Sally Falkow, a guest contributor in ?Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS?, explains how a small business with huge competition achieved #1 search engine rankings utilizing the power of RSS and a brand new blog type, blogsite. Based on the contribution in "Unleash".

BTI provides business telephone systems. They have been operating for 20 years Although they do traditional phone systems for businesses they have kept abreast of the technology changes.

In 2003 the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market really took off. The technology matured and became a viable option. The market (and the Internet) was flooded with marketing material from big players with big budgets.

A company with a limited budget could have been buried in this avalanche of content online. There is no way they could compete head ?to-head with any of the big players like the Bells, Cisco or Avaya.

Using the system of a blog and RSS feeds aggregating and syndicating their content, they have increased their Internet footprint and visibility from zero results on the first three pages for any search term to do with business phone system or VoIP to 120 page one results on terms like

VoIp solution provider #1 #3

VoIP small business #5

VoIP small business phone #7 #8

VoIP business phone #7 #8

VoIP benefits #2

VoIP market demand #1 #2

Even the highly competitive term business phone system, which is competing against 24 million other web pages, is now at #23 on Google and moving up fast.

The RSS feeds have influenced journalists in this space too. As a result of finding their feeds and their blog, two journalists have interviewed BTI executives and clients for influential online newsletters aimed at CIOs and CFOs ? BTI's perfect target audience.

The traffic to their corporate website has increased by 50% and they are starting to get leads from the Internet.

Other companies who are paying to appear on page one for these terms are shelling out over $5.00 a click for these top positions.

How They Did It?

The BTI Communications blog is a good example of an "integrated" blog / brand site, boosting the company's position in the VoIP marketplace through thought leadership content pieces and in addition by including relevant VoIP content from other content sources.

The web site itself includes a number of integrated VoIP blogs, as well as a collection of auto-generated feeds about the VoIP market ("VoIP Radar"). The Radar automatically integrates content from different web sources and on different VoIP sources, making the web site a central information point for VoIP, thus generating added value for the web site's visitors.

All of the content available through the web site helps generate greater reach for the company through better search engine visibility and from all of the RSS feeds it provides.