- Image by Josh Bancroft via Flickr
What's RSS and why should I bother?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication – or so they say) is a way for you to subscribe to a website and be notified as soon as new information is published there without messing about with email.
It is supposed to be a standardized format but, as always, there are a number of variations though nothing to bother yourself about.
RSS feeds are usually indicated by the orange XML or RSS buttons like the one at the start of this sentence which allow you to locate feeds quickly.
But they also come in various shapes and sizes – not usually as odd as the big guy with the newspaper to your right – that's my personal variation to grab your attention.
To know when new material is published you need to use an RSS feed aggregator or reader. This allows you to collect all the information you are interested in directly in your own reader without having to visit lots of websites.This is very convenient and saves you lots of time.
Here's a great video I found on YouTube to help you better understand the whole process.
The Google, MSN, Bloglines icons in the right sidebar allow you to add the RSS feed directly to your personal page on the respective sites (if you have a personal page, of course).
So, just like an aggregator, all the feeds you are interested in appear on your personal page just like your own personal newspaper.
How do I subscribe to a feed?
Just log in to MyMSN, MyYahoo!, Google Reader or Bloglines and click the relevant button:
These four services are the only ones you really need to care about. The benefit of using them is two-fold:
- A web-based service means your favorite feeds will remain available when you change computers
- Search engines (will) provide tools to organize feeds by topic and relevance rather than by site and date
Myself, I highly recommend Google Reader for two reasons. One, it has a list function so you can just scan the headlines to sort out what is interesting to you instead of having to read the first few lines of every entry.
Secondly, if you use it with Google Mail which, again, I highly recommend, then they are both available on a single screen within your account.
The drawback is of course your loss of privacy. If you dislike the idea that Google knows more about you than yourself, then use something else. But as I'm not doing anything shady or illegal I'm happy to use the powerful tools that Google provides.
- Try news readers one by one if you have time to waste; or
- Download Firefox and install the Wizz RSS News Reader; or
- Internet Explorer 7 has an RSS reader built in.
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There's a post over on SlyMarketing blog today about the difficulty of getting press attention to your latest and greatest idea – particularly the product or service you might be marketing. The difficulty he identifies is that the local newspaper is focused on something else, namely soccer! what else and the specific local area.
This is an extreme example but encapsulates not so much the difficulty of how to get press attention but rather the opportunity it opens up. This is a traffic generation strategy much loved by Andrew Reynolds, one of the UKs leading direct mail marketers.
His advice is not to write a press release and ship it off to every journal under the sun. Rather to research the publications that are big in your niche, study the style of their articles and then write an article for them. Note I said an article, not a press release.
The editors of most niche publications are desperate for copy. Something, anything to fill those empty spaces that will attract readers because it is the reader numbers that attract the advertisers that pay their salaries.
If you deliver to them an attractive article about the niche in which both their publication and your product belong – and you just happen to major on your product as being newsworthy; and it is written in their house style and is the length they are comfortable with so it fits into their usual page layouts then it is quite possible they will print the article without even editing it.
And what did you put into your article? Why, your website address, the product name, your company name and contact details so that the readers of that publication will have no difficulty at all in finding your website or picking up the phone to order. All in a nice subtle way, but just make sure they are there.
So what's the secret? It's the research and tailoring the article to fit easily and neatly into the editors product. After all, what editor is going to complain if a contributor makes their life so easy?
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If you don't K.now about K.nol yet then it's time to get with it.
Ask Google what a knol is (define: knol in your Google search bar) and Google tells you: "Knol is a project planned by Google for user-generated articles on topics ranging from "scientific concepts, to medical information, from … http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol
- and as you can see it draws it's information from Wikipedia.
Apparently, Knol was announced in December 2007 and was opened in beta to the public on July 23 just 6 days ago, with a few hundred articles mostly in the health and medical field.
The Google view seems to be that it wants to build a source of knowledge as an alternative to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has it's own problems as anyone can edit the content much to the annoyance of many politicians who find their life stories being adulterated by their enemies. But it has built up a phenomenal reputation and body of knowledge. So to compete Google is going to have to pull all the stops out if it is to achieve comparable recognition.
In contrast to the peer review editing of Wikipedia, a Knol, the word Google has invented to describe their nuggets of knowledge (my phrase!) can only be edited by the author and should therefore maintain it's integrity.
But there lies the rub. What is to prevent people publishing rubbish? The wiki concept, in its pure form, applies peer review to content so that it is constantly improved. It's a shame that some people just can't stop themselves being vandals and corrupting the information
Since Knol opened its doors there has been a storm of comment and no little criticism particularly in the SEO community. Why? Because there appears to be little difference between a knol and and article when used for promotional purposes in that if you are first to get an article/knol published in your subject area then Google is going to rank it and you are going to get recognition.
So the real question is whether Google was going to allow the ranking to develop naturally and according to it's normal algorithm or whether it was going to give it's latest baby something of a boost.
The evidence so far seems to be that Google is boosting knols up the search engine rankings above existing content. Evidence for this has been supplied by Aaron Wall, a highly respected SEO operator in a post at www.seobook.com
So it looks like there is going to be lots of argument probably for months to come as Google works to either justify it's approach or to modify it's algorithm so that it's own product is downgraded. Hardly likely, is it?
From the average marketers point of view there is only one thing to do. If writing up your content and calling it a knol rather than an article is going to get you high search engine rankings then get to it. Get your knol machine in gear and start writing knols.
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Blog Comments For Traffic – The Proof
One of the methods recommended to generate traffic to your website is to locate highly ranked blogs on your subject and make a Comment on a recent blog post. Naturally, you include a signature file after your post linked back to a page within your own site that is relevant to the subject.
This is an opportunity to obtain both one way links deep into your site for the SE spiders and also a doorway into your site for human traffic that is already interested in your subject matter.
While lapping up this sort of information from your teacher/mentor this traffic strategy sounds eminently sensible while at the same time rather difficult to pin down. How do you know this use of blog comments really works?
So my inspection of the weekly scheduled Google Analytics report that was sitting in my email In tray for a blog on which I was expecting little traffic anyway was quite cursory until the large percentage of referred traffic caught my eye.
By the way, if you are not using Google Analytics then you really should – especially when it is so easy to install on Wordpress blogs.
Drilling down into the report I found that most of the referred traffic was coming from a single inbound link and isolating that link in the report told me that it was a single, very cursory comment I had made on a high ranking blog.
The great thing about this, other than the traffic, of course, is that I am using Google Reader to scan and monitor relevant RSS feeds to give me content and ideas for my site. So I had actually taken the news content from the high ranking site and put a little effort into re-writing it then posted it on my blog.
So I had up-to-date, relevant content on my blog. It was only as an afterthought that I put a very cursory comment on the 'donor' blog. Result: a flock of birds killed with one stone. Fresh, new content for continuity and SE ranking, participation in the subject community, lots of inbound traffic and a long lasting inbound link.
Blog comments? Yes, they work gangbusters!
Tags: blog comments, Bruce Bird, traffic strategy