Email marketing once proved to be immensely effective, but greedy and idiotic polluted well by spamming planet with everything from weight-loss products to sexual enhancement drugs and beyond. Because of stench, filters and laws have been created to attempt to fix problem, but still Internet is polluted with more and more junk each day. So obviously, filters and legislation are not solution, for consumers, publishers, or marketers.Everyone has been left scratching their heads and asking... What do I do to avoid this crap and make Internet mine again? How do I build my business and promote it without having to deal with email? After all, what's point in spending money on email advertising campaigns when there is no guarantee that emails will even reach their destination?
Enter... RSS. RSS is perfect communication tool. It's applications far outreach those of email for marketing, publishing and personal communications. RSS is answer to our communication woes.
Using RSS to create blogs for communicating with customers, affiliates, partners and family is far and away more effective and reliable than email ever was. As a marketing tool, it really packs a punch that email never could. The reason being is that blogs are targets for search engine spiders. They are themselves, a web presence, whereas email never was and never will be.
Just like a web page, search engine spiders hit blog pages and rank them. The difference between static web page and RSS feed is that web pages seldom update their content, RSS feeds, by design, are created to be dynamic and provide regularly updated content, in theory, depending on blog owner of course. This prompts search engine spiders to revisit and rerank them more often.
For writers, publishers and and anyone else with something to say, RSS has been a godsend. It has provided answer to question of what to do now. Blogging has replaced email for those who have become frustrated with dealing with problems of email publishing and marketing. Publishers can now get their message out to their subscribers without headaches associated with sending email, or posting static pages to web. Even publishing an ezine to Internet as a web page required sending of email to make readers aware of newest issue.
As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and blog publishing is no exception. Now that RSS has become rage for marketing purposes, several people have taken it upon themselves, in name of almighty dollar, to pollute this well too. The newest rash of 'RSS tools' have created some issues of ethics and and credibility. With perhaps honest intention of being search engine optimization tools, or an automated system for fetching content, this batch of stuff has too much potential for misuse. The result of misuse of these types of programs can be devastating. Already some of these programs have been banned from places like Google and Blogharbour because of this potential.
Programs such as these in hands of inexperienced, will cause future problems for bloggers down road. More and more pages generated using these programs will be banned, and getting banned, right out of gate, for a newbie, would be a sad thing indeed.
The right way to use blogging to increase your search engine presence is to publish good content. Period. Provide useful information to those who are looking for it. Become someone's trusted information provider, and you have a customer for life. Publish keyword rich articles that give searcher what they are looking for... solutions for problems.
Publish your information regularly. Weekly is good, daily is better. Sending pings and things too often will get you blacklisted too.
And here is where networking comes in... Find content for your blog from article banks, where authors submit their work for reprint. List yourself in databases as one who accepts article submissions. Get to know other authors and publishers and share content with them. Syndicate your blogs in exchange with other bloggers. Watch your world explode with new opportunities.