Today on Word Sell, I observed that
RSS is "the most underutilized technology tools in business today." RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, has been around since 1999, but it remains a mystery to most folks outside of bloggers, geeks, and workers in the technology sector.
But RSS is a superb tool for search marketing, no matter what your business. RSS enables you to subscribe to blogs or regular Web pages, so that newly published material comes directly to you, just like a newspaper delivered to your home. Instead of combing the Web to find new material on the Web sites you like to follow, new material comes to you - immediately and, unlike newspaper subscriptions - at no cost.
An RSS feed (like the one you see on this blog's sidebar, marked by the orange RSS emblem) is cost free and easy to set up. Your company can use RSS to deliver important information to suppliers and customers -
- New product announcements.
- Personnel changes.
- Upcoming events.
- Industry news.
- Company news.
- Employee profiles.
- Sales promotions.
- User tips.
- Case studies.
- Anything else you can think of!
If you're smart enough to be publishing fresh content on your site, take the next step and offer an RSS feed. Your valuable information is not getting read, because you're relying on people coming to your site, which doesn't always happen.
It may take a little work to show customers how to use RSS, but they don't call it Real Simple Syndication for nothing. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to subscribe to feeds and read them.
RSS gets your marketing message out, directly to the people you want to communicate with. But equally important, RSS puts customers in control. Customers decide what feeds they want to subscribe to. Customers decide when to read them. Customers decide when to stop subscribing.
Customers like that. If you offer an RSS feed, customers will like you, too. Give us a call - we can help you set up your feed. There's really no reason not to RSS.
