Search Marketing News

With so many new search engine and marketing resources hitting the net, sorting through all the rubbish to know what sites you can count on for quality information can be difficult. Like most of you, my time is limited. However, a big part of my business depends on my research and keeping up to date, [...]

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.

Split Run Testing
If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..

Know Your Target Audience
Equally important with knowing your target audience is finding ways to let your target audience know you as a person. Many times when we run an online business, we forget the power of talking with our target audience. Handing people a business card in casual conversation is a common courtesy, but it is unlikely [...]

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.

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.

The Next Big Thing
Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..

The Nofollow Attribute
As a measure to help prevent comment spam, many blogging platforms automatically add the nofollow attribute to all links found within the comments section of a blog. The thought was that if Google no longer gave “credit” for links using the nofollow attribute, we would see a tremendous decrease in comment spam. “From now on, when [...]

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 ... :)

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.

Best Web Development Tips
One of the best teachers that any of us can have is the voice of experience. Over the years, the tips that I have learned from others has been invaluable to me. When it comes to learning web development skills, the little bits of information we pick up here and there can make all the [...]

Are You the Biggest Difference?
Are you the biggest difference for your business? Many years ago, a motivational speaker told me that the surest way to financial success was to find something that I absolutely love doing and then find a way to get paid for doing it. This is probably the best advice that I have ever received, and advice [...]

Ecommerce Sites and Content
For some reason people keep thinking that ecommerce sites are somehow different and do not need much content, beyond a brief description, similar to what you might see with a catalog. The search engines do not change HOW they evaluate the relevance of pages based on “what kind” of a page is being displayed. They could [...]

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

All About GPRS
Dickens once said, \"never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.\" Perhaps we can now say, \"never close your ..

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.

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.

Link popularity and tools for link building
Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

Pages Removed From Google
Why are so many websites having a large number of pages removed from Google’s index? They are discussing this topic in every SEO and webmaster forum on the internet. As always, everyone has a different opinion as to why this is occurring. The only clear indication of what is truly going on has been answered [...]