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Your 7-Step RSS Marketing Plan

by Rok Hrastnik

As an alternative to e-mail, RSS is becoming an increasingly important content delivery channel that allows marketers to deliver all of their content, fully upgrade all of their marketing initiatives and establish lasting client relationships.

Whether direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communications, online publishing, SEO, traffic generation or customer relationship management, RSS brings the power of delivery back to the hands of marketers.

But most marketers still do not know how to actually get started with RSS, especially when trying to take its power beyond basic blogging.

Here's a 7-step plan to help get you started. It includes a personal RSS marketing checklist to help you get the most from RSS marketing.

1. Start using RSS as an end-user.

The first step to getting started with RSS marketing/publishing is getting your own RSS aggregator, subscribing to other RSS feeds and just seeing and understanding how it all works.

There's a variety of RSS aggregators to choose from, including the following:

• Web-based RSS aggregators: MyYahoo!, NewsGator, Bloglines

• Desktop RSS aggregators (software): Awasu, FeedDemon, Vox Lite

To find feeds of interest to subscribe to, cruise RSS feed-specific search engines such as Feedster.

2. Plan your RSS feeds.

Planning your RSS feeds might be the most important thing you do for RSS. It's the one factor that decides between RSS marketing success and failure.

Start by identifying the different target audiences that you might want to reach with RSS, especially these:

• Prospects, segmented by prevailing interest

• Existing clients, segmented by prevailing interest, business topic or existing products

• Business partners, segmented by partner type, such as suppliers

• Internal audiences, such as employees, owners and investors

• The media

• Website syndication partners, segmented by their existing content

• Search engines and directories

Depending on how complex your business and online content strategies are, you might need to plan for different feeds for each of the target audiences you identify. Of course, this also depends on your marketing goals with each.

After identifying the key target audiences for RSS content delivery, the next step involves actually planning what content type and topics you are going to deliver. These might include the following:

• Product feeds
• Podcast feeds
• News feeds
• Articles feeds
• Direct communication feeds
• E-zine publishing
• Autoresponder content
• Forum content
• Latest downloads
• Product support information & updates

3. Create a list of RSS marketing/publishing requirements

Then create a list of requirements for the RSS marketing/publishing solution you will obtain to publish your feeds. The list should answer the basic questions, such as these:

• Do you want to integrate RSS publishing with your existing content management system?

• What RSS metrics you'll want to watch? For example, are you satisfied with just a rough idea of how many people are reading your RSS feed, or are you interested in more precise subscriber counts, clicks and even individual content-item popularity?

• Do you need feed personalization, such as personalizing your RSS content with the recipient's name and other details?

• Do you want to provide your subscribers with the ability to precisely select the content they want to receive in your RSS feed (customization), such as by content topic, keywords, authors and so on?

• Do you want the RSS feeds to be hosted on your own server?

• Do you need the ability to target promotional messages or other content to your individual RSS feed subscribers, for example based on their previous clicks and reading habits, or even their subscription data?

• What's your budget?

4. Choose an RSS marketing/publishing tool and start generating feeds

After you've prepared a list of requirements, start searching for the appropriate tool. These come in a few general categories:

• Desktop feed generation tools. Desktop software you can use to inexpensively, quickly and easily generate RSS feeds, but that doesn't allow for more advanced features such as content targeting.

• Basic hosted online RSS publishing solutions. These work quite similar to desktop tools, but generally allow for a more streamlined publishing experience. Their key problem is that they usually require the publisher to host the feeds on the vendor's server, thus decreasing the SEO impact of RSS.

• Advanced RSS marketing solutions. These will cover more advanced RSS marketing capabilities, such as metrics, scheduled autoresponder messages, database building capabilities and similar features.

• High-end e-mail integrated solutions. e-mail integrated solutions are the most recent newcomer to the RSS industry, being provided by some of the best reputable e-mail vendors, and providing marketers with full integration with their existing e-mail marketing solutions.

• Other options. There are other options as well—for example, using your existing content management system to publish RSS feeds, or using a blog publishing solution, which allows for some basic RSS publishing features but not much in terms of RSS marketing.

5. Promote your RSS feeds through your own channels

• Create an RSS presentation page to explain to your visitors what RSS is; how the visitor will benefit from using RSS; where they can get a free RSS aggregator (recommend one yourself!); how they can subscribe to your RSS feeds; and why they should subscribe to your own RSS feeds.

  Then, on this same page, include the links to all of your RSS feeds. In addition to the standard orange RSS button, also include direct links for subscriptions via My Yahoo and other relevant services, such as Bloglines.

• Promote the RSS presentation page as much as you can using all of your available channels.

• Promote your RSS feeds directly below your e-zine subscription box, and always "above the fold." Promote your RSS presentation page (telling your visitors that's where they can subscribe to your feeds) on the most prominent locations of your site.

• If you're publishing more than one RSS feed, or a couple of focused-topic feeds, promote each of them next to their topics on the site.

• Promote your RSS feeds in all of your e-mail messages and e-zine issues.

• As for the content, don't just say "Subscribe to receive news from my site." Instead, prepare compelling copy to show your visitors why they need to subscribe to your content in the first place, and why they should subscribe specifically to your RSS feeds.

• Enable auto-discovery to allow browsers with integrated features to easily discover your feed upon visit, and help search engines locate it on your site.

6. Promote your RSS feed through external channels

• Submit your feeds to the appropriate search engines and directories.

• Ping the RSS aggregation sites each time you update your online content, letting them know that new content is available to be indexed.

7. Other key RSS activities

• Measure and optimize your feeds.

• Syndicate your feed content to other Web media.

• Display third-party RSS feeds on your site.

Rok Hrastnik is the author of "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS", acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide on marketing with RSS by top RSS industry leaders, experts, developers and top marketers. Find out all you need to know about RSS and how to use it to get your content delivered, win back your customers, make more sales and increase search engine rankings.

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