors, and Infacta, vendors of GroupMail, a great desktop e-mail marketing tool.

Their integration ...

a] allows GroupMail and Nooked users to insert RSS feed items into e-mail messages,

b] insert e-mail messages via GroupMail into Nooked,

c] generate and deliver unique subscription links to Nooked-generated RSS feeds via GroupMail, to allow for full user tracking.

On the surface, these 3 benefits help e-mail marketers save time when duplicating their efforts to RSS, and even more importantly, allow them to easily promote trackable RSS feeds to their e-mail subscribers.

RealNetworks Rolls Realtime RSS Readers
Speaking of RSS aggregators, RealNetworks has launched two of them. You can download a beta of the desktop version over here. It will officially launch in early 2007. However, there's an online version too....

Guerrilla Insight for Authors

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Please Share the RSS Marketing Survey

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