Learning RSS from Zero Knowledge

FeedBurner Is So Confusing!

2006-07-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

It has been a couple of months I've been learning and trying out RSS. One of the Feed service which is very popular is called Feedburner. They claimed to have 204,917 feed publisher (from the date I'm writing this which maybe including myself) and serving more than 18 millions subscription. I've been exploring the features inside Feedburner with the free account, however I'm still confused with what they offer, it took me a couple of hours to figure out how to use them.

Oh well, I think I have to study more about it. If you are interested to get to know more about Feed and what it is about, you can read about Feed 101. I'll write about what I know and how I feel about feeds and RSS later.

How To Create A Feed For Your Site

2006-06-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

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 traffïc 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 salës 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 salës 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 optín rates.

Everywhere else the optín 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 sp@m 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 clíck 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 yoursëlf how many of your visitors choose to ignore your email subscription förm 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?

About The Author
Jack Humphrey is a professional website promotion consultant and writes for The Friday Traffïc Report on marketing with RSS and other internet marketing topics, available at http://fridaytrafficreport.jackhumphrey.com.

ClickBank Profit Feeds Generator Review, Part 1

2006-05-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

A few months have pass by. Well, I've learned a lot about something else but I'm not going anywhere with RSS technology until recently. I stumbled across this software and since I have all the thing that the software needs, I better get the software to use as I'll be wasting my time if I don't. The software is called the ClickBank Profit Feeds Generator. I can't recall where I found it but I got it somewhere. Of course installing it was easy as installing Wordpress, however using the tools is a bit confusing as I still don't understand what RSS is truely about.

So, I spent my weekend trying to search for information which could lead me to understand what and how to utilize this RSS technology. Since the last 3 months until today, if you asked me, I will say that RSS is still the same as what I've learned the last time. It's all about getting the latest news into a reader so that you don't have to go access the website of your favourite. However, that's from a user point of view. Now that I have this tool, I need to know how do I deliver that content to the reader or to a website which publishes feeds from other site that feeds the latest news.

Update on my RSS discovery pretty soon.

Adding Feed Subscription on Your Blog

2005-12-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

Before I found this fantastic tool, I used to copy the image, upload it on to my hosting server, note down the link, copy and paste it some more and last but not least republish my blog and do some testing to make sure it'll work. Now, there is this new free tool that you just can use. It has automated the need to do all the work I've mentioned. You only need to fill in your Blog Title and put your feed link there. If you are using Blogger's Blogspot, just add /atom.xml after your blog URL. It's just as simple as that. Of course, you need to know where to put the HTML codes after that. Play around with it and you'll quickly learn about it. Have Fun..

An Excellent RSS Resource

2005-11-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

I've found this excellent resource if you want to know about RSS. Here's a screenschot of it:

HOW TO: Getting Started with RSS

If you have any feedbacks, tell me about it. While I still have a lot of free time now, I think I'll contact anyone who gave me comments. Drop me a line, shall ya..

The Benefit of RSS

2005-11-12T22:31:00.000-08:00

I have to be honest. I am sometimes, a lazy person. I hate doing duplicated jobs or doing things the hard way. Heck, I think everyone doesn't like it either. So, normally what we all do is, we find ways to automate as many things as possible to leverage our limited time that we have in a day. In today's world, we are constantly expose to changes. Whether we like it or not, we have to adapt to certain type of changes in our life.

After I learned about RSS for nearly a week now, I've been using it ever since. I have save a lot of my time just looking on my 'feed reader' or My Yahoo to see if my favourite blog is being updated, or not. I don't really read the news as I think reading the newspaper is more fun during my weekends.

I am an e-mail addict. Whenever I am online, it is compulsory for me to check my e-mail accounts. I have several e-mail accounts, each has its different type of use. When you have e-mail accounts, you normally subscribe to various newsletter. I subscribe to dozens of them. Most of the time, I just skim the headlines and see which one catches my interest then would I read its content. There are blogs who you can subscribe to receive their updates. After knowing this RSS, I have cancelled the e-mail subscription and subscribe to RSS/XML subscription. It is so much easier.

That's the two most biggest benefits that I've experienced so far after a week of using RSS features. I haven't write about how to subscribe yet, but I'm sure going to write 'How To Subscribe To My Blog using RSS subscription' in my next post. I'll put on some pictures for a more comprehensive information. Till next time..

RSS Stands for Really Simple Syndication

2005-11-11T06:18:00.000-08:00

I have heard about before but never bothered to learn about it. I heard all the hype of blog and ping but I never thought is quite simple. I am a lazy person, if there are tools that can feed me while I wouldn't have to lift a finger, I would probably fork out all my money and buy it. The keyword here is 'feed'.

Let's move on to what I have to say about . If you are interested to read about , the best place to read in at Wikipedia. I don't want to waste time here. Apparently, I found out that even people who have blogs don't really know what is. I happen started to learn about it last week. So I'll record everything that I've learned in this blog. Hopefully, anyone who happen to read this blog would benefit something from my exploration.

I've posted a few posts on my personal blog about . You can check it out by clicking on the listed link below:

?What The Hell Is That??

?What The Hell Is That??(Part 2)

If you are lazy but really wanted to learn about and how to utilize it for your blog reading convenient. Then I suggest you first get an account for Google Reader (I personally use this eventhough there are lots of experience user don't really like this tool) and learn how to use it by watching this free flash video tutorial on How To Use Google Reader.

I'll write again on my next RSS exploration adventure..