Chris Pirillo wrote one of the first books on e-mail newsletters -- Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing (Top Floor Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0966103254 ). So when he announces that e-mail publishing is dying and that RSS feeds will be their replacement, I sit up and take notice.
If you're like me, you've seen the acronym RSS (Really Simple Syndication) floating in the Internet's alphabet soup, but you've never really understood it -- or its potential. More than that, I must confess to technology overload. For the first two days I studied RSS, the whole concept was fuzzy, foggy,
and elusive.
My goal is to provide you with some simple handles on RSS -- what it is good for and how to use it to promote your online business. So fasten your mental seat belts and let's explore a brand new concept -- RSS feeds and RSS syndication. I'm a hands-on kind of guy, but I am going to purposely avoid technical issues in this article. You can get many technical explanations of RSS on the Internet -- I've listed many good articles under RSS Resources. But first you need a non-technical explanation to introduce you to this subject. http://www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=me_RSS
What Can RSS Do for You?
I understand things better when I understand what they can accomplish. Here's what RSS can do for you as a newsletter publisher:
RSS feeds show the headlines and links to your articles to others without you having to e-mail those titles and links to your list subscribers. Within a few minutes or hours of publishing, people are aware of your latest articles and many will click through to read the article.
What Does an RSS Feed Consist of?
An RSS feed is essentially a file coded in XML that contains, for each of your most recent articles:
Title
Article URL
Descriptive teaser sentences designed to get someone to read the article
If Mary Customer "subscribes" to your RSS feed, her news aggregator program will check this file every few hours. If any articles are added, the new article titles will be displayed almost immediately.
What is a News Aggregator?
A news aggregator is a new kind of software installed on your computer that allows you to receive RSS feeds. It's a lot like the news group readers of yesteryear. Eventually, I expect to see news aggregators become an integral part of web browsers or e-mail programs.
How Prevalent is RSS?
Just how many people are gathering information via RSS feeds? Probably millions worldwide. I talked to Greg Reinacker of NewsGator, a popular RSS news feed aggregator that integrates with Microsoft Outlook. He estimates that less that 1% of Internet end users have a news aggregator at present, though he believes that RSS feeds are just now being noticed by the mainstream press. Those who use news aggregators find that they can keep up with the news sites they are tracking in a quarter of the time they used to spend. I expect to see the number of users growing very rapidly this coming year.
Publishers are increasingly using RSS feeds. Just recently Yahoo! began to syndicate 14 of its news feeds using RSS (http://news.yahoo.com/rss/). More and more publications -- as well as thousands of blogs -- offer RSS syndication.
How Expensive Is It?
Publishing your headlines in RSS is essentially free. You'll need to remember to add an "item" to your RSS feed each time you post a new article on your website or publish a newsletter. Even the publishing tools are free.
Is E-Mail Marketing Dying?
A few gurus predict the death of e-mail as a publishing and marketing tool, such as respected industry player Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome.com. But I think reports of e-mail publishing's death are exaggerated. And, at this point, RSS hasn't been widely adopted as a replacement.
I also see statistics cited by MarketingSherpa and DoubleClick to prove that e-mail marketing is strong and healthy. Frankly, I don't believe them. From my vantage point, I've seen opt-in e-mail list revenues dwindle and opt-in e-mail newsletters become less responsive, so far as click-through rates are concerned. More ISPs are rejecting e-mails solely on the basis that they receive a certain threshold number of bouncing e-mails from a given source. There is a very serious problem.
However, I don't see e-mail marketing as dying, but challenged. I believe we'll find a way to renew the tremendously useful medium of e-mail. But we can't afford to ignore the growth of RSS feeds as a preferred way for many business people to receive information. RSS is on the cusp of widespread use. As a result, I am now offering site visitors the option of subscribing via e-mail and/or an RSS news feed that contains my article titles, URLs, and a short description. I recommend that you do the same. And, while you're at it, why don't you download a news aggregator and then sign up for my RSS feed right away?
