Another Big Ticket Marketing Tool - RSS

Ok, today we’re going to talk about RSS and why it’s an important tool for you Big Ticket Marketing efforts.

First, let’s define what RSS is. RSS actually stands for Real Simple Syndication, which is just a fancy name for a way of formatting content that can then be easily distributed across the internet and read using programs called RSS newsreaders.

RSS readers come in two types.  The first type is a standalone reader that you can download and install just like any other regular program.  The second type is an add on that runs in your internet browser.  I use an RSS reader called Pluck.  You can check Pluck out at pluck.com. If you want to see a screen shot of Pluck running as an add on to internet explorer, check out Figure 1 in the resource box below.

You don’t need to understand the format that the information gets published in in order to take advantage of RSS but just in case you are curious the format is XML (which stands for extensible markup language).

Ok, so where and why would you want to use RSS?

Well, as a user, RSS is a nice way to get access to content in areas that you are interested in without having to surf to a bunch of different sites or by cluttering up your email inbox subscribing to different email lists. 

Say, for example, you are interested in top news stories.  One way to do that is to surf over to Yahoo and then check out the top news stories category.  You could then surf over to the Associate Press site and check out what they have to offer.  And then you could go to USA Today for even more.

But an easier way is to subscribe to Yahoo Top News, Associated Press News and USA Today News using an RSS feed. 

An RSS feed is simply a specially formatted XML document, like I described earlier, that contains the content of the information you are interested in.  RSS adds information to the content like a title, date, brief description and creates a feed that RSS readers can subscribe to.  We’ll come back to how to create a feed later in this article.

If you have an RSS reader you can then read the news simply by browsing the list of RSS feeds you add to your RSS newsreader.  The newsreader will show you the titles of the main stories, the date of publication and also a brief description of the story.  If you are interested in that story you can simply click the RSS story link and read the whole thing right in your news reader.  No more surfing to all sorts of different sites to view the news!  And some newsreaders have a notification feature such that it tells you with a little popup when something new comes in under any of your chosen feeds.

Ok, ok you say, but how can I use RSS as a Big Ticket Marketer.  Well, lots of different ways.

Do you publish a newsletter or blog like I do?  Do you send out updates on a regular basis? How about publish news stories relevant to your target market.  If you are an entrepreneur or a marketer you should be doing at least some of these.  Remember, you need to build relationships with your prospects and customers.   They need to know you, like you and trust you before they will buy from you.  One way they can get to know you, like you and trust you is if you constantly give them great content, information, free stuff that is of interest to them.

Well, you can publish a newsletter or post to a blog or even send updates via email.  In fact I do that today.  But you should also be looking to leverage the power of additional technology to get your message out as well.  Remember everything little thing you do counts!

And there are some definite advantages to using RSS as well as your existing methods.  Here are some of the benefits:

• No spam, virus or email filters turfing your messages.  RSS is what is known as a pull technology. You have to add an RSS feed to your RSS reader and then the reader polls on a regular basis to see if there are any updates to that feed.  It then downloads them for you to read whenever you want.  Email is a push technology which means that you are pushing your message to your customers.  Unfortunately so are all the spammers of the world.  In order to protect themselves, customers using spam filters.  But that also means that legitimate messages from you may get unexpectedly filtered.
• Broader reach. Some people may sign up for your RSS feed even if they don’t sign up for your email list immediately.  So you can still reach more people with your message without them being on your list.  Now, they should probably still be on your list because some offers and specials only get sent to people on the list.  But they might start out just using the RSS feed until they get to know you better.  Also, RSS feeds are getting to be more universally distributed.  They can now be sent to Ipod type devices and hand held PDA’s.
• Rich reading experience.  Instead of receiving an unordered list of messages in an email inbox, the RSS reader automatically organizes messages for a specific feed under that feeds topic.  I’m a hard core email reader but I can definitely see the appeal of having the messages organized by topic before I even read them. Chances are, some of your prospects and customers will like that too.

There are now also products on the market that allow you have autoresponders that send out RSS feed like messages directly to people on your list so they can choose how they get content from you. 

One potential downside is in the area of tracking.  I don’t know how or if RSS messages can be tracked to see if they have been opened or read.  This is currently possible (not perfectly) with certain types of email.  But I’d be willing to bet that someone will figure out how to do this soon if they haven’t already.

As you have probably guessed from reading the last few paragraphs, I am not telling you to stop using email as a way of communicating with your customers.  Certainly RSS has some advantages but it is still being adopted by users.  I suggest you take advantage of it as one more way you can communicate with your target market.

Ok, now on to some practical stuff.  I wanted to show you how to create your own RSS feed.  As an example I am going to tell you how I created an RSS feed for my blog.  My blog is hosted on my own site but is a blogger.com style of blog. I used feedburner.com to actually create the feed that I put on my blog so that anyone with an RSS reader can quickly add it (either by dragging or dropping it into the news reader or by copying the feed URL) to their list of feeds.

So today, I am going to assume you have a blog and that you can configure your blog to produce RSS style content that can then be distributed.  If you don’t yet have a blog you can set one up easily at blogger.com. You can tell blogger.com create the RSS style content on the Settings tab under the Site Feed Link.  Look at Figure 2 in the resource box below if you want to follow along as I talk about the various fields you need to fill in:

Publish Site Feed: The default here is No.  You need to change this setting to Yes.  This will tell blogger to publish an Atom style feed as part of publishing your blog.  Atom is another format that news readers can understand but is not as widely used as RSS is.  We’ll create a feedburner.com style of feed which will convert the Atom format into the one needed for RSS.

Descriptions: There are two choices here. Short and Full. If you choose the short description only the first paragraph or 255 characters of the content of each post will be made available to the news reader.  If you choose full description then all of the content of your post will be available to the news reader. I chose Full to make it easier for everyone to read the entire content of each post.

Site Feed Server Path: This is the path where the content will be formatted (using XML) and saved so that it can be distributed.  I have filled this in with the location of my blog on my FTP server.  If your blog is hosted by blogger you can just leave this blank.

Site Feed Filename: This is the name of the file that blogger will use to format your content. I picked atom.xml as suggested in their example.  I think if you leave this blank it defaults to atom.xml.

Site Feed URL: This is the full http URL to the blog.

Article Footer: I don’t use this so I left it blank.

Ok, now that we’ve got blogger setup to create our content in Atom Format, we’ll use Feedburner.com to create the actual RSS feed that people can add to their RSS newsreaders.  Refer to Figures 3 through 9 in the resource box below if you want to follow along as I talk about the various fields you need to fill in:

In Figure 3, which is the Feedburner.com main page, you simply enter your blog or feed address.  The feed address is a combination of Site Feed Server Path and the Site Feed Filename from above.  So for example if your Site Feed Server Path was http://www.mydomain.com/blogs/myblog/ and your Site Feed Filename was atom.xml then you would enter the feed address as http://www.mydomain.com/blogs/myblog/atom.xml. Click on the Next>> button to the right of where you entered the feed address.

In Figure 4, you can see Feedburner telling you the URL you just typed is what it will use as your feed address.  The 2nd page at Feedburner.com allows you to specify some services you want for your RSS feed.  There are many different types of services.  Under Statistics Service we will check the Standard Stats option (because it’s free :-).

In Figure 5, also on the 2nd page of Feedburner.com, under QuickFeed Services we will select the SmartFeed and Browser-Friendly Burner options.  SmartFeed allows Feedburner to translate your feed to whatever format is most acceptable to the target newsreader.  And it does this independent of the source feed format.  (Remember that Blogger publishes in Atom format… Well, using Feedburner ensures that your content is served up in the format that is most acceptable to the requesting newsreader). The Browser-Friendly Burner options simply makes sure that if someone does view your content in a plain browser and not a newsreader that they can read it easily. I just use all the other defaults under Browser-Friendly Burner.

In Figure 6, again on the 2nd page of Feedburner.com, you can customize the address used to republish your feed through FeedBurner.  So you can change the Feed Title to be something that represents your blog.  I typed in “Big Ticket Blog” for my Feed Title.  And in the FeedBurner URI I modified the URI to be specific to my blog by tacking on bigticketblog at the end of the default URL.

Leave all the other options unchanged.  Click on Next>> button to go the register or logon to your account (Figure 7).  If you don’t have a feedburner account, just follow the basic steps to create one.  If you already have an account, click on the Sign In link.

In Figure 8, you get a Feed Service Confirmation from Feedburner.com.  It will list the title of the feed, the feed URL and the services you selected. To activate the feed, click on the Activate My Feed>> button.

Figure 9 shows Feedburner.com confirming that you have activated your feed.

Now, the final step.  You need to put your feed URL and one of the standard RSS logos on your blog. You can click on the Launch your Publicity Tools link (from Figure 9) and follow the process or you can just copy this html code and add it to the template page for your blog on blogger.com.

HTML Code:

<p>
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/bigticketblog" 
  title="Subscribe to the Big Ticket Blog feed">
  <img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/flchklt.gif" 
    style="border:0"/> Big Ticket Blog feed
</a>
</p>

You will have to replace the href= above with the URL for the feed you just created.  You will also have to change the title and text that people click on from something related to “Big Ticket Blog” to something which is more appropriate for your feed or blog.  If you don’t understand HTML or editing of web page, get your webmaster to make the changes for you.

If you look at the Big Ticket Blog website in the resource box below, you can see the little XML logo and Big Ticket Blog feed that I added in the sidebar at the right below the Archives and the I Power Blogger logo. 

Now for someone to add your blog to their RSS newsreader all they have to do is click on the XML logo or the Big Ticket Blog feed link and drag it over to their newsreader.  The blog will be added automatically and everytime the blog is updated they will receive the new content.  Now, I know for sure that drag and drop works with the Pluck newsreader but it may not work with all of them.  In that case, there will usually be another way to add the feed URL to the list of feeds the newsreader has.

I hope this helps you understand why RSS can be important in your Big Ticket Marketing efforts and gets you setup for distributing your Big Ticket Marketing information via RSS!

Copyright (C) 2005 Chuck Daniel, Like Magic Marketing, LLC -- All Rights Reserved.


-Chuck

Referenced Figures:

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Chuck is a former Microsoft software designer and program manager who spent more than a decade happily working on Email and CRM. Admittedly a seminar, workshop and information addict, Chuck left Microsoft to pursue his interests in personal development, internet, direct and information marketing and to promote and work for charitable causes.

Chuck Daniel
chuck@likemagicmarketing.com
Would You Like to Make BIG Bucks
With BIG Ticket Items Online?
http://www.bigtickethomestudy.com
http://www.bigticketblog.com


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