Contributor: ebonk

How to Integrate RSS Into Your Marketing Mix
By Kim Roach (c) 2006

RSS is changing the way we consume information online. Instead of being overloaded with mounds of information in our inbox, we can pick and choose exactly which content providers we want to hear from.

On the other side of the story are the publishers. Not only is RSS changing the way visitors view information, but it is also opening up vast opportunities for publishers wanting to syndicate their content across the Internet.

RSS is turning into one of the most popular distribution channels for webmasters, publishers, article writers and news syndicators. With RSS, you have the opportuníty to have a continual digital conversation with your readers. You can use RSS to syndicate a wide variety of media formats including text, video, and audio.

No longer is the Web all about text. You can use RSS to syndicate your very own talk show, weekly podcast, or a collection of video tutorials.

With over 100 RSS and blog search engines available online, it’s time that you started integrating RSS into your marketing mix. This article will outline how you can combine the power of RSS with your current marketing activities.

To begin, let’s start with email marketing. Some people have predicted that RSS will one day overtake email as the top communication model. However, this is not likely to happen considering the differences between these two technologies. Instead, the two should be combined to form a powerful marketing duo.

Email Marketing and RSS Intertwine

You can complement your email marketing campaigns with one or more RSS feeds. By providing your readers with alternatives, you will reach a much largër number of subscribers.

There are a number of ways that you can integrate RSS into your current email marketing campaign.

1. Use RSS to announce each new issue of your ezine. Announce your e-zine in your RSS feed as a single RSS content item. When your subscribers click-through, they can access your newsletter in full on your website, drawing additional visitors to your content.

2. If you are currently using email autoresponders, provide those very same autoresponders as RSS feeds. You can do this at http://www.zookoda.com .

Using RSS, you can syndicate a wide variety of content. One of the most obvious uses of RSS is to deliver content updates to your users. RSS is an excellent communication medium for delivering daily updates of your web site content. You can’t expect your visitors to come back to your site every day to chëck for updates, but with an RSS feed they can quickly pick up any changes that interest them.

However, this is just the beginning of what is possible with RSS.

Deliver Content Updates, News, and So Much More…

You can also use RSS feeds to deliver news announcements, forum discussion updates, new product releases, quick tips, quotes, new coupons, job listings, classifieds, and real estate listings.

RSS can even be used to deliver content that is not available on your site. Let’s face it, you cannot possibly publish all of the great information that is available on your site’s particular topic.

However, you can supply your users with a content aggregation service that directs them to the best content within your industry.

With all of the digital junk that is currently being delivered online, you would be delivering an extremely valuable service simply by syndicating the most important and relevant information within a particular niche.

Keep in mind that relevant information goes beyond whether or not the content relates to your visitors’ interests. Relevant information can also speak to each individual user. Just like email marketing, you can use personalization within your RSS feeds to increase your response rate.

Speak Directly to Your Visitors with Personalized RSS Feeds

One of my favorite examples of personalization can be found at Babycenter.com. As soon as you enter the site, you are asked for two pieces of information:

Your due date or your child’s birthday and…
Your email address

After you submit your information you start receiving a weekly e-zine that is relevant to your pregnancy stage or the age of your child. If you have a 2-year old, you’ll be receiving articles, tips and product recommendations for that age.

Do you see the power in this? By using profiling, webmasters are able to send information that is highly relevant to their readers on a case-by-case basis.

You could use this same idea with your RSS feeds.

Basic personalization might include elements such as the reader’s first name, while more advanced personalization might deliver personalized content, product recommendations and so on.

Once you have decided on what type of content you would like to syndicate, you must then start organizing content for your feed. If you want to use RSS to its full potential, then I would highly advise you to create multiple RSS feeds for your users.

Use Multiple RSS Feeds to Increase Your Exposure

You can do this by creating RSS feeds for each category of content you cover. This extends your reach and marketing capability. Do not pack all of your content under one generic RSS feed. This is not beneficial for you or your visitors. By breaking your RSS feeds into categories, your visitors will be able to tap into the exact information that they are looking for.

For example, visitors who only want to keep up with forum updates shouldn’t have to sift through articles, news, and other content.

When you begin marketing your RSS feeds, keep in mind that this is still a fairly new technology.

RSS Isn’t Quite Mainstream, So Educate Your Visitors

Take your visitors step-by-step through the process of locating, subscribing and reading an RSS feed. By doing this, you are informing your website visitors and helping to promote the use of your own RSS feed.

To see a really good example of this, go to BBC News.

There is one last step to integrating RSS into your overall marketing strategy. This one is often overlooked, but can be extremely powerful when executed properly.

Take Your RSS Marketing to the Next Level with Your Affíliates

Provide your affíliates with an RSS feed of your product catalog. They can then use your feed to syndicate your latest product releases on their own websites. Whenever someone clicks on a headline, they would be directed to your web store. If they decide to make a purchase, the referring affíliate would make a commission on the sale.

Of course, this type of RSS would most likely need to be customizable, allowing the affíliate to carry only the products updates they feel would be a good match for their website.

Amazon.com has implemented this very same technique and it’s time that the rest of us do so as well.

RSS is one of many ways to communicate with your customer base. RSS should not be your only communication mechanism, but rather simply a piece of the marketing puzzle. When RSS is combined with other communication models, including email and postcard marketing, your message will finally receive its true potential. When any of these techniques are used alone, they löse much of their marketing power.

Start combining your communication models to see much higher response rates.

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About The Author
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com

This article may be freely distributed without modification and provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimisation, webmaster, rss

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Contributor: ebonk

Are Made for AdSense Sites Ruining Search Results?
By Adam McFarland of iPrioritize.com

It’s happened to you. You’ve searched for something on Google and several promising results appear. You click on a link, but when you get to the site all you see are a few ads and nothing even remotely close to what you searched for. So you go back to the search results and try again, only it happens again and again until you finally find a page with some decent content…or frustration sets in and you give up all together.

Why does this happen? How come in this day and age Google can’t give you the results you’re looking for? A large part of the answer is the growing number of made for AdSense (MFA) sites on the web today. MFA sites are designed for the sole purpose of getting you to click on a Google AdSense advertisement.

Define Made for AdSense

A site is made for AdSense if its sole purpose is to get users to click on AdSense ads. Its owners don’t intend that users will learn from its content or participate in a community. All that they want is for them to click on an ad.

A site is NOT made for AdSense if its primary purpose is to provide unique content and the site owner decides to keep their content free by displaying advertisements, AdSense or other. This has been going on for years - television, newspapers, and magazines all generate revenue with advertisements. The difference is that the advertisements supplement the content of the show or article. The same applies for the web. If you have a news site or a forum, placing ads on your site does not make it a made for AdSense site.

Why Do People Make MFA Sites?

The thing with MFA sites is that they work. The overwhelming majority of the population has no clue what Google AdSense is and doesn’t understand that Google and the site owner make money when they click on an ad. By placing these ads in locations that people tend to focus on (Google gives you examples of locations that result in the highest click-through), it’s inevitable that a certain percentage of visitors will click on the ads - either intentionally or unintentionally.

Site owners make anywhere from five cents to several dollars per click (revenue is split between them and Google) depending on the industry. Big deal right? If you convert 5% of users into clicks and you make 10 cents a click, you’re only making 50 cents for every hundred visitors to your site. Well if you make a thousand MFA sites and each gets two hundred visitors a day, you are making a cool $1,000/day.

Smart MFA site owners design sites with keywords that advertisers pay more than the standard 20 cents or 30 cents. They design sites with “content” about lawyers and car companies that purchase AdWords advertisements that cost several dollars a click. Re-do that calculation with five dollars a click instead of 10 cents and your jaw will drop.

How do they get their traffic? In addition to using conventional white hat SEO methods (like unique content and link building), many of these sites shamelessly also take advantage of keyword stuffing and cloaking - tactics that are considered unethical and are against Google’s terms of service. Many also get their clicks in unethical ways - either by clicking on ads themselves or by employing bots to automatically click. This is called click fraud and is also against Google’s terms of service.

Who Gets Hurt?

Some would argue that no one is getting hurt by “tricking” people into clicking. Hey they’re not getting charged anything. No, but some advertiser is. Some business that’s pouring their hard earned money into Google AdWords to attract targeted visitors to their site. Instead they end up paying for accidental clicks.

You (the searcher) also get hurt by getting less than optimal results. Imagine an internet where these sites didn’t exist. You might actually have a chance at finding what you’re looking for on the first try. That would save you some time that I’m sure you’d be glad to have.

Should Google Do Something About It?

Everyone’s first thought is “Google could stop it if they tried.” In reality, probably not. Regardless of the talent they recruit, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people trying to figure out a work around. As Seth Jayson recently said in his article about the same topic entitled “How Google is Killing the Internet” “I think when you pit a few hundred Google Smarty Pantses — who are getting fat on stock options and gourmet meals at the Big Goo campus — against many thousand enterprising schemers on the Internet, the battle will go to those hungry schemers every time.”

Google does have a system in place to reduce click fraud and are always improving their algorithm to rid their results of sites that practice cloaking, keyword stuffing, and other black hat SEO techniques. Unfortunately, it’s probably not enough.

The larger (and much scarier) question is whether or not Google wants to do something about it. For the time being, they stand to make a ton of money off of MFA sites. Until Google starts to see a negative impact from MFA sites there’s really no reason for them to rush to do anything about it. Say Yahoo! all of a sudden came up with a way to identify and block MFA sites and provided better search results because of it, Google may be threatened by the potential (or actual) loss of search percentage. But until that happens I wouldn’t expect Google to do much more than they are right now.

What Can You Do?

There’s no doubt that MFA sites have clogged up the web with thousands of worthless pages. The best way to reduce the number of made for AdSense sites is probably to do something about it yourself. If you advertise on Google AdWords, don’t allow Google to display your ads on their content network (AdSense sites). As an internet user, you can educate others about MFA sites and encourage them not to click on ads. It may not seem like much, but all of those clicks add up - just ask someone who owns a made for AdSense site.

About The Author

Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize - the efficient way to get organized. iPrioritize is the next evolution of list making. We take your pen and paper list and turn it into a live list that can be edited at any time from any place in the world. We make it easy for you to email and print your list, subscribe to your list via RSS, share your list with others, and check your list on your mobile phone.

Technorati Tags: search engine optimisation, webmaster, google adsense, google adwords

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Contributor: ebonk

Checking Out with Google’s New “Checkout” Service
By Merle MCPromotionsPress

After months of “buzz” online about Google’s proposed “PayPal Killer,” they’ve finally launched their new service, “Google Checkout.” After all the hype that was floating around, you’d have thought this new creation would be the death of Paypal, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Online payment options are important, so it’s always nice to have another way to accept payments from your web site. But Google’s new service is also good news for consumers who are concerned about their privacy when shopping online.

We all know Google likes to do things their own way and put a little “Google Twist” on their work, so it comes as no surprise that they’ve added some integration with their Adwords program. You don’t need to use Adwords to utilize Google Checkout, but if you do, Google gives you some other nice benefits.

If you are a seller who also uses Adwords, you’ll love this: For every $1.00 you spend with Adwords, Google will allow you to process $10.00 in “Google Checkout” salës for free. So if you’re already using Adwords and start using Checkout you’ll save monëy on your transaction fees. What are the fees, you say? 2% and $.20 per transaction, which does beat Paypal’s current fees of 2.9% and $.30 per transaction.

Another advantage to offering Checkout on your web site is that your Adwords ads will display a small graphic of a shopping cart next to them. This is called a “Google Checkout Badge,” and will identify your site quickly to searchers as one who will take “Google Checkout” payments from shoppers. Some are wondering if this may help your Adwords ranking. This is something that still remains to be seen.

To sign up, you’ll first need to have a Google account, which you can get at nö chärge by going to http://google.com/accounts. At this time, you must live in the U.S. and have a bank account if you wish to process payments as a merchant. If you’re a merchant you’ll also need to specify your return and shipping policies.

Merchants can accept payments by Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express. If you have an Adwords account you’ll want to link it to your new Checkout account during the registration process in order to earn your free transaction credits.

Before you get too excited, be aware there are some things not allowed to be sold using this new service. They include:

• Adult Goods
• Alcohol
• Body Parts (don’t you need to keep those?)
• Buyers Clubs offering goods at wholesale
• Credít and Collection Services
• Drugs
• M-L-M and
• Gambling

For a complete list, see http://tinyurl.com/hmujh.

There are three ways for sellers to accept payments:

1. Buy/Now Buttons: These are similar to Paypal buttons. You just copy and paste some HTML code and you’re done.
2. E-Commerce Partners: For use with Google’s approved partners’ shopping cart systems.Some of them are: Channell/Advision, Infopedia, Mercantec, Monster Commerce, ShopSite, Volusion.
3. API: A more complex way to integrate more options. This involves a programmer to setup.

One disadvantage to the cut and paste button method is you cannot specify tax or shipping rates. You’ll need to use the API checkout method in order to do that. Another shortcoming is the inability to specify your own return page after a customer completes the purchase process. They get taken back to a “Google Thank You Page.”

All orders are placed into Google’s Merchant Center inside your in box. To view your orders you’ll need to log into Checkout and go to the “orders tab.” If the order can be fulfilled, you then clíck the “charge button” that’s located next to each order. After the order is sent you’ll need to let the buyer know by clicking on the “ship button” next to it.

If you’re worried about chargebacks, don’t. They’re all evaluated by Google and Google will go to bat on your behalf. If the transaction is covered by their “Payment Guarantëe Policy” and you supply Google with all of the documentation they request within 10 days, they will reimburse you within one week.

If you sell on Ebay and want to use Checkout, you might want to review their current approved payment types. There’s been talk on the Net that they are not currently allowing sellers to offer this payment option. For more, see http://tinyurl.com/gowgy.

Checkout’s privacy features are great for your buyers. Google handles all of their personal information — instead of entering a credít card with each transaction, all they have to supply is a user name and password to complete a purchase. All credít card details are maintained by Google with complete details of all transactions.

With the rise in identity theft and people more nervous then ever about sharing their personal information, this should make everyone happy. There’s also the added benefit of a faster checkout experience which is to be appreciated if you’ve ever been put through page after page of a badly put together shopping cart.

Buyers can also clíck a box during the purchase process to specify if they would like to receive future promotional emails from this seller. This should help some with their already “too full” in boxes.

No matter if you’re a merchant or a consumer there are advantages on both sides when it comes to Google Checkout. I’m sure with time Google will add more benefits and features that will make their Checkout process even more impressive. And who knows, maybe someday they will give PayPal a run for their monëy. For more information see:

https://checkout.google.com and
https://checkout.google.com/sell

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About The Author

“Must Have Marketing Resources” by Merle is loaded with VALUABLE online resources YOU need to know about, when it comes to running your online business. Download your copy now at … MCPromotions.

Technorati Tags: webmaster, google checkout

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