RSS: Keep Your Readers Fed

Keep your readers up to date with RSS

Feeds come in several formats – RSS (remote site syndication), XML, Atom and other links to news relevant to your viewership – the people who visit your site in search of the latest news.

 

 

Remote Site Syndication (RSS) Links

And there are plenty of great reasons to post and broadcast feeds:

 

• The software to collect feeds (aggregator), reader and broadcaster are free and free is always good.

• You’re the editor. You choose which feeds to gather, which feeds to display on your web site and which features you’ll broadcast, spreading the attraction of your site far across the web.

• Feeds can be delivered by way of a web portal site, via an RSS reader (free, and built into newer browsers so users don’t have to download a separate feed reader) and email. This means that your latest news feed can be accessed by anyone with a pulse.

• If your feeds are brilliantly constructed and professionally designed, you can create a subscriber list. Some feeds charge a small subscription fee. Others only want the visitor to opt in. Cool. You get the email address and the opt-in gets your daily thoughts on…on whatever.

• You can package your feeds to display on any digital communications device including cell phones, PDAs, laptops, desk tops – you can broadcast your words and podcast your podcasts any time, anywhere. That puts you in control.

Whether you’re a site owner or web surfer, RSS feeds enable you to gather information of interest one time for display on your site, or for your own education. These icons indicate a site, a section
of a site, a blog, podcast or other digitally-formatted data that can be
broadcast by you (just add the icon to the piece so other RSS
gatherers know its useable).

Who Benefits from Feeds?
Everyone, once you have the software set up and configured. Here’s how the site players all gain from your feeds.

You gain by eliminating the need for a publisher – an entity willing to put your words out there. The traditional publishing model, popular since Johan Guttenburg created moveable type, is dead. You don’t have to submit your article to 20 periodicals and suffer through those rejection notices.

You don’t have to truck your treatise on hyperspace travel from one publisher to another and you certainly don’t need an agent. (Talk about a dying profession!). You decide what gets published and what doesn’t. Writers will quickly start coming to you to see if you’ll carry their latest blog post and syndicate through your feed.

You gain again. Once you start broadcasting your own content, you start to build a following. Readers like what you write. Podders like what you say. Broadcasting your own RSS feeds makes you an instant authority – especially if what your writing is accurate and on topic.

Your visitors gain. They gain time, they become more productive and best of all, they come back everyday to see what’s new in your site’s newsroom. This kind of site stickiness is invaluable. Instead of searching 10 or 12 sites for the latest in stock analysis, a trader can simply log on to your financial news section and discover dozens of feeds from around the world.

Yes, this cuts down on web ambling, but when you need it fast, RSS delivers it like yesterday. Your visitors can amble about when there’s time. Speed and conveneince – that’s what RSS feeders want.

Advertisers gain. Advertising your message via feed simplifies distribution of the message and eleiminates many of the challenegs of traditional online marketing channels. Advertisers that use feeds don’t have to sneak past spam filters (everyone’s got one), they don’t have to worry about delayed distribution, especially critical when the item or sevice is time-sensitive.

Search engine page rank is no longer a concern. Used to be the higher the PR, the more the site owner could charge for advertising space on his or her website. With advertising delivered via feed, you get the same exposure to the same demographic – free.

So Who Uses RSS Feeds?
The better question is who doesn’t? Virtually every 24-hour news channel – CNN, MSNBC and Fox all broadcast by way of a feed. This allows viewers to get the latest news while riding home on the bus.

Other feed broadcasters include USATODAY.com, CNET.com, Yahoo and Google. Visit Google News for everything from the latest American Idol losers to the weather out where the folks live. And what’s great is you pick the news you want to read or hear in whatever order you choose.

How Do I Broadcast My Feeds?
First, it helps to have something to say or see. Otherwise, no one is going to pick you up except your mom – and chances are she won’t understand what you’ve done!

It doesn’t matter the format – HTML web site, audio and/or video content (pod and webcasts), a blog and even pictures of the newest member of the family. Whatever the format, you can create a feed and send it to the world or just the family.

There are lots of free blogging software available. Basic feedware is free. If you want to soup up the looks of your feeds, you can purchase feed software at reasonable prices – especially when compared to your ROI on the software.

Some of the more popular publishing tools include Blogger, TypePad and WordPress. These software packs publish your feed automatically. Simply type in your words of wisdom, click the “SEND” button and you’ve just gone global.

Another way to get your ideas out there for the world to share is through non-blogging social sites like Flickr and FaceBook. These social sharing sites are adding RSS technology to enable their members to broadcast anything – from their latest tune, rant, screed, picture or lesson. There are also tools to convert older, traditional content to make it feed-worthy. That’s good if you have a substantial site archive loaded with good information that just happens to be in a .wps format.

Does This Mean the End of Search Engines?
The fact is, feeds won’t eliminate the need for search engines but it will change the purpose of Google, Yahoo and Inktomi. Right now, in the early stages of RSS aggregation and broadcast, most web users still rely on search engines to find what they’re looking for. But that’s going to change thanks to RSS feeds.

Here’s why. RSS is totally interdependent of search engine rankings. Many RSS users are setting aside their browsers to use feed readers to deliver all the news of interest to that site visitor. So, instead of the web surfer searching high and low for the latest in hobby news, in 30 minutes that same, one-time Google-user can collect RSS feeds on topics of interest and skip using a browser altogether.

This may explain why Google is doing double-time to, not only be the web’s address book, but a major content provider, as well. It could also explain the $1.8 billion price tag for YouTube. Google is a cash machine but now it needs content to keep up with RSS technology.

So, if you don’t bring the news to your site visitors, they may or may not be back. And, if you don’t broadcast your own feeds, you’re missing the best marketing opportunity since AdWords.

Go RSS. Become your own publisher, make your site convenient for repeat visitors and stop worrying about your site’s PR. With RSS, page rank has no value any longer. Simply broadcast your advert and your done.

So, no matter how you use this interactive technology – as a reader or broadcaster, RSS is changing the face of the web. And, if your site isn’t in the RSS race, that site will out of business before you reach the finish line.

The Case for Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a four-letter word in the current U.S. business climate. Jobs being exported to distant and not-so-distant countries, depriving American workers jobs on assembly lines and in office cubicles answering customer care telephone calls.

 

ARE YOUR KIDDING ME? OUTSOURCE IT!

The fact is that many outsources are U.S.-based. I am. I live in Connecticut. But people and businesses call me every day looking to outsource everything from content development (copywriting) to business development consultation. Over the years, as I’ve learned more I’ve been able to expand my service offerings – a sure-fire way to stay ahead of the bill collector, especially in slow times in an inert business climate.

 

But business marches on. And outsourcing is a great tool for business owners large and small. And, you can outsource anything. ANYTHING!

Why increase your staff?
If you run a small, boutique ad agency catering to local merchants and associations, why hire a copywriter when you can outsource the work? When you outsource to a quality provider you only pay for work delivered.

An employee actually costs a business owner 20% over and above that employee’s salary, so an editor earning $50 a year actually costs the company $60K with health benefits, sick days, vacations, maternity leave and other employee bennies.

Outsources pay their own insurance and when they take vacations it’s on their time, not yours. Bottom line: you only pay for performance – by the page or by the word or a fixed price for the entire project.

That’s another benefit, often overlooked by buyers of outsourced services. You can set a fixed price for a project. Keep it fair to maintain the provider’s attention but, by establishing a fixed price, you know to the penny just how much something is going to cost, whether it’s web site text or bookkeeping services.

From a pure productivity POV, outsources deliver greater value than staff employees.

No long-term commitment
Another plus. Once the job is finished, your relationship with the service provider is over unless you want to keep it going. It’s your call.

If you hire someone and they don’t work out, you’re stuck. Hire an outsource you don’t like and just move on to the next one until you find the provider who delivers the highest level of quality at the lowest price.

You can negotiate
You can with an outsource. Many will take a lower fee for regular work. It’s a good gig because the provider doesn’t have to beat the bushes for the next assignment so the trade-off between regular work and per hour rate evens out.

Can’t do that with an employee.

Create a virtual office.
There are big companies that employ virtual offices. Workers log in from home, see their assignments, notes from supervisors, reports to be read – everything they’d find in their in-boxes at work.

This software equips you to oversee all employee or outsourced activity in real time. This saves a ton of money on office space, furniture, equipment and donuts in the morning. It’s just like having an office but your outsources telecommute.

And you can track all business activity from an administrator’s console, making it easy to see pinch points and other problems before they become serious problems.

You get real world experience
Outsource workers have a long list of referrals and recommendations from happy clients. That may not be the case of the interviewee who has three recommendations from her communications professors. You want hard-nosed, no-nonsense recommendations from people just like you. A good outsource collects these referrals as a business building tool.

So you know what you’re getting.

You don’t need no “stinkin’” office. You don’t need a staff of 10. All you need is a well-fed Rolodex and a central clearing house – a virtual office – to keep projects moving forward.

So, whether it’s order fulfillment, marketing, accounting or even legal services, you can find highly-qualified men and women on sites like Elance, odesk and rentacoder.

Don’t hire and add 20% to your company’s operating expenses. Outsource in the U.S. and get more value for your shrinking dollar. And though it may sound harsh, if the company is going under for the third time, consider cutting costs by cutting full and part-time staff and outsourcing your bookkeeping and contract negotiations instead of paying for time spent chatting around the water cooler.

I’m an outsource and I’m proud of it.

Go Hyper-Viral: Make Contacts and Cash

Viral marketing has been around for thousands of years. It’s nothing more than word of mouth marketing (WOM), but with the advent of the world wide web (W3), viral has taken on a nuanced cachet of subversion – exploiting the system. How cool is that?

Through the centuries, WOM was just that. One person told another who told another about this book or that technology and word spread. It was self-perpetuating. As the band of “in-the-know” individuals expanded, naturally WOM expanded with it.

'Slinger Goes Hyper-Viral

 

 

Today, within the ferocious sphere of e-commerce, viral marketing has changed tactics but the premise is still based on word of mouth. Today viral marketing includes:

• blog posts on topics of a site owner’s expertise with a back link to the poster’s site

• uploading product “how-tos,” movie trailers and endorsements to YouTube and other sites that rely on user-generated content

• syndicating articles to other web sites, providing a back link

• creating connectivity within a smaller, niche market (building a weblet; see below)

• posting to Wiki sites to establish authority within a market or commercial sphere

There are other viral tactics. Create a billboard on MySpace and Facebook pointing to your site; sign up as an expert on Yahoo Answers; list services on sites like Craigslist; make your site book-markable by providing visitors the option to ping you at sites like digg and other social book marking sites. Digital technology has changed the tactics of viral, word of mouth advertising, spreading the news globally in just seconds. We’ve come a long way fast.

Hyper-Viral Marketing
Hyper-viral marketing employs new technologies to expand WOM exponentially. It’s taken a few years for the technology to catch up with demand but today, web site owners have a number of tools and tactics at their disposal to simplify and automate the process of building word of mouth webuzz.

When blogs got hot at the turn of the millennium, posting to one blog at a time wasn’t efficient, though site owners who recognized the viral aspects of this marketing tactic did, indeed, take the time to do just that. Cut and paste. Cut and paste. Over and over.

Now, software tools, like Feedburner are available to automate the process of blog posting. Using this tool and others like it makes it simpler to post content on remote sites, to measure readership and placement of syndicated content and blog posts, to maintain metrics on subscriptions to newsletters, podcasts and other interest-generating content.

Google recently purchased Feedburner. As of the day of this writing, this software was feeding 870,764 publishers (site owners like you) with 1,549,103 distinct feeds.

Feedburner is an excellent example of a tool that has been developed to turn viral marketing into hyper-viral marketing – automatically.

Facebook Goes Hyper Viral
Ever since Facebook launched and social sites went viral, online businesses have employed the resources of these sites to create some free biz buzz. It’s easy to create a digital billboard for your business on Facebook, which makes it an ideal viral marketing tool.

The social website has recently gone hyper-viral with the addition of its “People You May Know” feature. This addition increases the utility of Facebook as a viral outlet by enabling users to search for quality contacts by geography, specialty, schools attended and so on. The idea is to create smaller communities within the larger Facebook universe.

For site owners, the addition of this feature to an already valuable viral marketing tool increases the utility of the site. However, your Facebook space may have to be revisited. New content to attract Facebook’s site search bots can easily be added to link up with old business acquaintances, classmates, neighbors and so on. The result? A higher quality of contact within the Facebook/social site model.

Blog Directories
Blogs are a great way to go hyper viral fast, especially if you post provocative, controversial and bleeding edge content. Getting your blog picked up, however, is another matter. You can submit to blogs but there’s no guarantee that the blogmaster is going to give you some space without something in return – a blog bribe in the W3 trade.

Blog directories build credibility and make it much easier to find your posts. To list your blog, visit toprankblog.com for an extensive list of blog directories. Using automated technology and current blog posting software, you can access dozens of weblog directories and list your blog with a few clicks.

As blogs take on a more significant role in reporting news, identifying trends and shaping opinions and buying decisions, their importance as a hyper viral marketing tool increases. That means good content. Buzz-worthy content. Sites like Spike.com provide a lot of provocative content. (Word of caution: Spike contains content that may not be suitable for all users so be forewarned. Some of the stuff on the site is crude, salacious and downright weird, but that’s the whole point of provocative content.)

Schemes, Scams, Disputes and Deceptions
Whenever a new technology is developed, there are schemers, scammers and other neer-do-wells out to subvert the process and take advantage of the unwitting so tread slowly in this new age of hyper-viral marketing. The snake oil salesman is knocking on the door. Make sure you know what you’re paying for, what you’re getting into and what kind of measurable results you can anticipate. Oh, and does it come with any kind of guarantee?

There are blogging services and press release syndicators that “guarantee” that you’ll get posted on 10,000 blogs within 24 hours. You gotta question the editorial judgment involved in posting to appropriate blogs. Your erudite musings on the Chaos Theory may end up on an anarchist site in Columbia. Be careful. These services are automated and the results aren’t always what’s anticipated.

Oh, and are you going to take the time to determine how many blogs really got your post. Any busy blogger has enough filters on the incoming chute to keep mass mailings headed straight for the DELETE FOREVER file. The finality of the deletion is indisputable. It’s gone without so much as a look. But the PR distributor delivered on its promise by delivering your release to 10,000 sites. What’s more difficult to measure is how many opened the PR and how many ran it on their sites or blogs.

Take care when writing a check for services that are amorphous and difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. If you don’t know how success is measured using a distribution service, man, you got the wrong service.

Also, be wary of “hyper-viral” software coming to market. Some early 1.0 editions are buggy, some over-promise and under deliver and some make promises that may not synch up with your site or server side software. For example, there are several software developers selling RSS to blog software. One of the things that has held back the explosive use of RSS on the web is the hassles of aggregating, monitoring and getting the collected feeds before the site visitor in a meaningful, useful way.

These software packages and associated support services make hyperbolic claims of instant wealth and fame by filling blogs with your RSS feeds. Google “RSS to blog” and enjoy the battle of what works, what’s a scam and what’s worth further exploration.

You Gotta Go Hyper But Not Be Hyper
There are hyper viral tools like Feedburner (and lots of other blogger distribution software; Feedburner isn’t the only one) podcast and webcast syndication software (growing quickly), automated PR software, newsletter software and a bunch of other spam to hit the fan as hyper viral goes hyper viral – starting now.

Take your time. Choose which outlets will deliver bang for buck, which can be measured with specificity and analyzed in a useable format, which players want your money and which want to help by providing a truly potent service or software that makes spreading the word about your site easier, more automated, more targeted and even more personalized.

Holy Cow! How To Use Twitter to Build Business

Yeah, I’m a twit, or tweet as some preferred to be called. I only follow 13 friends. I can’t plow through the daily trivia of strangers, much less the trivia generated by my own life. But something happened.

 

I’ve tried to figure out how to use Twitter as a sales tool. Nothing, though I admit my efforts were less than consistent. However….

 

…I recently Twittered an ebook I was flogging, looking for partners. True fact. Within 24 minutes of posting, I picked up five more followers (many in the same field as the ebook covers) and an invite for an interview.

 

Sell stuff. Find partners who complete the puzzle. I was amazed and…wait, I just got another follower. Got to check him/her out.

 

Any way, got something to sell, or looking for partners for projects, check out Tweeter.com and keep those offers coming in.