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RSS Marketing Interview with Rok Hrastnik
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My friend and EzineArticles expert author Rok Hrastnik interviewed me yesterday for his 2007 edition of his RSS e-book. He gave me permission to share his questions along with some of my answers:
1. Could you please give us an overview of how you are using RSS for your marketing purposes?
We’re not using RSS for marketing purposes as the primary goal, but rather we use RSS for pre-qualified visitor traffic-attraction purposes.
EzineArticles has RSS feeds for every category and one for every single expert author listed on our site (45k+). For a select few publishers in a closed test, we also have a keyword RSS feed. Lastly, we’ve made our RSS feeds compliant with the browser standards that allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds very easily.
2. What general results are you seeing from your RSS marketing? Have you seen it drive traffic from the RSS search engines, drive new subscriptions … ?
I’m not certain it’s driving new subscriptions, but I do know that after search engines and email alerts, that our RSS feeds drive the next highest level of traffic to the site daily. This comes largely from a combination of RSS readers who subscribe directly to a particular set of feeds and from niche publishers who add the respective EzineArticles RSS feed to further add value to their web visitors. Example: A Yoga website could add our Yoga RSS feed to display automatically the freshest Yoga articles on their site. They win because they expose their users to a more complete set of information, we win because this drives highly desired and qualified traffic back to our articles and our authors win because they get more exposure.
3. What does it take to manage such an incredibly large number of RSS feeds? What system are you using?
Since 2003 we’ve been developing our own CMS (Content Management System)… So, it’s all done in-house and it’s full automated.
4. Could you please take us through your implementation process step-by-step?
How we implemented our RSS feeds would most likely be of no value to your readers who don’t have the benefit of an in-house CMS development team. I can tell you that we’re only scratching the surface of how RSS feeds will be used to grow the site and attract more qualified visitors.
We have not begun educating our publishers on how to intall RSS feeds in their own website as this varies widely depending on which CMS they are using. Most of the CMS engines today have RSS modules but I’m not sure they are as flexible or customizable as they should be/could be.
5. What are the key learning points you’ve learned through your RSS experience that you can share with other marketers?
- Have them… meaning, get RSS feeds up on your site immediately if you don’t have them.
- Test them often and make sure they work.
- Only offer PARTIAL-FEEDS. I have yet to see any good arguments for FULL-FEED RSS feeds.
- Watch for funny character-sets that can break RSS feeds… and pay close attention to the mechanical quality of your article SUMMARIES (because this is what the RSS reader sees).
- Use your email newsletter to educate your audience on how to use your RSS feeds.
- If you accept user-submitted content, give them the ability to have their own RSS feeds so they can display them also on their own website.
- Autoconfigure your RSS feeds to be browser aware so those with RSS-intelligent browsers can bookmark your RSS feeds.
6. How well does RSS work with e-mail marketing?
A better question to ask: How well can you use e-mail marketing to convince your users and publishers to use your RSS feeds for their and your benefit?
I hope everyone enjoyed the interview. :-)
Any RSS questions?
 Posted by Christopher M. Knight on February 16, 2007 at 10:01 am | Views 1,220 | |
14 Comments »
Edward Weiss writes: Thad Ferguson writes:
Christopher M. Knight writes:Perhaps in the future, yes, that would be nice data to be able to share.
Edward,
Think of RSS as XML rather than RSS… because it is XML… a language with its own rules very similar to HTML.
That said, you can either have your CMS produce the feed for you as a plug in/add on or you can hire someone to write a php or asp script to autogenerate the XML file.
Kathy Ostman-Magnusen writes:For me I think there needs to be RSS feed for dummies, esp. when I read the comments about RSS, CMS and SML and then HTLM…
EWWW and GADS!
Allen Taylor writes:I too would like more info on RSS. This is an area that I want to grow in the use of but I’m not sure where to start. I’ve been researching aggregators but I’m not sure if I should use a web-based feedreader, an Outlook reader or a stand alone reader. Plus, creating feeds for my own website. I’ve been unable to find one source comprehensive enough that is trustworthy for giving the best and most in-depth information.
Allen Taylor writes: Christopher M. Knight writes:If we did a full-feed, we’d include the entire article in the feed. This makes no sense to us, so therefore we won’t do it.
Allen Taylor writes: Samantha Rangen writes:I use it on one site to pull my own WordPress blog entries to the bottom nav bar and on my “about us” page to pull a list of articles from one of my author names here. Same script, one site, different config command.
By combining CARP with my author name RSS feeds, I can write niche articles and pull the feed onto the correct niche site.
Thanks for the tips on other implementations of RSS, Chris. I’m working on a site based on Drupal, and your tips were good heads up for planning.
Elaine Rithal writes: Elaine Rithal writes:RSS feed for comments on this post.
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You gave me one to use before but I confess I have not implicated it because it all confuses me. I cannot wait to see the input on this blog. I always learn so much from each subject. I have around 30 blogs that I maintain to keep my different series of work better defined. I am sure they would all do better with RSS feed. That and all my articles and my website… OK! A must!
Thank you.