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Internet Marketing Is Going To The Feeds
By Jack Humphrey (c) 2006 Tale Chaser Publishing, Inc.

This change is permanent: Marketing your website without
taking advantage of RSS feeds will be the biggest mistake
you can make in 2006 and beyond.

Microsoft is unleashing a new OS (Vista) that will plug
into the web via RSS in a very profound way. If you
haven't been keeping up on Vista (formerly Longhorn)
developments because you thought it was of no consequence
to you as a marketer, think twice.

Vista will revolutionize the way everyone syndicates their
content and markets their websites forever.

RSS is fast becoming the backbone of the web. Sites are
organically syndicating content around the web through RSS
search engines like this one: http://rssfeeds.contentdesk.com.

Feeds in RSS directories then get picked up by publishers
looking for good headline content for their sites.

The major search engines also pick up those feed listings
and often discover new sites and spider them faster than
any other form of content syndication including articles
and press releases!

How To Create A Feed For Your Site

First off, if you are not blogging, you need to. Every
type of site imaginable can produce a relevant blog with
topics related to your main content.

It doesn't matter if you simply sell furniture on your site
- you need a blog!

Imagination is all that is required to create a blog
featuring the almighty promotion power of an RSS feed. In
the furniture example you can blog about interior design
and any number of topics.

Notice that the big sites (that were formerly simple
shopping cart sites with little content) are now putting up
articles and blogging about the topics surrounding their
products.

They are not stupid. They know that creating content and
feeding it around the web is a major traffic source and
they've been switching to richer content models for well
over a year en masse.

Most any major shopping site you land on nowadays has rich
content somewhere on the site. And they have a feed their
visitors can subscribe to and that they can market with.

For the smaller mom and pop shop, a Wordpress blog is all
you need to plug into the RSS world and fill your site with
rich content (not just product descriptions and sales
letters) that the engines are looking for, as well as the
major part of your market who want more information before
making purchases.

A review site is a very popular model. Lots of surfers
want to read about 3rd party experiences with products
before deciding on purchases.

Again, this model is not new and it is not an afterthought
marketing ploy. It is major business to the sites who have
mastered the art of filling direct sales sites and shopping
cart-run sites with deep content.

With Microsoft Vista, all PC users are going to be able to
detect feeds on every site they visit and subscribe to
those feeds.

Very soon the days of "Give me your email address and other
private information" will be a thing of the past.

Smart marketers are going to adopt the RSS information
delivery model because surfers will quickly begin to ignore
email subscription forms while looking for the simple and
completely anonymous RSS subscription model.

So if you haven't started planning a marketing campaign
utilizing RSS delivery of newsletters and updates over
email, you had better get started understanding RSS and its
eventual replacement of the traditional email list.

Critical mass tolerance of spam and giving out email
addresses has been reached in all markets. Only in very
tight niches in special circumstances where there is
instant trust and credibility conveyed by a site will you
find decent optin rates.

Everywhere else the optin rate for any kind of email
notification list is at rock bottom. Add to that a dismal
delivery ratio of emails due to overzealous, catch-all spam
filters from the ISP to the user level, and the writing is
on the wall: email is on its way out as a viable tool for
a successful marketing campaign.

The change is happening now and it will be permanent. RSS
will eclipse email lists and it will be the new defacto
method of content syndication around the web by the end of
2006.

Tracking what your RSS subscribers click on and do through
your RSS feeds is the problem many geeks are working on
now.  We will soon have more accurate and more in-depth
tracking available through RSS subscription and syndication
than we currently have with email marketing.

Once marketers feel comfortable that they haven't lost any
tracking ability that we currently enjoy with email, the
game will quickly accelerate into a whole new type of
competition for eyeballs. Watch also for a whole slew of
new marketing courses and materials that teach how to
dominate a niche with RSS marketing rather than email
marketing.

"Growing Your List" and "Syndicating Your Content" is going
to be done by RSS more and more by regular website owners
as this year progresses. That includes your competition!
Vista will be a massive feed detector/reader available to
all PC users very soon.

This means that you can have a feed on your site for
visitors to subscribe to, or you can see for yourself how
many of your visitors choose to ignore your email
subscription form and your content because you are not Web
2.0 enough for them.

So, are you set to take advantage of RSS as the impending
dominant tool in your marketing campaign?
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Jack Humphrey is a professional website promotion
consultant and writes for The Friday Traffic Report on
marketing with RSS and other internet marketing topics,
available at http://fridaytrafficreport.jackhumphrey.com
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