07.18.06
Really Simple
But when will it become really overused – or even abused?
Well, that is the beauty of RSS – it can’t. It works on the principle of supply and demand. Readers have to sign up to your feed and if they don’t like what you have to say, they can very easily delete it from their Reader.
RSS has been evangelised as the way forward to get your information delivered right to your target market’s desktop or onto your website without having to go out and look for it. I am an evangelist of this content delivery method, without my RSS reader – I would not be able to keep track of all the latest info for my industry as quickly as I am able to.
Not only is this a great way to stay up to date with content, but the flip side of the coin is that it’s a great marketing tool – if used properly.
In terms of marketing methods, it’s also relatively cheap to set up and very quick to implement on your site.
USAToday.com reports that their RSS traffic is ‘rising month after month by orders of magnitude’, even though they are barely promoting their RSS feeds.
Travelocity identified the Yahoo and MSN email users among their current email subscribers and sent them an offer to subscribe via RSS feed with the easy-to-use MyYahoo! and MyMSN buttons. 2/3 of the people that opened the e-mail actually subscribed.
There is a market for everyone out there – you just need to know how to set it up correctly, have your own voice and present your content appropriately.