When it comes to new internet marketing opportunities for your business, RSS just might be answer you were looking for. Here are just some of new opportunities it can provide you with …

1. PODCASTING AND VIDEOCASTING

Podcasting (delivering internet audio content) and Videocasting (delivering internet video content) allow you to communicate via rich media messages, not only making your content more attractive and powerful, but also enabling a more personal »conversation« with your audiences.

Up until know, internet was predominantly a textual channel. Adding audio and video to mix, delivering both via RSS, goes beyond basic capabilities provided by »traditional« internet content delivery channels. Rich media personalizes internet experience and gives your company a distinguishable face, while at same time providing you with a media platform to convey your message so that it is easier to understand, see and feel.

Think about ...

--> Delivering press releases in audio or video

--> Sending your customers a personal video message from CEO

--> Doing audio interviews to expand your reach and provide more content to your visitors

--> Delivering video demonstrations of your products

--> Using video and audio to demonstrate how your customers and readers can easily resolve various issues that you are helping them with

--> Delivering important messages to your readers, customers and business partners via a more personal audio experience, instead of using impersonal e-mail communications

--> And so on ...

In addition, Podcasting and Videocasting form basis of new business models, giving you opportunity to expand your product base to include these formats with higher perceived value.

Customer education & support are improved as well, since you can now demonstrate key product usage points via online video  providing customer support content in a format, which can easily demonstrate everything you need to convey to your customers.

2. HIGH FREQUENCY CONTENT UPDATES

High frequency content updates, even on a daily or hourly basis, are now finally possible with RSS. No more need to hold on your important messages, news and other content for a week or even a month to include it in your e-zine --- with RSS you can update your content as often as you want/need, and your subscribers won't mind.

3. APPCASTING

Appcasting goes one step further, giving you ability to deliver critical software updates and patches to your existing clients, without them having to visit your web site every week to see if much needed update is already available or not.

4. PRODUCT NEWS, RELEASES AND UPDATES

Product news, releases and updates are now finally possible in an easy-to-consume way. Using RSS, you can provide your customers or prospects with simple tools to create their own »product feeds«, through which they'll be immediately notified when new products that precisely match their interests are available.

When building websites there are two main options: large content site or small mini-sites. Large content sites are normally more "information" focused. Mini-sites, however, normally have one purpose only, to sell.

Given what search engines want, large content sites are much better for getting search engine traffic. Most of time (unless you're excellent at optimizing), it's hard to get mini-sites to rank well for competitive keywords.

This is why most do NOT rely on search engines for traffic to their mini-sites.

In all honesty, best strategy is to combine two types of sites by having a large content site to rank well with search engines that feeds traffic to your mini-sites.

However, not all of us have time or know-how to easily build large sites that do well with search engines. Most of us just want to put up a small site and start making money.

Here are 3 traffic generating techniques I use everyday for traffic to mini-sites.

#1: Forums/Discussion Boards

I have made more than $6,000 from one mini-site just by targeting it to right forum in my signature file. All I did was leave a nice statement in my signature file; in 1 month I attracted over 5,000 targeted visitors that converted to over $6,000 for me.

The basic strategy here is that you need to find related forums and become active in them. Get yourself known, find out what those members talk about and find an affiliate product to fit their demand.

Then, make a nice, simple, yet captive site with a great headline followed by a review of product. Test it and if it pulls well, you have a winner. If not, choose another product.

#2: Ezine Advertising

I would rate ezine advertising at second best way to gather traffic to your mini-sites only because this technique can cost some money. Forum promotions have no cost (typically). However, ezine advertising can provide much better results.