A now "deceased" website on RSS marketing and RSS publishing - a look at the history of internet marketing

Rok Hrastnik

A Note from the Author: The RSS Diary is Closed

rssdiary.marketingstudies.net was built to help marketers get the most from RSS. However, much has changed since the site was last updated in 2007 - and it's pretty fair to say that it's now completely outdated.

Since I've moved on to other interests in internet marketing years ago, the site is now officially closed, and only remains online as an archive of a part of internet marketing's past. This is how we used to see RSS between 2004 - 2007. We don't, anymore, but there's no harm in having a small part of our past available online.

With that, I'm also making the e-book that started all of this, Unleas the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS, available for free download.

Rok Hrastnik [to contact and/or follow me: LinkedIn l Facebook]

Get Your Content Easily Published on Other Sites

 
 

Does anyone still remember that RSS was also supposed to be used to make it simple for publishers to share and display their content on other sites?

With the quick expansion of RSS into "end-user waters", where it's used to deliver content to direct subscribers (people), most marketers and publishers are forgeting the fact that RSS can also be used to show their headlines and content summaries on other sites and so bring them additional visibility, credibility and targeted traffic.

Sure, many of the early RSS adopters will say I'm crazy to be teaching old tricks, but how many marketers out there are really using RSS as a controlled content syndication? And I do mean real content syndication, not delivering content to direct subscribers ...

Simply putting a feed on your site and then hoping that whoever's interested in placing your content summaries on their site will just jump at the opportunity, without any help from you, is a sure way to not get any syndication at all.

In "Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS" I explained that content syndication does happen by chance or simply because you put your feed out there, but only when real effort is put in to the project. You need to invite people to syndicate your content, explain it to them, explain the benefits, be in personal contact with them ... and offer them the easy tools to do so.

While everything to the "tools part" is easy, although it does take more than 5 minutes, offering the right tools to third-party sites is no trivial matter to smaller sites that don't have the resources to pull all the needed tools together into a single neat package, which would be easy to use for your syndication partners.

It's not just a matter of offering the feed, it's the matter of offering a PHP syndication script (for the sites that use PHP), an ASP script (for the sites that use ASP), an IFRAME code (for sites using static HTML) and even JavaScript (for webmasters that really want the easiest way out).

Fortunatelly for smaller websites with no budget and very little technical expertise, RapidFeeds just provided a new free service that offers all of these tools in a single stream-lined package.

While the package isn't perfect, it's going to work great for smaller sites and those that just want to do it quickly.

"Using MySite, all the publishers who want their XML content to be displayed elsewhere, need to place an "Add to MySite" button similar to "Add to My Yahoo!" on their website or blog.
Webmasters who wish to display the content on their own site can click on this button, fill out a short form and get the code for the feed in languages like PHP, ASP, and also JavaScript and Iframes. The feed's display is completely customizable and there are different templates and colors available to choose from.
What's unique about MySite is its' viral nature. The "Add to MySite" is not only displayed on your site but also gets displayed on any other sites, which display your content. This allows the content to spread on it?s own."
Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS
Rok Hrastnik Avtor: Rok Hrastnik

Rok Hrastnik is an experienced international internet marketer and manager in Central & Eastern Europe, lead by the conviction that marketers should first be driven by measurable business outcomes: sales and profits.

He is currently serving as the International Internet Director at Studio Moderna, the leading CEE direct response TV & multi-channel retailer, managing their internet operations across 22 countries (Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, Turkey, Romania, the Baltics and others).