Marketing with RSS
Tue, 15 May, 2007 – 8:09 am
If you run a site which constantly adds new products or services then are you utilising RSS feeds too? I've recently set up sites for clients and used RSS feeds to allow people to subscribe to their newest product list without giving up their details. People like to be anonymous online, so even an email subscribtion is invasion of privacy especially when a lot of people are concerned with spam. RSS feeds are the perfect, private way to keep tabs on a site without anyone knowing and without you having to constantly visit that site. It's a win win situation, especially when you pay for bandwidth!nnOne client who is using this successfully sells pre-owned watches, so every watch is a new product as no two watches are the same once they've been worn. I added the RSS feed to their site at the start of the year, and without even mentioning it on the website, simply linking to the RSS file in the header, there have been 12,800+ hits to this file for this month alone. Whether it's improved sales or not I couldn't honestly say. With it being unknown technology to a lot of people outside of the Web Design/Development circle, I doubt anyone in the office would even think to ask customers if they'd used it. They probably don't know it's there!nnAnother client runs a Recruitment website. This time I've simply set the RSS feed to display the latest 10 jobs from the database and there's one for each department. Looking at the site stats I can see a little takeup on this, not bad considering it's not really advertised yet! I also demonstrated this to the company owner by showing him how I could check on the latest vacancies by subcribing to the feed on my mobile phone (Nokia N73), thus showing complete privacy from anyone else knowing what I was doing – also helpful when I could then email him a word document acting as my CV!nnThe great thing with RSS is that you can simply subscribe to the feed and then forget about it. It checks for new items in the background and only mentions itself when there are new items within the feed. Whilst it's handy for sites with constantly new content/products/items to market, it could still be utilised on product sites that gets a new product occassionally. Afterall, plenty of people will subscribe and then forget about your site and the feed. Suddenly you add a new product and hey presto, everyone knows about it again. A much better method than relying on people to bookmark and return to your site, especially if they return twice and find nothing new.nnRSS feeds are relatively simple to set up. I tend to just use PHP to populate them and use a PHP extension setting the output as XML so that they're picked up correctly. You can also set your PHP to write to an XML file and write out a static XML page instead. You'd need a CRON job to run every so often to ensure the file is always updated. However I'd personally stick with the dynamic XML file route. There's no difference really 
nnFurther Reading: RSS 2.0 Specification
"I tend to just use PHP to populate them and use a PHP extension setting the output as XML" – this is exactly what I did with my Site Builder. It works well, even those the sites are "article based". RSS is useful for blasting out site details to the "hundreds" of RSS aggregators and RSS directories. It can also be used on people's homepages (eg iGoogle, MyYahoo and so on). You can also use your RSS feeds in other ways, such as the RSS module on Squidoo (if you are into Squid marketing)…nnAll in all, if your site does not have some flavour of RSS, you are missing a trick!
By Burty on Tue, 15 May, 2007
Hey Burty, I think a lot of people either don't think about the marketing opportunities with it or even don't know what it is. I didn't get into reading feeds until 18 months ago (thanks to Dave!). It seems more popular in the US than over here but it's so easy to sell to clients considering a post for example to their News section can be in Google Blogsearch within the hour!
By Sarah on Tue, 15 May, 2007