The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book

The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book
E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.

1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign
One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.

F Trains: Another Example of Getting RSS Wrong

RSS Specifications point to the F Train from NYC and their RSS feed, which lets you watch traing schedules and changes.

The essential idea of course is good --> use RSS to get your latest and most important content to your prospects and customers. Train schedules certainly seem relevant enough for someone in NYC to subscribe to them.

But again, someone is missing the point.

If I want to know about traing schedules and changes, I don't care about all schedules and changes. I just care about the routes I take.

If I'm only taking the Queens-bound route, don't talk to me about Manhattan-bound trains.

F Trains, great idea, but now makes this a little more usable and allow people to select which routes they're interested in and then give them an RSS feed just for those.

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.

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

links for 2007-03-24
TwitterBuzz - The most popular links on Twitter - URL Popularity "TwitterBuzz shows you what people using Twitter, a microblogging service, are linking to. It's updated constantly" (tags: twitter zeitgeist) Revso Cool new web 2.0 blog. (tags: Blogs newvoices Web2.0)...

AttentionMeter Compares Alexa, Quantcast, Compete
Here's a neat web application that triangulates traffic graphs from Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. It's called the Attentionmeter. I am not sure about the name but I can live with it. Even better, there's a handy dandy bookmarklet (yum, I...

Twitter May Face Huge SMS Bills
In the good ol' United States of America, the receiver pays the SMS bill. In Canada, Australia, Europe and I believe much of Asia, the sender pays. For Twitter, this may add up fast. If you spend some time on...

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

Directly Grabbing RSS Subscribers and Getting Syndicated Through Pheedo RSS Advertising

Pheedo just released a new RSS advertising concept, called FeedPowered Advertising, that helps you generate new subscribers to your RSS feeds using RSS advertising, through Pheedo's RSS advertising network or through other ad networks.

The Key Facts

Their new RSS ad format ...

[a] Displays the latest content items from your RSS feed, including video content with direct "watch" links

[b] Allows the user to also add your content (directly from the ad) to del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Furl or e-mai it to a friend

How the New Format Integrates DM, PR and Brand

The implications of this are quite strong.

[a] The ad format allows you to syndicate your RSS content to targeted online media, displaying your content there directly to generate more brand awareness, build your credibility and get new readers by actually demonstrating your value

[b] Furthemore, the ad itself contains further syndication options that will virally spread your content through the key social networking sites

[c] The ad functions as a direct subscription generation tool, enabling you to quickly capture new subscribers through other sites ... and actually works towards increasing your conversion rate by first demonstrating the content and so making the subscription decision easier and more educated, thus generating better qualified subscribers/prospects

In essence, the ad format integrates PR, direct marketing and brand advertising.

Is it perfect? While it is an amazing idea, it does need some further refinement.

Further Improvements Needed

[a] Looking at their example on their site using Internet Explorer 7 shows that the feed subscription option in the ad is not highlighted through the IE7 native RSS Reader, making it less intuitive to subscribe

[b] The existing example is clearly targeted to RSS Aware users. But data shows that more than 80% of RSS users are not actually aware of using RSS. The ad format also need to include other subscription options, in addition to the RSS button, such as Add to MyYahoo!

[c] The ad also needs some space at the bottom to better entice viewers to subscribe, using enticing copy and perhaps bribing the viewers to subscribe by offering them a free whitepaper

[d] For direct marketers, the ad format should also allow an in-between data capture window, allowing the direct marketer to capture prospect information prior to being given access to the feed

[e] The next step would be for Pheedo to add additional metrics for advertisers, such as new subscriber retention and long-term customer conversion, and perhaps even the CPO.

If you want to check it out yourself, here's the screenshot (working version available here):

I'm a little biased here, because I've always dug Pheedo work, but in my opinion this is the best RSS advertising development yet ... and finally an RSS advertising tool to generate real results by taking advantage of the power of RSS.

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 10-Step RSS Marketing Plan

While RSS has certainly become well-established with most marketers, few are using it to its full advantage.

Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.

The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).

Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.

But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.

1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy
It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.

2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.

3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy
Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.

4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.

5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level
Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.

6. Promote your RSS feeds internally
Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.

7. Promote your RSS feeds externally
After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.

8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.

9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.

10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand
Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.

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.

I'm Not Spamming You!

... but someone certainly is, using a non-existant MarketingStudies.net e-mail address.

If you receive an e-mail with the subject "Got It, I Think" from tahaseggdzf@marketingstudies.net, or something simillar, it's spam. Not from us though ...

This is how it works:

(a) The spammer finds a number of open relay e-mail servers, which allow the spammer to send e-mail using an e-mail address that's not "hosted" on the e-mail server and often without even having a user account at the server provider.

(b) He or she then uses your e-mail address as the "Reply To" e-mail address in the spam messages and sends out the spam blast.

(c) Everyone receiving these e-mail messages will now think they are coming from your domain, unless of course they have enough knowledge about the subject to check the headers of the e-mail messages received. Those show that the e-mail is in fact not coming from MarketingStudies.net.

The funny thing about this spam is that the spammer didn't include any links in his spam e-mail.

Looking for ways to stop this, but I'm affraid it might be impossible ...

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.