Marketing with RSS

Marketing without email makes getting targeted quality traffic to your site the most important element of your marketing campaigns. That is, however, a very general statement and something that even email marketers want to do, although they go about it in a different manner. What direct-to-desktop marketers do to get traffic is different from what email marketers do to get traffic.
Email marketing is based on the assumption that you have or are building a reasonably large listof subscribers. Five thousand or more is the usual standard, and it is assumed that this list is comprised of legitimate contacts who actually receive and read your marketing messages. I am not going to argue the validity of that assumption here other than to say I feel that is not a valid assumption most people should be making, given the state of email today.

Email marketers work to build the number of subscribers on their list and they send marketing messages to their lists on a regular basis. This can be in the form of solo mailings, classifieds in their newsletters, or what are euphemistically called "press releases" by some email marketers. All of these options tend to be "in your face" advertising, comparable to the advertising you see on your television or hear on the radio or see in the local newspaper.

These ads might get someone on your list to visit the appropriate page on your web site. That gets you what is called a "click thru." Once on your page, you might even convince that visitor to buy. You make a sale.

But, whether your visitor clicks thru, buys, or does what most people seem to be doing with advertising email: delete it, there is no long-term marketing effect of that email. Even if a few people save your message for future reference or bookmark your page, either being highly problematic, your advertising mess is gone until you send it again. If you send it too often, you could easily irritate some of your subscribers. Then they either unsubscribe, or, more likely, they will just ignore and delete your advertising.

This whole process is based on the assumption that the people on your list are interested in what you have to say and/or what you are selling. The validity of that assumption is based a great deal on how you built your list. If you used the free subscribers provided by the email advertising co-ops, that assumption, as well as the assumption in the first part of this discussion, goes right out the window. First of all, and I know this for a fact from my own experience both as a member of several of these co-ops as well as being an administrator for one, a lot of people subscribe to the ezines in a co-op with a junk email address.

Secondly, most of them are only interested in getting their advertising in front of your subscribers and have little or no interest in reading your messages, especially your advertising, except to make sure you sent their ad. They think everybody else on your list is waiting with anticipation for your every message. In other words, they think they are smart and the rest of us are stupid! Feel free to add whatever comment you feel is appropriate here!

To make a long story short, email marketing is not a good way to get targeted traffic to your site unless you are willing to do a lot of research and more than likely spend a lot of money buying advertising from one of the really big publishers that does have a responsive, legitimate list. That, in most cases, does not fit into the budget of a small mom-and-pop business and that is why the co-ops appear so attractive. You get to send your ad to so many people for so little money. But you are actually throwing your money away.
There is a better way to market your business. Use direct-to-desktop marketing.

One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is to get decent listings on the search engines, especially Google. You want as many of your pages listed as possible for all the relevant key words. But your sales pages, if they look like the sales pages the gurus of email marketing use, will not get the job done. The reason for that is that Google is looking for content, meaning useful quality information, not a page that says "Buy Now" a hundred times!

If you want to get decent search engine rankings for certain key words, then you need to have a web site with lots of good articles that provide high quality information but also sells your product or service at the same time.

So you put lots of content on your site and you use links to those articles in your email newsletter. That is a good start, but think about all the work you put into your newsletter. You are not really getting any traffic benefits for all that work. Why? Because your articles are not being indexed by the search engines!

What you need is a newsletter that will be spidered by the search engines. What you need is a newsletter with content that is easily syndicated. What you need is a newsletter that uses the power of information sharing – community – to build not only your own traffic and rankings, but to build up the traffic and rankings of the community as a whole. The power of community is the major reason I do not recommend going it alone as a direct-to-desktop publisher.

Let me wrap this up by saying again that the most important thing you need to make sales online is, first and foremost, high quality, targeted traffic to your web site. The best way to get that is by offering your visitors information that they need and will use, not a lot of "in your face" sales copy. It is that content that will get you ranked with the search engines if you use key word rich content. But your content must be relevant to your key words and your key words must be relevant to what you are selling.

The most effective way to do all that is to use direct-to-desktop marketing and direct-to-desktop publishing for your newsletter. That will make your newsletter something that the search engines will love. And if you integrate your newsletter with your web site through syndication and links back and forth, both your newsletter and your site will benefit in the rankings. There is no way for email marketing or email publishing to do that for you. The search engines could care less what you send via email.

Use key word rich content in both your newsletter and your site – key words that people use to find the products and services you sell. Doing that on a regular basis will make your site and/or your newsletter content the listings people will see first when they go looking for those key words. That means you will get traffic that is interested in what you offer and they will be more likely to buy.
The funny thing is that you can do this for a lot less money, time and effort than you can doing email marketing!

The Power of Community

The most important part of marketing without email is that you cannot do it alone! That is true of any form of marketing but most especially with non-email marketing. The days of the lone wolf are over.

The thing to remember about any community marketing efforts is that this is not referring to the usual crap most email marketers refer to as Joint Venturing. The type of cooperation that email marketers promote is intended to mainly benefit one person – the person at the top of the pile. The people at the bottom get a little bit of trickle down effect. Sort of like Reaganomics, and we all know what that did to the US and world economy.

Community marketing seems to be a concept a lot of present and former email marketers have a real problme coming to grips with. In a community, all the members of the community, at least in an ideal world, work at whatever they do best. But they do it within the framework of the community. What does that mean?

Look at your arms. Your arms do "arm things." They pick up things, they hug people, they put food in your mouth. Your arms work within the context of your body. They do not go off by themselves and act like a spaceship or a locomotive.
Same goes with your legs. They do "leg" things. They walk to the mailbox. They bend, they straighten out, they follow your feet. They do not go off on their own and act like a rabbit or a goose.

But, and here’s the hard part to understand, your arms or your legs do not and can not exist on their own. They are part of an interconnected whole called you. Your arms or your legs do thingsm not just to benefit themselves, but to benefit the whole body. What your arms do affects your whole body. What your legs do affects the rest of your body too.

Whether we really choose to believe it or not, all human beings are interconnected in a similar way. What one of us does, good or evil, affects the rest of humainty as well. We may not "see" the affect immediately, but believe me, it is there.

Now, we can choose to pretend that this interconnectedness does not exist and act as if we were alone in the universe, or we can choose to participate as a member of the community. It seems to me that most of the human race acts as if each of us were independent of the others, or, at best, we limit the number of communities we want to participate in.

For instance, one cell on the fingernail of the little finger on your left hand participates in a nimber of communities. Ir is part of the community of that one fingernail. It is also part of the community of that one finger. It is also part of the community of your left hand, the community og your left arm and the community of your body. Suppose that one cell decided to not participate in one or more of those communities. You would enf up with an infected nail which would infect the finger, which would infect the hand, which would infect the arm, which would infect the body and you die.

That is how a community works. Our hands and legs do not work for the benefit of themselves, but for the benefit of the whole organism. When all the parts of the community work together, not only does the whole organism benefit, but so does each part of it. Each part of the community contributes according to its talents for the mutual benefit of each member and for the benefit of the whole.

Now, getting back to marketing, in a Joint Venture, even the best of the so called "win-win" situations are stacked in favor of the person at the top of the pyramid. Each participating member may reap a small benefit, but the lion’s share of the benefits goes to the top.
That’s how the system works for most people. But some of us belong to a community called YORGOOpublishing amd YORGOO and things are different there. For example. when any YORGOOpublishing publisher posts an article to their newsletter, there is an automatic submission made to weblogs that we have updated our "blogs." What that does is generate a listing on weblogs’ daily reports of updated feeds. That is used by the major search engines in their rankings alogrithms. Sites that update regularly get ranked higher than those that don’t.

When the search engine robots read that info, they go to the updated page to see what they have done. Now, as with any site, the robots will follow the links and scan the entire domain. Following so far?

Here’s the neat part. Every YORGOOpublishing publisher is part of the YORGOOpublishing domain. Our newsletters are all subdomains of the the YORGOOpublishing server. So, the search engines will scan not just the post but other publishers’ feeds as well, especially if there happens to be a link to one or more of them. The key here is that the robots will be looking for related content.

Now, suppose we publishers make a conscious decision to all focus on one topic on one given day. We each write an article about that subject which we post. Then we all go and read each other’s stuff, post comments on each other’s feeds with links back to our own feeds or our home sites, write stuff in our feeds about one or more of the posts by other publishers. What do you think the cumulative effect of that would be? What if we started doing that every week using a different topic?

The reason this works is because there is no YORGOOpublishing.com outside of the publishers themselves. We are YORGOOpublishing. We are what makes YORGOOpublishing work and we are the ones who reap the benefits. YORGOOpublishing is designed to be a community in the best sense of the word. The marketing potential of that is totally awesome. And that is how you market without email.
One of my favorite movies is Field of Dreams. To paraphrase Costner’s vision in that movie. Build the community and they will come. Without email!