Up next...a panel on RSS feeds & blog marketing.
I've taken more of a paraphrasing trascript-y approach with this one, as it is an area I have not really done anything in. As always, these are NOT verbatim quotes, just me trying to keep up and get the point across.
Introduction
Users can read feeds through a number of channels:
- Integrated into their browser experience
- Feed aggregation homepages like Yahoo! or Google Reader
- Email feed aggregation tools
RSS allows us to use multiple formats, including language and different file formats like PowerPoint, PDF, and HTML, among others.
There are many delivery formats, too. Browser buttons in the chrome can lead to feeds, and iTunes can distribute multimedia feeds.
Feedburner: Don Loeb
Free service, provides publishers way to measure content viewed outside their website (readers, pages, iTunes, devices); help publishers grow reach by driving traffic, sharing on social networks; enhance RSS medium allowing users to share and save content--email to friend, share to Facebook, etc.; monetize content with advertising in distribution, shared between FB and publishers.
What is RSS?
FB makes the RSS look more like a webpage than the ugly XML. "Nobody should hear about RSS."
Pheedo: Bill Flitter
We help marketers realize full potential of RSS. Provide feeds, and layers of user data.
How do we identify the user who can actually be reached with your ad? Not only the immediately accessible, but also the interim prospects who may not respond now, but are valuable.
Pheedo is an RSS-based advertising platform that allows users to subscribe right from the ad. The person who needs more information or is just too busy to think about it right now can subscribe and read more later.
NetConcepts: Stephen Spencer
Getting to the top of Google with your blogs and feeds
Optimize your feeds
- Go full text, not just summary
- Have more than one feed for your blog
- Have a feed for every category
Your Blog
- Change structure: tag clouds, internal tag pages - tagging posts with right terms can bump you up
- Title tags - most miporant onpage seo. Title tag plugin for WP - incorpoate keywords
- Related posts - multiple pathways
- Top ten posts
(His 15-year-old makes $20 a day with her blog! Smart kid!)
Discussion
To Bill: how do you make money with your feeds?
Bill: RSS plays a vital role. We use our own products to do outbound marketing, using our widgets. We can grab our feeds, and use the widgets to show our content on other people's blogs
To Don: How do you use your personal blog to extend your reach?
Don: FB doesn't spend a lot of money on marketing. Every employee has a blog covering happenings in company and industry. We; spend a lot of time on that. For anyone trying to use blogs for corporate communication, it takes a change in thinking and culture. You need to be transparent and genuine, and use real voice, not marketing. Every employee needs to be able to do customer service of some kind. This can include using Technorait, etc., to track how your company is doing, and getting out and writing personal comments on those talking about you. We seem bigger than we are just becasue we are out there and so active talking to customers on blogs.
To Stephen: How are you putting the things you've talked about into practice?
S: The entire site is powered by WordPress, so it's really all a blog though it doesn't feel like it. What Don said is very important. It's not just you on a soapbox. You need to spend as much time on other people's blogs as on your own.
Back to ours, we decided right before Search Engine Strategies to throw out our CMS and use WP instead. Within 2 months, we doubled our traffic. WP by default is search engine friendly, but not search engine optimized. We implemented tag pages and clouds, and related tags pages (the links display alongside content). This lets you dig deeper on related topics, sort of like guided navigation. Related tag pages were our "secret weapon"--within a few months, we had thousands of indexed pages.
To all: How does HTML in emails vary from feed conversations we are having today?
D: RSS and email are complementary. We think RSS has advantages...email gets caught in spam filters, and is very crowded even when it gets through. Unsubscribing is hard. You have to go out to the site, then hope it actually works. Finally, email requires giving personal information.
No personal information is needed for RSS, and content is delivered in a less cluttered manner. Caveat--RSS publishing requires more frequent publishing than email.
B: "Email is where content goes to die." If you are a publisher, email is getting more costly with regulation and spam protections. RSS is very efficient; if you're a publisher, there is no reason not to have an RSS feed, at least as a supplement. A suggestion...on your email opt-out page, you can have a feed button to keep a few readers.
S: Make sure your feed is updated frequently. Average read time for an email newsletter is 15-20 seconds. If you spend lots of time on it and send it once a quarter, it gets wasted. Frequent RSS updates are a way for more touches. It's not all about frequency, but also recency. Freshness is important!
D: On RSS on the opt-out page. Some publishers realize their email list is "dying". They segment the email by Hotmail, Gmail, etc., and approach users and suggest adding to aggregation pages instead of getting email (don't even call it RSS!)
To All: How are people consuming the content?
B: Interesting use of RSS is things like Netvibes or mSpoke to customize your experience online. A little fancier than simple aggregation, they're a a good use of feeds. Feeds are like a living, breathing organism. You will be able to consume feeds on just about any device, which makes it easier to consume.
S: You can be your own best user of RSS feeds. You can use it and people may not even realize it's RSS. As an example, you can use RSS feeds to create "related content" areas on your own site. Users don't know it's RSS, they just get the benefit from it. You can bring them to your own related content before they look somewhere else.
D: Feeds are not limited to a small subset of users. A lot of people are using standard products like Google homepage, or more specialized things like Google Reader. It's really about distributing content everywhere--widgets, mobile phone, MySpace. iTunes has a 50% market share for podcasts, but that's down significantly; not because iTunes is slipping, but because the web is growing. People are consuming in new ways, like through widgets on pages.
To all: If I use full content, I'm afraid I won't make as much as if people were coming ot my site. How do you manage this?
B: We're seeing that if you do full content, people are still coming back to the page. RSS is just a new opportunity to generate revenue. You may not have user data on them just yet, but they are a subset of your overall pool, and probably the most loyal. They are asking for your content, they are a valuable customers.
D: We've looked at that too. Media companies tend to put out headlines, bloggers are more likely to use full text. We've found no statistical difference. Clicks are pretty much the same through both methods. On blogs, after you read the text you want to comment, so you click through. It's a loyal audience, and you should monetize that. As publishers evolve, there are companies ready to expand their use of RSS. They realize they have to go where users are, so they are increasing content and putting ads into the feed content.
S: By using just the headline, you lose a lot of opportunity. You can include text links that come back to your site. This gets associated with your page by the search engines. This value gets stripped out if it's just a summary feed, and loses a chance for deep links. You can also track with a pixel, which you can't with a summary. (I explain pixel tracking technology in my summary of Akin Arikan's session on measuring web 2.0. It's about halfway down the page.)
To all: What other ways can you track success? IOW, is anyone listening?
B: We do a pretty deep analysis and benchmarking for customers. Not just clickthrough, also open rates, and is content being shared and forwarded? (I lost the rest.)
S: Also, how many comments are coming in through the posts. You can do things to increase the likelihood of getting comments. WordPress has a plugin that inserts a comment box into the feed. Lets people comment without even opening their browsers. (Sorry...I tried to find this and can't. If you know what this is, please post it in the comments!) Also track traffic from search engines, and keywords people are using. Counts for keywords...does a page draw 2 keywords or 20? Page yield - how many pages are yielding traffic? If only 10% get search engine attention, 90% are freeloaders...not doing ANYTHING to draw visitors from search engines.
D: We do provide a range of tools to analyze user behavior and think of things in terms of engagement metrics. Web analytics look at a site, feed analytics look at feeds. You should have a 360 view of your audience. We are trying to provide a framework to track site stats, feed stats AND widget stats, and merge them together. And interaction stats (Diggs, sharing, comments) I get 10 times more people consuming via feeds than via the site. If i didn't understand that, my view of the audience would be very limited.
To all: (Missed the question)
D: Add your content EVERYWHERE. Ping everyone (Pingshot) when you update. Try to get into directories if you can. Submit to every directory.
S: Make sure you have the "Add to my Yahoo" in the search results. This gives a one-click add to their Yahoo! reader straight from SERP. A study found that people didn't even know they were using RSS, but they had the feeds on their page.
Wrap-up
That's it for the panel on RSS feeds and marketing. I think it was one of the better panels I've been to, and definitely gave me some ideas for what I can and should be doing with RSS feeds.
Go forth and feed!
