RSS And The Future Of Article Marketing
According to this SiteProNews article, only 20% of Internet users intentionally read RSS feeds. That’s surprisingly low, but it does make sense. Most people are still attached to their e-mail and still piddling around online. But I predict a day when RSS will be the tool of daily use. Even for article marketing.
Already, article directories like EzineArticles provide RSS feeds for publishers who want to use content for their websites and e-zines. But if you are an article marketer, you must upload your article content to EA, and every other article directory, manually, or submit through a mass submit service. There are problems with doing it either way. Those problems can be solved through RSS.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It really is simple. And that makes me wonder why very few people have started using it. If it’s so simple, what’s the hold up?
I think a part of the problem is information. Techies understand it, Internet marketers know enough about it to use and employ it in their research, a few business people have realized the value, but for the most part, most people have not made the full transition to online information publishing.
RSS is great because nothing gets lost. E-mail can end up in the junk mail folder, circulate around cyberspace for a couple of weeks, be inadvertently deleted, or overlooked. RSS is delivered 100% of the time. It never fails.
Another problem most people have, though they don’t know how to solve it, is spam. One slip up and your e-mail address can be all over the Internet and you’ll be spammed a million times. Sure, you can filter your spam into your junk mail folder, but you run the risk of losing good mail that you want or still having to filter through some spam that wasn’t caught by the filter. It’s a time waster. I know business people who have opted not to use e-mail for that very reason.
Information published by RSS doesn’t have these problems. One reason is because someone has to subscribe to your RSS feed before they can use your information. If they don’t subscribe, they can’t read it. Plain and simple. Another thing, they need a special reader in order to receive the RSS feed, and most people aren’t familiar with the technology are afraid to try it or haven’t received the proper motivation. The day will come, I believe.
When the day comes that people can open up a reader and have it download all of the information that they like to read and be as user-friendly as Outlook, and as accessible, then RSS will flourish. Instead of distributing articles through directories, people will be able to subscribe directly to your articles. They can now if they understand technology. All you have to do is put your articles on your website and insert code that will allow people to subscribe to them. Every time you publish an article, they’ll receive that article in their reader. If they want to republish it, they simply do so as you’ve sent it to them, complete with your bio. I can even imagine that you can program your content so that it won’t even publish if they try to alter it. Now that’s what I call article marketing.
