Guerrilla Insight for Authors: 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.

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.

FireFox 2.0 Launched
Heard the news yet? FireFox 2.0 is now available for download. I’ve been using FireFox for a long time, but I recently started using the new IE. FireFox was getting buggy and somewhat annoying for my daily use. I hope they got most of the bugs out in this version. [...]

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.

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.

PARTICIPATE: The 2006 RSS Marketing Survey

Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers?

Are you interested in the RSS industry average benchmark metrics?

Would you like to get top RSS marketing tips from those that are actually doing it?

Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, share your own insights, experiences and data ... and then receive a free copy of the report with all the data to compare your numbers, as well as receive RSS marketing best practices.

Also, if you care to share your own RSS marketing case study, it will be featured in the 2006 edition of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, critically acclaimed as the "best and most comprehensive guide on RSS for marketers".

For more information and to participate, please click here now.

And, if you can, please share this survey with as many marketers as you can, since that will provide us with a much better research sample ...

... and at the same time provide you with much better benchmark metrics, as well as more comprehensive RSS marketing tips and experiences.

Simply share this URL:
http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net

Participate by clicking here now.

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.

Expedia Takes the Lead in Travel RSS Feeds

My greatest gripe against RSS marketing initiatives is that they're just poorly done.

You have a great company with an amazing product database that just calls for customized feeds ... and all you get from their RSS feeds are one-size-fits-all packages.

Really a waste. No one wants to receive updates on all US flights ... they just want to receive updates on the flights that really interest them. And here's the real power of RSS: bringing the most relevant content.

Expedia seems to understand that, at least based on their new RSS offering.

They allow you to customize your feed with Trip Type, your originating city, your destination and your package type.

Well, they could still do alot more, such as providing the option of selecting a price range, but it's a good beginning.

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.

Clarification: FeedBurner Does NOT Require Users to Point at Their Domain

Yeah, I blundered.

In a recent article I wrote:
"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."

Quite wrong, as I was kindly corrected by Traci Hailpern from FeedBurner.

Actually, the premium FeedBurner service MyBrand allows you to do exactly that: use all of the benefits of FeedBurner, but instead of directing your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server, the MyBrand service allows you to serve your feed from your own domain, retaining all the SEO benefits of RSS.

A big "I'm sorry" to you, the readers, and to FeedBurner.

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.

Important: 2006 Unleash RSS Preview for Existing Customers

Just a quick update for existing Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS customers ... if you haven't received the message yet.

We just released the preview of the 2006 edition, with the first two sections. The preview (and the full version, once it comes out) is available to you for free, of course.

Just drop me an e-mail at rok.hrastnik@marketingstudies.net --- if you haven't received it yet.

And you'll certainly want to do so, since this isn't simply an upgrade, but a whole new e-book, with more easy-to-follow RSS marketing instructions than ever before.

A New Breed of Branded RSS Reader: Inclue!

Inclue!, just released a couple of days ago, is a new breed of mass-market branded RSS Reader ... which integrates into Outlook (to consume RSS content), as well as Internet Explorer and FireFox (to directly subscribe to RSS feeds while surfing).

But why a new breed of branded Reader?

a] It integrates with Outlook, which most other branded RSS Readers don't (usually either web-based or desktop applications)

b] Publishers can create their own branded version (unfortunatelly only with their own feeds right now) in 5 minutes, and then distribute it via their Inclue! landing page, which is also automatically generated.

c] Publishers that sign-up for their affiliate program receive a commission when end-users decide to upgrade their Reader to the premium version.

d] The Include! Reader is based on viral methods to further spread your RSS feeds and help you get new subscribers, for example using the FeedBurner Flare tool to entice your RSS subscribers to get your branded Inclue! Reader. Similar links are also displayed when a user forwards an RSS feed item to his friends via Inclue!

To see how it works, take a look at my quick version (just a demo, haven't included all the feeds, a decent description and so on).

Inclue! also does a great job of promoting RSS to end-users, giving them concrete benefits of how RSS will actually help them ... from tracking eBay auctions to getting job notifications. Just take a look at the link above.

Essentially, the Reader is targeted at new RSS users, giving them simple functions, especially with their ease of subscribing to feeds with just one click.

Now I'm just waiting for them to add visual branding possibilities ... :)

You Underestimate My Sneakiness Sir!
Ah..my favorite phrase from the movie, “Mr. Deeds” It still gives me laugh when I think about that movie. Well, the movie is not the point of this post. Today, I’d like to tell you one of the researching techniques that I use. This technique requires serious sneakiness :) j/k. [...]

What Happened to the Site?

Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)

1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.

2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.

3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.

4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.

5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.

So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.

But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:

Leaving for Chicago, ACCM

I'm leaving for Chicago in about 3 hours for a week, where I'll be speaking on RSS and direct marketing at the ACCM conference.

If you're in Chicago and want to grab a coffee, drop me a note.

And I might be a little slow in responding to e-mail messages during this week:)

Google Page Rank Updating
Here is a quick update. It looks like Google is updating Page Rank. Here is the Page Rank for MarketingSyndrome.com 1 toolbarqueries.google.com (4) 2 64.233.161.104 (4) 3 216.239.59.99 (5) 4 64.233.161.99 (4) 5 66.102.9.104 (5) 6 216.239.53.99 (4) 7 216.239.39.104 (4) 8 66.102.7.99 (5) 9 216.239.57.104 (4) 10 66.102.9.99 (5) 11 66.102.7.104 (5) 12 216.239.53.104 (4) 13 66.102.11.99 (5) 14 216.239.57.99 (4) 15 66.102.11.104 (5) 16 216.239.59.104 (5) 17 216.239.39.99 (4) 18 216.239.37.104 (4) 19 66.249.93.104 (4) 20 64.233.179.104 (4) 21 216.239.51.104 (4) You can check your Page Rank by using our free Page Rank Checker.

Commenting Problem Fixed
Thanks for pointing out about the commenting problem. I obviously didn’t turn off my previous spam filter plugin. :) I apologize for the inconvenience. It is now fixed and working properly. Thanks Chris.

Guerrilla Insight for Authors

Sunday, October 29, 2006

RSS Really Starting to Move Towards E-mail Marketers

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