Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

How Marketers Can Use Yahoo! Pipes to Increase Their Online Sales
By Rok Hrastnik (c) 2007

While RSS end-user adoption has been relatively slow,
marketers have jumped at the chance to use this new
internet channel increase their online sales.

If you're new to the world of RSS --- RSS is a simple
technology that allows you to deliver your online content
directly to your subscribers, other websites and the search
engines. It helps you improve your content delivery, as
well as increase your online traffic and reach, and even
conduct business intelligence more easily.

RSS content is delivered through so-called RSS feeds, which
are just simple files that carry your online content. Each
of these simple files containts multiple "stories" that you
may want to deliver to your audiences, called "content
items". A content item can be anything … an article, a blog
post, a whole newsletter issue, a sales letter and so on.

But there is more to RSS than simply getting your content
out.

One of the fields of RSS marketing is also NewsMastering,
which allows you to:

[a] take multiple third-party RSS feeds,

[b] mix them together,

[c] filter your new mix using various keywords that you're
interested in,

[d] use the mix and your filters to create a new stream of
content, pulling together all the content items from dozens
or hundreds of other RSS feeds … but only the content items
that match your filters.

You can now take this stream of content and either
subscribe to it yourself, if for example you want to find
out immediately what the market is saying about you, what
it's saying about your competitors, and what your
competitors are doing themselves.

Or you can take this stream of content and display it on
your website to:

[a] enrich the visitor experience, by giving them access to
the latest and most relevant list of content from your
field, such as the latest news in the field you are
covering … and do so automatically;

[b] by doing so also making your website more search engine
friendly, thus increasing your rankings.

But up until now doing all of this was quite complicated
and really wasn't accessible to most internet marketers.

But no longer so …

Yahoo! Pipes Changes The Landscape

http://pipes.yahoo.com is the latest offering from Yahoo!,
finally bringing the premise of NewsMastering to the mass
market, and actually putting it on steroids.

The general idea behind Yahoo! Pipes is to allow its users
to "easily" connect various internet data sources, mix them
together in various ways, add additional functionality to
them and create a new single output, pertaining directly to
your settings.

While this may sound alot like the standard RSS aggregation
& filtering we mentioned above, it actually goes much
further than anything on the market in enabling you to
manipulate outside sources and come up with a new content
output, all of this in a visual programming environment.

The "old services" simply allowed you to combine various
RSS feeds, set some basic rules on how you want to get
content from them, such as limiting the output to only the
content items that match your keywords and removing
duplicates, and get a new single RSS feed from them. You
could then subscribe to this RSS feed in your RSS Reader
(for business intelligence purposes) or use it to display
its contents on your website.

But Yahoo! Pipes goes much further.

[BTW - in the Yahoo! Pipes glossary, a pipe is an output
you create from mixing and manipulating various content
sources]

[a] Aggregate and Filter any XML Feed

Aggregate any kind of XML feed, not just RSS, which means
that if your application provides an XML data output, you
can now aggregate that data feed with other different feeds
you might be interested in, and create a single RSS feed
that you can subscribe to in your RSS Reader. Just as an
example, imagine having an RSS feed that brings you various
data from your organization in a single output, such as the
latest sales data from your webstore, latest account of
company expenses, notifications of new employees, important
team communications, your website visitor counts and so on.
It even lets you combine other pipes into a new single pipe.

[b] Content Manipulation

Apply various filters, such as a keyword content filter to
give you only the content you're interested in, sort,
count, truncate, join or even create your own filters. It
even lets you add your own input fields. For example, you
could create a pipe that aggregates all the RSS feeds from
top online retailers, and include an input field that
allows you to enter the name of the product you want the
latest deals on, and then creates an on-the-fly output with
the latest deals for this product. Essentially, it allows
you to add simple or advanced search functionalities to
filter out only the content you're really interested in ...
from hundreds or even thousands of content sources.

[c] Social Applications

Browse through pipes created by other users to either use
them as an end-user, or use their pipes to create your own
new pipes. It of course also allows you to make your own
pipes public and even provide them as a service to
end-users.

There are really almost countless opportunities of what you
can do with Yahoo! Pipes, and various new applications will
surface when the service gets some milage.

The best part is, you can either create your own
application that you use when the need arises from the Web,
or an RSS feed that you subscribe to in your RSS Reader, to
constantly deliver to you the content that you want. Or you
can use the RSS feed to display that content on your
website.

All of this is done through a visual interface, which might
be daunting for the average user, but shouldn't present a
problem to marketers that either have the time to learn the
ropes or pay a little something to a person that already
has.

How Marketers Will Profit

If you're thinking of how you can profit from Yahoo! Pipes
as a marketer, there really are countless opportunities.

[a] Provide highly relevant streams of content on your
website to enrich the visitor experience.

[b] Become a preferred access point to relevant and latest
content in your industry.

[c] Build applications that allow your visitors to easily
access the content they're interested in.

[d] Take your business intelligence activities to the next
level.

And much much more ...

With all the capabilities available through Yahoo! Pipes,
countless new opportunities will certainly arise quickly.

The best part is, you can now more easily take advantage of
them.
===========================================================
Get the easy way to mastering RSS marketing today. Click
here now to get all the details on how to make RSS
marketing work for you and help you increase your online
profits: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/?src=s32
===========================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.