Web logging first appeared on net in mid-1990s. The term “web log” was initially coined refer to a server’s log file and then expanded to include meaning of online personal journaling. Later on, to avoid confusion, word “blog” was adopted to refer to personal journaling. Today a blog is defined as an online publication where an author puts his or her personal thoughts and opinions from most intimate to corporate ideas, concerns or events, in chronological order on net.

Although, there are as many kinds of blogs on line as there are people, most of these will roughly fall into these kind of bloggers: Personal Bloggers (the original use of blogging), then there are organizational and business Bloggers.

Organizational blogs are meant to facilitate communications between its internal and external audiences. It may also provide information for external publics’ use.

Business blogs promote products or services for profit. They also increase awareness about company, as well as establish itself as an authority with customers, vendors, through publications that demonstrate their expertise in market.

Contrary to general opinion, RSS meets needs of even most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does, except for strong push factor.

Most direct marketing reasons against RSS are in fact result of inadequate understanding of RSS by most marketers.

a] Scheduled and autoresponder messages

There are already a few services and software packages on market that allow for scheduled and autoresponder messages via RSS feeds. Once your visitor subscribes to your special RSS feed, he can receive a pre-determined set of messages in a specific time frame, determined by you. Use these messages to welcome your new reader to your RSS feed; thank your new customer after purchase, send him additional information about ordered product and give him opportunity to buy an additional product at a lower price tag a couple of days later, and so on.

b] RSS metrics

RSS can in fact be tracked: track anything from number of your subscribers, their reading habits, their reading frequency to your click-through rates and activities after clicking-through from your feed. This includes tracking which of your RSS feeds are performing better, are more interesting to your readers and drive more sales ... and same for individual content items.

c] Message targeting