lesson 2: Let us roll the RSS ball

Let us roll the RSS ball

Well, are you a net savvy who may fit into one of the following categories?

• You are usually in hurry and looking for something specific without wanting to waste your valuable time.
• You think staring at computer screens hours together can be tiring for the eyes. So prefer scanning text instead of reading word for word.
• You frequently end up on some webpage (not through the homepage) and do not know how it fits into the rest of the website!
• You are a person expecting the information on the web to be up-to-date.
• You like to have privacy on the information you are interested in and control over the numerous unwanted information popping and earning your irritation.
• You welcome with great interest the latest methodologies, if that cannot only save your precious time but also prove to be a powerful, versatile method to keep you well updated faster than the conventional methods.

Are you an organization/marketer/publisher who has opted for Internet marketing strategies, having created your website and has been on the constant run to win more visitors to your site? Glance through the following points of which at least some have caught your attention at one time or the other in your path of business:

• Presence of millions of web pages gives you the challenging job of hooking the visitors who may very easily move on to somebody else’s website.
• Having spent thousands of dollars creating your website, you feel it does nothing to promote your organization. Should it not help you grow your business at least to some extent, when so much pain is involved?
• You are on a long hunt for a suitable method of conversational marketing on Internet, which can replace the so-far passive Internet marketing.
• Visitors do not trust web contents unless its credibility is clear.
• You wish to give a distinguishable look to your company with the help of a blend of audio and video elements in your website.

Whichever category you may fall into – the former or the latter – here comes an incredible solution, to your long-pondering questions! A drastic change from traditional solutions to a highly effective methodology – RSS is the buzzword, creating waves in today’s Internet world. RSS, an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a very cost effective method to bring your information to your clients and ‘to-be-clients’. It is a viable alternative to produce effective solutions to your numerous business needs.

RSS opens a new gateway to ever-flooding effective business strategies, never existed before, and creates a new dimension in the way you reach out to the public. When you, as a marketer/ businessman/company, decide to promote your business through the marketing strategies of Internet, try to take the maximum advantage of this interactive medium. When your website does not engage visitors, then your web-based promotional efforts have been crippled. What are the means to attract visitors to your website, when there exists a million dollar question – whose website to visit? Given innumerable choices, just think of the visitor’s plight to decide which one and whether he wishes to really come back after his first visit.

RSS has a lot of advantages over the other existing methods, to turn it into the most sought-after, powerful, influential tool, which will take over the Internet world very soon, if understood fully and properly. It is basically a ‘push-based’ communication method, which can be published and subscribed to easily. It can be explained as a file containing the latest information and accessed by subscribers who are interested.

Consider a website as a real-world conversation.  We need to adopt the same things just like while trying to sell our product to a sales prospect in person. RSS has wonderful features, which embody the techniques of conversational marketing in a very flexible way.  Don’t you go through the following while reaching out to the visitors? Glance through and see how RSS helps:

• First, you decide your goal and try to analyze what kind of audience your website can get.
• What do the visitors get on visiting your website? Interview customers for their feedback, do a research and make changes to your website accordingly. The last part can be done very easily done using RSS feeds (which we will see in detail in the later chapters).
• The look of your website is very important. RSS has made it very easy to understand, see and feel your message for the visitors by mixing video and audio channels to your contents. Also, keep in mind that not only is it enough to have a good website but an appropriate one to your business also, to catch your visitor’s eye.
• Make your website work well in all the browsers. Your website is open to a variety of visitors who can prefer browsers of their choices. RSS is a convenient way since it works on all platforms. Most of the browsers may not face hurdles accessing RSS.
• Your website is the gold mine of information on how the public respond to what you say. RSS provides an unbelievable platform to discuss the views of the public without wasting time. Instead, you can spend your time on crafting quality contents. RSS has got many special features such as dialog facilitators, RSS radars, and automatic responders to enhance the significance of conversational marketing.
• You can collect a lot of information such as the number of subscribers, their interests, their reading frequency, the topics they are more interested in etc using RSS feeds. These are definitely going to be vital for improving your standards of business.
• Your search engine ranking reflects how good your website is! RSS increases the search engine ranking remarkably and well, again helps develop your business.

 

Not only these! You can go on listing down the various advantages of RSS which we will explore one by one after knowing about RSS in detail.

And do not think it’s a super-techie thing that you cannot use! Once you are familiar with the tool, you are open to the amazing world of RSS and one day, sure to find yourself hooked to it! Its going to be the beginning of an unbelievable era, exploring deeper and deeper the many faces of RSS and of course, the web world, through it! Though it can’t be an all-out replacement for other technologies, it can be a standard to optimize your Internet experience.

So, what are you waiting for? Get going to know more about RSS in the following chapters and unleash the power of this incredible, powerful tool!

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