RSS is Not Only for Blogs

by Rok Hrastnik

Published on this site: April 7th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

Contrary to popular opinion, RSS is not only good for delivering content from your blog, although blogs are what made RSS so popular.

In fact, RSS can be used to deliver a great variety of content and content types. If you can break down yourcontent in to individual stories or individual pieces, you can deliver it via RSS.

Just to give you an impression of the power of RSS, here are some examples of content you can publish using it …

• MarketingVOX is using RSS to deliver internet marketing news to their readers as it becomes available. Instead of having to wait to receive all the news in a single e-mail newsletter, RSS users get them as soon as they are ready.
  
  
• Amazon.com is using RSS to announce their bestsellers and to help their users keep track of releases they are most interested in.
  
  
• Some affiliate managers already communicate with their affiliates using RSS. You can of course use it to communicate with any other target audience as well, such as your employees or team-members, and even your company owners.
  
  
• FindSavings.com uses RSS to deliver savings coupons and related information.
  
  
• Lockergnome uses RSS to provide visitors with the latest downloads and relevant software. Yet again other companies are using RSS to deliver product updates and patches directly to their customers, just as they become available.
  
  
• A few hundred content publishers are using RSS to deliver audio content, such as .mp3 interviews and even “radio” shows.
  
  
• Textamerica.com allows people to post pictures, videos & text from their mobile phones and then make this content available via RSS feeds.
  
  
• Other companies are using RSS to deliver whitepapers and other educational content.
  
  
• One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation.
  
  
• Many internet publishers are using RSS to deliver their newsletters, as a supplement to their e-mail delivery. Since many people no longer want to give their e-mail address away to publishers, this is a great way to keep your e-zine readership growing.
  
  
• Publish living digital catalogues of your products and provide your customers with your latest product releases, broken down by the categories they're interested in, and make it easy for them to order.
  
  
• Provide your affiliates and marketing partners with RSS feeds they can promote to their visitors to better promote your products and still make a commission. Amazon.com is already doing it. When are you starting?
  
  
• Create RSS autoresponders with scheduled messages, to keep in constant “marketing” contact with your prospects and slowly get them to the point of purchase.
  
  
• Provide limited-access content to your customers, employees, team members and even investors, without fearing other unwanted eyes. Use RSS for internal communications, teamworking and other needs.
  
  
• Provide your customers with easy access to software updates, delivered to them exactly as they become available, without the fuss of having to visit your web site or deal with huge e-mail attachments, which would get blocked by spam filters anyway.
  
  
• Newsreporters are constantly bombarded with e-mail, so why not instead deliver your press releases via RSS? Or even better yet, why not deliver some of your releases as video comments, interviews or statements from your company managers or owners?
  
  
• Help your visitors keep up with what’s going on in your web forum, by publishing your latest forum posts or whole threads via RSS.

And yet these are still only a few examples of what you can do with RSS today, since something new comes up almost every day.

Are you as well already among those taking advantage of the marketing & publishing power of RSS?

Rok Hrastnik is the author of »Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS«, acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide to RSS for marketers by leading RSS experts. The complete guide on RSS for marketers: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa3