You’re currently reading Generate UK’s Top 20 Digital Marketing ideas. Over the course of the next month, we’ll be sharing our experience to help you marketed your business on the Internet.
Feeds are also known as RSS. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people opt for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. In essence, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by computers rather than people. News feeds allow the user to see when websites have added new content. The user can receive the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as it’s published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.
The big benefit to RSS is that individuals can opt-in to content of interest and totally control the flow of information that they receive. If the quality of the content in the feed declines, users simply remove the feed from their RSS reader and they will not receive any additional updates from that source. The RSS reader acts as an aggregator, allowing users to view and scan multiple content streams in a timely fashion.
If you would like to learn more about how RSS feeds can help your business, contact us on 01635 550431,
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Small RSS logos, similar to the one you can see to the left of this page are popping up on all sorts of web sites. Many of the larger well known sites already have them and you might be wondering what their benefit is and what they might do for your own site or business.
Typically, RSS is considered a great way to increase the amount of relevant content on a web site. For example, if your business is selling motor bikes, you might have a news section where you syndicate all of the related news to motor bikes. The benefit to your visitors is that you are providing them with regularly updated information that is pertinent to their interests. The benefit for the web site owner is that it reduces the time required to serve up interesting content.
The next stage is even better; by offering an RSS feed on your site you are providing an opportunity for people with similar interests to your own to syndicate your content. This works great if you are a news or content driven business, however it less clear how to benefit if you’re an e-commerce site for example.
We at Generate UK, were recently engaged to work on an e-commerce site, we set our client’s site up, created a solid pay per click campaign and optimised their web site for the search engines. We also wanted to see how we could incorporate RSS feeds into their marketing plan. One way that we identified was to encourage their customers to review their products. These reviews, were collected as a section in their blog and syndicated.
We then started to optimise their RSS feed, this is an important step. You need to track the number of readers, establish who is reading and encourage users to add your feed. You then have a readership of interested parties finding out about how good your customers are saying you are. It’s the perfect referral system for the digital age.
If you would like to learn more about RSS and how it should be a valid part of your online marketing plan, please do not hesitate to contact us.
