Guerrilla Insight for Authors: RSS Marketing With Christopher Knight: Use E-mail to Promote RSS

RSS Marketing With Christopher Knight: Use E-mail to Promote RSS

How does EzineArticles.com, one of the largest websites to help you syndicate your content, use RSS for their marketing?

To answer this question, we interviewed Christopher Knight for the 2007 edition of the RSS marketing e-book (coming shortly). But if you want to know more, click here to read Christopher's summary.

BTW - did you know that EzineArticles.com publishes more than 40,000 RSS feeds?

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.

MarketingStudies.net Back Online and Comments Working Again

After a rather painful week, MarketingStudies.net is back with its full functionality, including comments.

As already noted, we started the move to a new hosting provider about a week ago, when the comments on this blog were again turned off by the old hosting provider without notice.

The move went relatively smoothly, thanks to the great MovableType architecture and excellent cooperation from both the old and the new hosting providers. Plus, we're now running on MovableType 3.3, which really is light years ahead from the old 2.x versions.

The only thing that really went wrong with the move were the sub-domains. Everything else was smooth.

Quick Steps for Changing Your Hosting Provider and Installing a New MovableType Version

If you're thinking of doing the same, here are the quick steps:

a) Sign-up for your new hosting package and contact your new hosting provider. Contact them in person and explain to them what you're doing and that you might need a little more assistance from them to finalize the transfer.

b) Make a replica of all of your files from the old hosting provider and upload the exact folder structure with all the files to the new hosting provider.

c) Export the SQL database with your MovableType data, directly from the SQL interface. You want a full copy of your database with practically everything.

d) Install your current MovableType version on the new server. Do not just copy the files from the old MovableType installation, rather do the installation again on the new server.

e) Import your old SQL database from the old server into the new SQL database on the new server. Make sure you import it into the new database created by MovableType.

You should now have all of the data and settings from MovableType on the old server in MovableType on the new server.

f) Log-in to MovableType on the new server. You will probably need to modify the server paths for storing files, so open the settings for each blog and change the server paths if needed.

g) Rebuild your files on the new server.

h) Install a new MovableType version on top of the current one, of course on the new server.

i) Once everything is working, ask your domain host to point your domains to your new server IPs.

This is it. Good luck!

Using RSS Radars in B2B CRM

RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.

Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.

David's idea is simple:

Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated

This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."

But, there are two problems:

Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients

This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.

Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.

More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)

Generating Revenue Through Advertising

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.

Comments Off Again

I just love my hosting company.

They again disabled my comments script on the server, of course without giving me any kind of notice.

Usually I'm patient, but what's too much is too much.

So, I apologize for the inconvenience. Comments will be back up as soon as we find a new hosting provider and implement the website there.

In the mean time, please e-mail your comments to info@marketingstudies.net

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 ...

Will Yahoo! Pipes Increase Content Theft?

First of all, I was want to emphasize again that I strongly believe that Yahoo! Pipes is a dream come true for marketers, finally offering us a tool to easily conduct business intelligence and create RSS Radars.

However, the more you think of it, the more obvious all the dangers become obvious.

Sure, these were here before, but never before have they been accessible on a mass scale, for free, and with such ease of use.

Just consider it ...

Yahoo! Pipes gives anyone, with some time on their hands to learn how it works, the power to remix, filter and manipulate third-party content. In essence this means that you can easily take someone elses RSS feed and repurpose their content to best suit your needs and at the same time ignoring the needs of the publisher who is investing time, money and other resources into his content creation.

1. Creating Third-Party RSS Feeds with Your Standalone RSS Ads

Let's get started with something easy. Yahoo! Pipes allows you to combine any amount of XML data sources and filter them to create an output that best matches your needs.

For example, you could take 100 RSS feeds that talk about search engine marketing, combine them, deduplicate the posts, and filter the posts by various keywords to really create a highly focused content stream, for example on optimizing your site for Google.

With the power that Yahoo! Pipes gives you, you could now add your own content, via your own RSS feed, and create an output that mixes all the above feeds on SEM with standalone ads for your SEM services.

Now just promote the RSS feed on your site and start grabbing subscribers. If the RSS feeds you're using as inputs are offering full-text content, your subscribers will be able to read third-party SEM tips from your RSS feed, directly from their RSS Readers, without even taking notice that these articles weren't written by you. But at the same time they would be exposed to your ads, offering your own SEM services.

In essence, using this approach you could leverage the content written by third-party experts, without their permission, to directly build your own brand as an expert and directly generate sales.

The other possibility would be to use the same third-party content, but instead of also publishing ads for your own services, rather publishing paid ads. Again, you would be using third-party content to fuel your own revenues, without the publishers' permissions ... actually directly stealing from them.

2. Adding Ads into Content Items / Removing Native Ads in Content Items

Now, I'm not really 100% certain this is doable (haven't played with the service enough yet), but articles floating around the internet seem to indicate so.

Again, imagine taking the same SEM feeds and creating a new remixed output using them. But this time, you also use Yahoo! Pipes to remove the ads their content items already contained, replacing them with your own.

The result would be a full-text article from an SEM expert, with your SEM services ad directly below the article, taking direct advantage of the article to sell your services ... perhaps even miss-leading the reader that you are the author of the article.

3. Creating Spam Sites

Spam sites are becoming an increasing problem, with unethical webmasters taking advantage of third-party RSS feeds to fully fuel their own sites, in the hopes of targeted content increasing their search engine rankings and serving as a vehicle to drive Google AdSense clicks and revenues.

Yahoo! Pipes now makes this even simpler, actually enabling these webmasters to build full websites of highly relevant and smartly remixed content that will actually provide their visitors with some value and thus even further increase their AdSense revenue potential.

How Can Your Protect Your Content?

Yahoo! Pipes lists 3 ways for publishers to protect their content:

Configure your web server to block the user agent "Yahoo Pipes"
Add a "noindex" meta to your RSS feed:
E-mail pipes-optout@yahoo-inc.com with a list of the feed URLs you want blocked

Of course, the dillema here is that by blocking Yahoo! Pipes in fear of unethical practices you are also blocking acceptable uses of your content by legitimate users and are thus decreasing your content syndication opportunities.

Is It the Tool or the Users?

The four examples are just the tip of the iceberg. With the power of Yahoo! Pipes the "opportunities" for content theft are becoming nearly unlimited.

Of course, this isn't the fault of Yahoo! Pipes. It's just a tool ... and it's in the hands of users what they do with the tool.

Unethical webmasters have actually been doing this for quite some time now even without Yahoo! Pipes. But now they have a stronger tool in their hands, and it's only a question of time when this will hit "the black market mainstream".

What Can Yahoo! Do?

Yahoo! Pipes isn't a problem yet, but when it reaches "the black market mainstream", publishers will start taking notice, and that my create a backslash against Yahoo.

But what can they really do?

Somewhat limit the level of manipulation you allow with third-party feeds, at least preventing the removal of inline ads
Create a new RSS element that will allow the RSS feed publisher to request an e-mail notification of Yahoo! Pipes use of his feeds, by simply placing that element in the RSS feed
Allow the RSS feed publishers to mark their feeds as "Yahoo! Pipes syndication available only on-request", enabling them to authorize the use through the Pipes user interface [this one might be going a little far:)]
Implement a stringent "no unfair use" policy, immediately blocking users that exhibit such uses

On the other side, adding all of these administrative hurdles to the pipes creation process for the user would greatly dimish the service's mass appeal.

So what's the right way to do it?

Please comment below ...

[you can now post comments, but you will receive an error message after you submit them ... but they will still be published]

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Thursday, March 29, 2007

RSS Marketing With Christopher Knight: Use E-mail to Promote RSS

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