There are two realizations I’ve made recently. First, feeds are like magic. The marketing machine loves RSS feeds.
Getting your marketing machine perfectly tuned and tweaked to run like a piece of precision German engineering is something that takes a bit of effort. But its effort that is well worth it.
What’s an RSS Feed
Sometimes I feel like RSS feeds are rarely used to their full potential. What exactly is a feed? At the most basic level, its a list. More specifically, its a computer file that resides on a server and contains a list of things.
Those “things” could be blog posts, news stories, or podcasts. They could be many other things, of course, but these are the most popular “things” in an RSS feed.
We’ll start off with a blog. Every time you make a new blog post, there is a file on your server that gets updated. Its a text document, called an XML file, that contains a few bits of information about your post (like the title of the post, the time it was posted, and a brief summary.)
Now if someone has subscribed to your blog, their RSS feeder (and there are many types) checks that file when it starts up, along with the corresponding XML files for all the other feeds on all the other servers that you might be subscribed to.
Think of it like a little robot. You start the RSS reader program and it goes out to the internet and finds all the sites that you’ve subscribed to and lets you know which ones are updated, as well as a brief summary of the updates.
If you click on the link it provides, then you are taken to the full blog post. This saves you the time of going to each and every site, one at a time, to check if they’ve updated their blog.
Whoop-dee-ding-dong! Why is this important?
So glad you asked! Not only does this make checking many websites, blogs, podcasts, and news sites, more efficient, but it allows you to do some real mojo with the information.
I use a Mac and there’s a great program called NetNewswire (they make other RSS feed programs for that “other” operating system too). This is what I use to see what’s updated. I’ve got all my RSS feeds organized by topic, so I can quickly see what’s going on in a specific interest at any time.
The Magic Mojo comes into play when you realize that this RSS XML file is just a text file that can be read by any computer. Now, you can do searches, you can do filtering, and you can get a pulse on a topic very quickly.
Once you start aggregating these feeds, you can start watching them for trends, since all that data is right at your fingertips. A great way to do this is with Google Reader and Google Alerts.
Both of these services aggregate RSS feeds in different ways. Google Reader is at its core, an RSS reader that takes a feed and displays it for you.
Google Alerts is like a custom feed creator. You give it some search terms and it creates an RSS feed created from all the blogs in its database. What’s in that new feed? All the posts with your search term.
Let me say that again… Google Alerts allows you to get an almost realtime notification of a specific search term culled from all the blogs in Google’s database.
Let that soak in. If you want to find out anytime someone blogs about a Cintiq, for example, you create a Google Alert on the word “Cintiq.” Then Alerts gives you a feed with posts from every reference to the word “Cintiq.”
I’ll let you mull that on your own for awhile.
Back? Okay. Now, realize that others are doing this too. In fact, RSS feeds are becoming very popular for this reason.
It is also affecting how people consume their information. For example, more and more, people are no longer going TO a website/blog/etc to consume their information. Instead, they use the RSS readers and have the news delivered to them.
It’s the newspaper all over again. Only now it’s a steady river of information flowing right up to your door. And, this information is customized and tailored to match YOUR specific interests.
Feed Your Engine
This is what makes it such a powerful marketing tool.
When you create these alerts and set them up as a feed, you get real-time data on what’s going on in your industry. This allows you to create custom marketing messages based on trends that most people won’t see for days, weeks, or even months later.
During political campaigns, politicians pay big bucks to get polling data and find the “pulse of the people.” Play around with the trends in Google Reader and Alerts and you can watch the graph of various topics and get that instant feedback.
Use this to find what your potential clients are thinking, what they feel is important to them at this specific moment in time, and things they feel are not important.
Creating Your Own Feed
Yes, you should have your own RSS feed for your sites for several reasons. The good news is that if you run a blog, this is already done, automatically.
One of the main reasons to have an RSS feed and be out there all the time is the old marketing concept of being the first person they think of when they need your service.
The idea of publishing a monthy/quarterly newsletter has now been transformed to publishing a weekly or daily blog. Your activity is attractive in many ways, too.
It is pretty well known that Google really likes fresh content. This is one reason they have a Blog search and News search added to their site.
By publishing a frequently updated blog, you are now not only feeding an RSS feed, but feeding the giant that is Google. It will frequent your site more often and we’ve seen evidence that it favors these types of sites more than older, static sites, in its search results.
Creating a Site Around This Concept
You can use any one of the many blogging software services out there. They all work well. Blogger (blogspot) is a popular one.
We’ve chosen to use WordPress for several reasons. First, we can install it on our own server. While you can create yourblog.wordpress.com, this has the same handicap as Blogger: your blog is on someone else’s server. All the links, all the traffic, goes to THEIR site.
With the WordPress (open source install package), we run the software on our own server and can now create blog.yourdomain.com.
This is huge. Because now everyone is coming to YOUR site. You can also make the blog a part of the site, so they are not leaving your site. OR… you can make the entire site run on WordPress.
Then the blog is an embedded part of your whole site and now your site gains all the benefits of a blog with the search engines, links, and traffic.
It also lets you brand your blog to exactly what you want instead of choosing from a small selection of ‘themes.’
WordPress is also standards compliant. This means that it sticks to the web authoring standards. It also creates a sitemap for Google, making it much easier for Google to see what’s on your site and what’s changed since the last time it indexed your site (and WordPress “pings” Google when you create it… letting Google know your site is there and ready to be indexed).
Are You Well Fed?
Hopefully, this has given you enough to think about. Between Google Alerts, Reader, the marketing engine of the feed aggregators, the benefits of fresh content on blogs, and WordPress, that should be enough to keep you busy for awhile.
So start tweaking your site, add a blog to your own server and site and start your research with the RSS feeds!
