This change is permanent:
Marketing your website without taking advantage of RSS feeds will be the biggest mistake you can make in 2006 and beyond.
Microsoft is unleashing a new OS (Vista) that will plug into the web via RSS in a very profound way. If you haven’t been keeping up on Vista (formerly Longhorn) developments because you thought it was of no consequence to you as a marketer, think twice.
RSS is fast becoming the backbone of the web. Sites are organically syndicating content around the web through RSS search engines.
Feeds in RSS directories then get picked up by publishers looking for good headline content for their sites.
The major search engines also pick up those feed listings and often discover new sites and spider them faster than any other förm of content syndication including articles and press releases!
Very soon the days of “Give me your email address and other private information” will be a thing of the past.
Smart marketers are going to adopt the RSS information delivery model because surfers will quickly begin to ignore email subscription forms while looking for the simple and completely anonymous RSS subscription model.
So if you haven’t started planning a marketing campaign utilizing RSS delivery of newsletters and updates over email, you had better get started understanding RSS and its eventual replacement of the traditional email list.
Critical mass tolerance of sp@m and giving out email addresses has been reached in all markets. Only in very tight niches in special circumstances where there is instant trust and credibility conveyed by a site will you find decent optÃn rates.
The change is happening now and it will be permanent. RSS will eclipse email lists and it will be the new defacto method of content syndication around the web by the end of 2006.
“Growing Your List” and “Syndicating Your Content” is going to be done by RSS more and more by regular website owners as this year progresses. That includes your competition! Vista will be a massive feed detector/reader available to all PC users very soon.
This means that you can have a feed on your site for visitors to subscribe to, or you can see for yoursëlf how many of your visitors choose to ignore your email subscription förm and your content because you are not Web 2.0 enough for them.
So, please take advantage of RSS as the impending dominant tool in your marketing campaigns.