RSS has already become a huge marketing power in the world of internet marketing, with so much marketing potential that it's difficult to list everything in a single article.

During the next few weeks we'll be taking a look at the key marketing & publishing aspects of RSS, trying to present you with step-by-step instructions on how to at least get started with RSS.

Every aspect of using RSS for marketing starts from the three key interlocking functions that RSS provides to marketers.

A] Delivering your internet content to end-users

The first is delivering your internet content to end-users, the people who you want to communicate with on the internet, which includes the following generic target audiences:

• prospects (segmented),
• existing customers (segmented),
• business partners,
• suppliers,
• investors,
• employees,
• media representatives and anlysts,
• government agencies,
• professional peers,
• etc.

Do not limit yourself only to prospects and customers, but use RSS to deliver content to every possible meaningful generic target audience that influences your business in any way.

Delivering internet content to end-users is marketing, and it provides many relevant business opportunities:

1. communicating with your target audiences (includes direct promotions), which leads to improved relationships and increased sales,

2. delivering content as a service for your target audiences, either as part of your marketing strategy as an added-value service (for instance delivering investment portfolio updates to investment clients; delivering new product updates) or as a subscription service (business model; for instance delivering industry news for a subscription fee --> in this case the actual content delivery is the "product"),

3. delivering content for business process support, such as delivering invoice information to the accounting staff etc.

All of the above are, in some way, marketing activities, which can be improved with the use of RSS.

B] Delivering your internet content to other internet media (content syndication)

Making your content available for re-publication on other web media, such as:

• news web sites,
• web sites owned by your marketing partners or affiliates,
• ?corporate? (any size of business) web sites that need relevant content for their visitors,
• content agggregation web sites, which specialize in aggregating content from many different sources and then making it available to other content consumers,
• etc.

Every RSS feed you publish can also be used to publish your content headlines, summaries and links on other web sites, thus helping you increase your traffic and position yourself as a source of quality news in the area you cover.

C] Promoting your web site

Promotion fits in perfectly with delivering content to end-users and content syndication:

End-users: RSS feeds bring your users back to your web site.

Syndication: your content displayed on other web sites provides you with additional exposure and help you acquire new visitors from those web sites.

Add to this the fact that RSS feeds also work well for search engine positioning, because content syndication helps you with getting inbound links from other web sites and the RSS feeds themselves are an effective way of letting know the search engines what new content is available on your web site to index.

The ?three? are meant to function together, because they are all based on using the same RSS feeds, meaning that a single RSS feed will function well for all three aspects.

These three are then joined by two additional, but separate (they have nothing to do with your own RSS feeds, but rather with using the RSS feeds of other publishers to your advantage) marketing aspects of using RSS:

D] Displaying content from other web sites

You can display content from other web sites (using their RSS feeds) on your own web site to increase the value you provide to your visitors, which is especially important if:

• you do not have enough of your own content or do not have the capacity to create more content,
• you want to include relevant (educational, ?newsy?) information from reputable content sources on your corporate web site as an added-value service for your visitors,
• you want to increase the amount of content on your web site to better ?please? the search engines,
• you want to provide your visitors with cruical information that is otherwise not related to your business (such as latest virus updates).

Either way, displaying content from other web sites can help you gain more visitors and provide them with more reasons to keep coming back, as well as increase your credibility if you display content from reputable publishers.

E] Advertising in third-party RSS feeds

Some RSS feed publishers are already starting to offer advertising in their feeds to advertisers, meaning that RSS is also an opportunity to increase the reach of your advertising activities.

Either way you look at it, RSS has the power to expotentially increase your business results.

We're talking about communicating with your prospects and customers and selling to them; generating new traffic; leveraging the traffic of other web sites to increase your own traffic; reaching #1 positions in search engines and even using the content of others to better serve your own visitors.

While the benefits are quite amazing and while RSS is easy to use and take advantage of, you do need to know exactly how to do it.

And unfortunatelly, up until now, there were no resources available that took you step-by-step through all of the key decisions and actions you need to take.

To be continued next week ...

In the meantime, take five minutes of your time and take a look at Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS. If you want to get started with RSS as soon as possible and with greatest impact, this is your ticket ...