Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity?

Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity?

OK, I admit it. I'm on a fighting streak today. Just one of those days.

After discussing how Yahoo! Pipes may facilitate content theft and unfair use, and bashing against Amazon for not taking better advantage of RSS advertising, it's time to take on e-retailers, online service providers and basically anyone that does transactional messaging.

Let's take a look at my inbox. Today I received ...

• A transactional e-mail "from PayPal"
• A transactional e-mail "from eBay"
• A transactional e-mail "from Amazon"
• And some other brand names as well

Of course, none of these e-mails were actually from PayPal, eBay or Amazon. Simply spam, as every other day, intended to capture my private data.

Even if PayPal really sent me an e-mail, I would never read it or respond to it, simply because I would consider it spam and would never believe that it's actually from PayPal.

As I'm sure you've noticed as well, transactional e-mail messages have become a horror story for the big brands, with spammers constantly trying to take advantage of their well-known brand names.

But here's the catch ...

• There is no SPAM with RSS, at least not in this form
• When you receive content from an RSS feed that you proactively subscribed to, you can be 100% certain that the message is legitimate and from the publisher to whom you subscribed
• RSS is perfectly capable of delivering personalized transactional information
• RSS is perfectly capable of delivering protected personalized transactional information, granting access only to those with the required username/password combination
• RSS transactional capabilities are easy to implement, if your user database is in order

So why aren't any of these guys using RSS to deliver transactional information?

PayPal, eBay, Amazon ... I really want my transactional messages from you. But when I receive them, I don't believe them. Please start delivering them via RSS and make me a happy customer ... a happy customer that actually trusts messages from PayPal, eBay and Amazon.

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.

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Quick RSS SEO Tips

WebProNews has a short summary from Amanda Watlington's tips for SEO optimization of your RSS feeds:

1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati

2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme

3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters

4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly

5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters

6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item

7. Provide email updates for the non-techies

8. Offer an HTML version of your feed

9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed

Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering:

10. Full text, not summaries

11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10)

12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)

13. Keyword-rich item [title]

14. Your brand name in the item [title]

15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container

16. Compelling site [description]

17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)

18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site:

19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course]

20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories

21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords

22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts

23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]

Do you have more tips?

(a) Post them in the comments form below.

(b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview

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.

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!

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.

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.