It's great to finally go international:)

Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly.

I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it.

But, I do believe it will be worth the wait.

I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books.

Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:)

So, yes. FeedBurner, a leading RSS metrics and RSS advertising company was just acquired by Google. Finally confirmed after weeks of speculation. I won't go into the details of the acquisition, as you can read more about it at the FeedBurner blog and just by following the news at Google News.

Here, we'll take a look at the implications this brings to the world of RSS Marketing. Just my predictions of course:)

1. RSS Metrics Will Finally Become Integrated With Web Metrics

In my book, all marketing/communications channels should be judged using the same metrics, such as conversions, cost-per-order, cost-per-subscriber, sales etc.

Although you could already do all of this with RSS, it required some tinkering.

But, as FeedBurner gets assimilated into Google Analytics, tracking the key marketing metrics should become a breeze, giving everyone access to crucial internet optimization data.

2. RSS Metrics Moving Closer to the Mainstream

With RSS Metrics being integrated directly into Google Analytics (which I'm sure will happen very soon), marketers might finally start actually measuring their RSS feeds.

Means better RSS Marketing, finally.

3. RSS Advertising Going CPC

Although FeedBurner is cautions to provide any details about how their CPM pricing model might change with the integration of their ad services into Google, I'm quite certain that RSS advertising will move the way of cost-per-click.

Means less revenues for RSS feed publishers, but better ROI for you, the advertiser.

4. RSS Advertising Moving Closer to the Mainstream

RSS Advertising will finally reach the mainstream, utilizing Google's massive advertiser database.

Prices will go up, and RSS content monetization will again start becoming the talk at industry events.

On the plus side, it also means Google will be able to attract more RSS feed publishers, meaning more RSS ad inventory for you. Your RSS advertising reach potential is about to explode, finally enabling you to reach the masses using RSS Advertising.

5. Trouble for Other RSS Advertising Companies

I love Pheedo, another leading RSS Metrics and RSS Advertising company, but the FeedBurner acquisition makes me wonder what's in store for them as Google starts pushing RSS advertising to their massive database of advertisers, especially as part of an integrated online advertising service.

It's certainly not the end of other RSS Advertising companies, but they might all soon see themselves transforming from RSS ad networks to RSS media planning & buying consultants.

Which would be a shame, especially considering the advancements in RSS Advertising developed by Pheedo.

6. Better Targeting for Google AdWords Advertisers (We Wish!)

Advertiser demand seems to be growing quicker than the inventory offered by Google.

The obvious choice for Google (in addition of course to increasing ad inventory through additional reach, media expansion through the content network, and expansion to new ad channels, like RSS and banner inventories) is to offer better targeting, for a premium price.

As a marketer, I clearly want to place my ads in front of the most relevant prospects. Keyword targeting is OK, but adding behavioral on top of that introduces another filtering element to my media planning, enabling me to really pin-point the users I want to see my ads.

• How about displaying search ads only to people who have already visited my website, but haven't made a purchase? Google AdWords and Google Analytics integration could offer exactly this.
  
  
• How about displaying search ads only to people that respond to marketing content banners on other websites? Integrating Google AdWords with one of the latest Google acquisitions, DoubleClick, can get us exactly this.
  
  
• Of course, I might also want to target my ads to people who are subscribed to X e-mail newsletter. What do you know, Google already has that information through their Gmail service.
  
  
• And then, how about displaying search ads only to people who are subscribing to other RSS feeds about RSS marketing? Integrating Google AdWords with FeedBurner would make this possible.
  
  
• Now just take these concepts, put them all together, and expand them to banner advertising, feed advertising and any other online ad channel Google develops/acquires in the future.

This may either be science fiction or Google's actual long-term masterplan. As more advertising budgets rush to the internet, available quality ad inventory will continue shrinking.

By introducing such targeting, integrating the metric and capabilities of all of their properties, Google could come as close as possible to total ad targeting, the holy grail of marketing we are all striving towards.

Things will get much more interesting ... and soon.

If I were an ad agency, I'd start developing a targeting department, focusing on targeted media buying.

But first, how do their tags actually work?

• You can tag any product you like, including your previous purchases, with a keyword that best describes the product.
• Easily search and access products tagged by others, using the keywords you're interested in.
• Tags are also used as a way for Amazon to provide you with personalized recommendations.

The good part is that Amazon now added RSS capabilities to their tags, available through most tag pages.

• Subscribe to RSS feeds for the tags you're interested in, and get latest product releases that match these tags.
• Use the RSS feeds to display Amazon products on your website, using the appropriate tags, to earn affiliate commissions.
• Share RSS feeds for tags with your friends, as a recommendations vehicle.

More information here.

An excellent RSS e-commerce application from Amazon!

• What will happen in the RSS space in 2007, for marketers and business?
  
  
• Will RSS become integrated into every enterprise application? How will that change how information is used?
  
  
• Will RSS improve information management within an organization?
  
  
• What challenges do RSS management present to IT departments in larger organizations?
  
  
• Will centralized RSS tools help solve the internal information management crisis?
  
  
• What is Attention XML and how will it help you get more of the content you need and less of the content that is not relevant specifically to you?
  
  
• Are smart RSS Readers only for corporations, or can consumers also take advantage?
  
  
• What are NewsGator's plans for 2007?

Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 13 min.]

• Why should online publishers care about branded RSS Readers?
  
  
• Does it still make sense to provide a branded RSS Reader, especially with the wide adoption RSS is getting through Internet Explorer 7?
  
  
• What kind of value can publishers bring to RSS Readers?
  
  
• How can online media enhance the user experience through third-party content via RSS?
  
  
• Is visitor ownership still a possibility, or are services like MyYahoo! owning the game? How can online media compete?
  
  
• How can small businesses compete with large portals and large media sites?
  
  
• Does syndicating your content via RSS mean that you're giving up content?
  
  
• Is RSS becoming a significant traffic driver?
  
  
• How can companies profit from pulling together relevant content on a specific topic from third-party sources?
  
  
• Is there a difference in how summary and full-text feeds drive visitors to your website? When to use which?
  
  
• Best practices for re-publishing third-party content on your website
  
  
• Can you put ads next to re-published RSS content on your site? How to do it?

Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 14 min.]

NewsGator is one of the leaders in the Enterprise RSS space, a provider of top-breed RSS Readers and also a branded RSS Reader vendor.

So, you can imagine we had alot to cover.

In part 1 of the interview, find out about how Windows Vista and Internet Explorer are changing the RSS landscape ...

• How are Vista and Internet Explorer changing the world of RSS marketing and RSS content consumption?
  
  
• How much and how quickly will they make an impact?
  
  
• Are they really the game changer every marketer expects them to be?
  
  
• What changes can we expect?
  
  
• How can marketers take advantage of the advances Vista offers for RSS?

Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 8 min.]

If you're in Boston or are coming to the conference, drop me a note.

I'll be speaking on RSS and other new internet marketing media, together with Scott Voight of Silverpop.

If you're at the conference, definetly reserve the Monday 3 PM slot to come hear us. The last presentation we did together with Scott in London was a huge hit, and we promise not to dissapoint:)

These and other practical questions are all revealed in the 2nd part of the RSS interview with Bryan Eisenberg. Without doubt, this is one of the best and most practical RSS marketing interviews we've done so far.

In part 1 of the Bryan Eisenberg RSS interview we focused on how the GrokDotCom.com is going beyond traditional RSS Radars by employing intelligent content aggregation tools, instead of relying just on contextual filtering, and what kind of results they are achieving.

In part 2 of the interview we move beyond RSS Radars to their overall RSS marketing strategy.

In this interview find out about ...

1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why?

2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds?

3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds?

4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership?

5. What's the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content?

6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?

Click here to listen to the MP3 file [8:33 minutes; 2 MB]

Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.

1. Product Discussions
Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement ... especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.

The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.

2. Customer Reviews by Author
Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.

I'm sure most of you have heard of Bryan Eisenberg before. Bryan is the leading worldwide authority on internet marketing optimization and website persuasion architecture. He was also one of the few marketers that got on the RSS Marketing bandwagon early on.

Recently, Bryan started exploring RSS Radars as a tool to increase the traffic to their optimization portal GrokDotCom.com, increase visitor loyalty, position the website as the key news source for internet optimization ... and naturally facilitate online sales of their books and consulting services. Take a look here.

But while most RSS Radars are based on contextually filtering content from selected third-party RSS feeds, the GrokDotCom.com RSS Radars go far beyond anything else we have seen on the market so far.

Instead of relying only on contextual content filtering to select the most relevant third-party content, they are employing a number of additional filters, such as the amount of linkage the story is receiving, source relevance and credibility, and so on ... and they're calling it a discovery engine.

• What are their RSS Radar marketing goals?
• How their RSS Radar is different from what you can generally see online?
• What concrete results are they achieving?
• What you can learn from their RSS marketing?

All of these answers, and more, available in the audio interview.

Click here to listen to the MP3 file [14 minutes; 3 MB]

Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.

David's idea is simple:

• Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
• Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated

This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."

But, there are two problems:

• Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
• Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients

This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.

Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.

More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)

Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.

The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).

Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.

But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.

1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy
It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.

2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.

3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy
Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.

4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.

5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level
Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.

6. Promote your RSS feeds internally
Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.

7. Promote your RSS feeds externally
After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.

8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.

9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.

10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand
Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.

Now, don't get me wrong, I see alot of development potential in virtual worlds, but Second Life as it is simply does not cut it.

I won't go into the details again, but the sheer lack of economy of scales shows that something is wrong when you compare the investments in Second Life and the actual virtual world penetration. Not to mention the difficult user interface.

Second Life is a good beginning, but virtual worlds have a far way to go before they deserve to be treated as seriously as some are treating them today. Yes, Second Life should certainly be treated as a marketing/communications playground, but not as a high importance marketing channel.

If you want to call this 20th century thinking, go ahead. It is. As are economies of scale, profitability, sales conversion, cost per order and other business "relics".

And as you'll notice, 20th century thinking still works, even in 2007. We've all heard stories of the demise of advertising, the death of PR, the death of e-mail, the death of postal direct mail and so on ... but they're all alive, well and kicking still today, and will remain so.

Actually, intrusive direct response TV advertising is still one of the most effective tools to generate sales. And it gives you more bang for the buck than almost any other marketing channel, including online.

Do I like this? No. I'd love to believe that the internet is the alpha and omega of marketing. But it's not. It's the key connector, but not the key driver. That's the way things are, and as markters we need to employ 20th century thinking and use what works best ... and the numbers tell us that.

But this doesn't mean we shouldn't play and test. Quite on the contrary.

OK, this conversation is getting somewhat beyond the original topic, and it's quite possible I'm not even getting what Mobil Avenue is trying to say:)

And please don't get me started on 3D virtual webstores ...

Of course, I might be wrong. And if I am, I'll be the first to change my stripes the next day. It's what marketers do. If a new thing comes up and works better than what you're doing, change. But every change first demand proof. Unless you're just testing ... because when you're testing, the rules of the game change.

It's just one of those things. You see a company that could really go above and beyond with RSS and really use it to drive revenues, but they just don't do it.

But at least they're showing some activitiy lately ...
[in addition to removing their list of relatively useless category feeds, which used to be available here]

a) Gold Box
Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It finally has an RSS feed with your daily deals.

But, unfortunatelly, the RSS feed only provides brief information about the product, instead of also giving you a direct purchase link, some of the latest product reviews and other information that could facilitate the sale. Also, there's no personalization, or so it seems. Why not give me an RSS feed with just the special deals for me, based on my previous purchases?

b) Plog
This is one of the genius Amazon ideas. Each Plog is personalized to the individual user, giving him the latest blog posts from Amazon's authors (just from the authors' whos books you've purchased), and it also comes with a targeted RSS feed, matching the Plog content you see when you're logged-in. You can also subscribe to additional blog content manually.

Also, Amazon is promising that we'll be soon able to track latest releases, changes to our orders and "much more" through our plogs, which will presumably also come be published in our targeted RSS feeds.

Amazon, please keep this up. Make us happy:)

c) The Amazon API
But let's be fair to Amazon. Even though their end-user RSS feed offering is poor, they do provide developers with the ability to create their own RSS feeds from Amazon, by integrating with their API.

Here are some examples:

RSStalker.com - provides a variety of Amazon product tracking options via RSS, such as a 10% price drop feed that lets you know when a product that RSStalker is tracking via Amazon drops 10% in price; RSS feeds from your wishlists; last 25 price changes in a selected Amazon category, and more.

Baebo - provides a persistant search RSS feed for Amazon products, based on your keywords.

More great examples floating around ...

1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati

2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme

3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters

4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly

5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters

6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item

7. Provide email updates for the non-techies

8. Offer an HTML version of your feed

9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed

Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering:

10. Full text, not summaries

11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10)

12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)

13. Keyword-rich item [title]

14. Your brand name in the item [title]

15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container

16. Compelling site [description]

17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)

18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site:

19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course]

20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories

21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords

22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts

23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]

Do you have more tips?

(a) Post them in the comments form below.

(b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview