Publishing with RSS
As we said in the first section, RSS is a only a tool and therefore I prefer to use direct-to-desktop publishing when discussing what most people refer to as RSS publishing. The reason for that is because, to effectively use RSS as your newsletter delivery system and to effectively integrate your RSS newsletter into your marketing, you will need to use additional tools besides an RSS feed.
You may use this content for your trainings and share it with users of The Magic Search Traffic Formula and the YORGOO Toolbar to help your team mated to understand the importance of RSS in Marketing and Communication in general. Yorgo
That is the point missed by many of those who claim to have "secrets" to RSS publishing. They explain how to set up your own RSS feed and then turn you loose to figure out how to market with it on your own. As you will see in this section, doing it that way is highly ineffective for reasons that will become clear as we go along.
Remember that marketing is all communications you have with your prospects and customers. That includes your newsletter as part of your marketing mix. Your newletter needs to be an integral part of that mix and needs to be integrated into your marketing efforts. You cannot separate your publishing from your other marketing.
To be an effective direct-to-desktop publishing, you must change how you look at publishing.
Email publishing and marketing is push marketing and push publishing. Push means shoving your messages into the face of your readers. You, as the publisher, control what content your subscribers receive. That is why spam complaints are such an issue for email publishers. They feel that they should control what content their subscribers see.
Direct-to-desktop publishing and marketing is based on the concept that your subscribers should be the ones in control. You, the publisher, must pull them to your content. By that I mean, your content must be both very high quality and very interesting to your readers. Sending out a lot of unwanted advertising will not pull very many readers to your newsletter.
That is the basic shift in attitude that becoming a direct-to-desktop publisher entails. There are both increased benefits and increased responsibilities placed upon the publisher.
Direct-to-desktop publishing means providing very-high quality content, much more so than email publishing. As much as possible, this content should be original (written by the publisher) content. Remember, you want to build your own credibility, your own reputation as an expert, not somebody else’s.
We all use third-party articles and you will need to do so even as a direct-to-desktop publisher. Make sure that you select only articles that are highly informative and of the highest quality. The reputation of the author as a "guru" should not enter into your decision. Select the article on the basis of quality of content. Length is not important either. Long or short, always pick the thir-party articles you use based solely on quality and relevance. Too many email publishers use articles that have little quality to them. You cannot afford to do that because your content will be spidered by the search engines and will affect your ranking.
When you do use a third-party article, I suggest you the following.. Write a multi-paragraph commentary on the article. Post that in your newsletter with a link to the actual article, preferably on your own web site. That way, your readers will get your views on the subject as well as whatever the author of the article has to say.
Doing it this way also has some very positive implications for your web site traffic. More on that in the marketing section.
The change from push to pull means also means a shift in how you think about subscriber counts.
Email publishers are also concerned about how many email addresses are on their lists. However, it has been shown that many of these lists are full of "dead letter addresses" – email addresses where no one ever checks the mail. This is especially true of those newsletters who either offer free advertising for subscribing or belong to one of the email ad co-ops that require the advertiser to subscribe to every newsletter carrying their ad.
When an email publisher makes the shift to direct-to-desktop publishing, assuming they make a clean break from using email as a delivery method, will see a significant drop in the size of their lists. This is to be expected and is not a cause for alarm. The people who will sign up for your RSS feed are those who were reading your newsletter all along, your loyal following. The rest are either freeloaders or the dead letter addresses. Based on personal testimonials and statistical evidence, on the average, 10% of the email addresses on an email publisher’s list represent real readers. Yes, there are always exceptions. This is the statistical average based on the data I was able to collect from various sources.
If you have been providing excellent, original content as an email publisher and your list has been responsive, you should see a significant number of your email subscribers move to RSS with you. If you have been doing an average newsletter, then a very small percentage will follow you. Do not be discouraged. One of the real benefits of direct-to-desktop publishing is that, as you learn how to be an effective direct-to-desktop publisher, the marketing tools built in a good direct-to-desktop publishing system will help you do something that is very expensive to do as an email publisher. Your newsletter will be seen more and more by the people who are really interested in what you have to say. AND this will not cost you a dime extra.
The change from push to pull means also means a shift in how you think about customer service.
There is one more adjustment you must make that really represents the difference between push and pull. We all have been taught to make the customer our first priority. But how that is practiced by email publishers is far different from how direct-to-desktop publishers make their customers their top priority.
First of all, all publishers need to realize that their readers are their customers. As customers, your readers have certain expectations, They expect a quality product that meets a need they have and they expect great customer service. If you are not providing those, your subscribers will leave. And rightly so. None of us do business with someone whose products are irrelevant or whose products are shoddy. Nor do we stay with a business that does not provide adequate customer service. And that is the way it should be.
Your subscribers should be free to leave if they feel that your newsletter is not for them. They should be able to leave quickly and easily.
However, email publishers, even the really big ones, make unsubscribing from their lists as difficult as possible. The more complicated the process, the more likely for things to go wrong technically. And if your subscriber has tried to unsubscribe and then receives another issue or ad from you, they are more than likely going to file a spam complaint. That could lead to some very serious repercussions.
Why do email publishers make it so hard to unsubscribe? They use all kinds of nationalizations for this. The most prevalent is for your protection. That is a smoke screen. Remember, email is push technology. It is designed to put the sender in control.
Most of them do it for other reasons, partly based on what list server they use. Some list servers, like Majordomo, need a special email code sent that is confusing, even for me, to make work right. If they wanted to make it easy for their subscribers, they would have picked a different list server, one much easier to use. The best email list servers provide an immediate unsubscribe link at the end of every message.
But even some of the lists that have a link like that, will tell you that it will be two weeks before your request is processed. Why do they need that long? We are using computers here, are we not? The unsubscribe should be instantaneous. If it is not, this is a publisher who is pushing you to stay.
Have you noticed something about the email unsubscribe process? You, as the subscriber, are not in control. Yes, you make the initial request, but after that it is out of your hands. Your request can be delayed at the discretion of the publisher or even be ignored due to "technical difficulties."
With direct-to-desktop publishing, it is the subscriber who controls what newsletters they receive and read. Don’t want this one or that one? Just delete it from your reader. Much like the channel set up on your television and just as efficient.
Having readers who can leave whenever they want puts a tremendous responsibility on the direct-to-desktop publisher. We have to learn to provide content that will constantly pull both our present readers and new subscribers to read our newsletters. That means that the only consistent way to get and keep readers is content. The better your content the higher retention and acquisition rates you will see. For direct-to-desktop publishers, content truly is king!
To summarize all this: email publishing uses push technology and focuses on quantity for success. Direct-to-desktop publishing uses pull technology and focuses on quality for success.
Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major shift in how you look at the purpose of your newsletter.
It is my contention that some publishers, and most especially email publishers, are marketers first and publishers second. That means they see making sales as the primary purpose of publishing an ezine or newsletter. We all hope that our publications will achieve that goal, but it should not be the primary purpose of your publication. Instead, your publication should focus on providing content of the highest quality that establishes your credibility. You do that by showing your readers that you know your stuff, that you are, dare I use the word, an expert – a real expert – in your field.
This means you need to do as much writing of your own as possible. Yes, I realize that writing articles is hard work and time-consuming. That is why we publishers use third-party articles. but don’t just run any article that you receive. Use some discrimination. Use only articles that complement your own content, that are appropriate to the focus of your own newsletter. And, whatever you do, do not just publish the article as is. Write a short introduction that gives your readers your own thoughts on the article. Remember, you want to establish your reputation, your credibility, not someone else’s.
The received wisdom is that newsletters should be used to promote your own products and services. If you look at the vast majority of email newsletters, that is exactly what the publishers seem to think is the purpose of their newsletter. In most, including a lot of the most-well known, newsletters, you can hardly find the content among all the advertising. these publishers seem to feel the need to shove their advertising in your face.
However, let’s look at what should serve as a model for all online publishers: your local newspaper. Most newspapers do not cram every page of their publications with so many ads that you cannot find the articles. Most of the good ones tend to have a separate section for advertising. And what ads do appear in the content sections are presented in such a way that they do not interfere with the presentation of the news.
How long do you think your local paper would keep its subscribers if they overloaded the news pages with ads? It’s time we online publishers changed the way we think. We need to get away from the newsletter-as-vehicle-for-advertising model and switch to a newsletter-as-vehicle-for-quality-content model.
Effective direct-to-desktop publishing requires a major shift in how you look at the design of your newsletter.
Email publishers tend to publish discrete issues of their newsletters on a regular schedule. The most common schedule is once a week. Each issue contains all the information that publisher wants to communicate to his or her subscribers for that week. There are a couple of drawbacks to that format, beyond the basic problem that this publisher is using email as her delivery system.
The first drawback is the length. With a couple of articles and a half dozen or so classified ads, along with the regular information like the welcome, the disclaimers required with email, the unsubscribe information, etc., that makes for a fairly long message. Most Internet users just don’t read messages of that length.
Yes, you could send out more frequent shorter messages, but that only compounds the problems associated with email delivery exponentially. The more often you email your subscribers, the more likely you are of getting shut down because of a spam complaint.
By using a weblog type of format, you do not do discrete issues. Rather you post an article or your advertising or an editorial on any given day. Let’s say on Monday, you post an article about RSS publishing, then on Tuesday you publish an editorial about the upcoming election, on Wednesday, you publish a couple of classifieds, on Thursday you publish an article on holiday advertising and on Friday you publish a few more ads. Let’s say this is the same content you would have published in a discrete issue, except for the disclaimers and the mast head – the stuff at the top that identifies your newsletter,
You do not need to publish the mast head because it is always there on your blog. You do not need to include all the email disclaimers because you are not using email. Things like advertising disclaimers and welcome messages can be integrated into the overall design of your weblog as a sidebar, so they are always there. Anyone going to your blog page will see them every time they visit.
Yes, even though you are using RSS as your delivery system for your newsletter, your newsletter will have an HTML page as well that your readers will visit whenever they read an entire item in your newsletter.
You see, the RSS feed will only carry the title as a link and the first paragraph or two of your item, say the article about RSS publishing. Each item will be listed separately in the same format. The RSS feed will hold up to fifteen items, the last fifteen items you posted. Any good RSS publishing system will set all this up for you and do all the necessary coding changes. Usually you post your item in HTML and the publishing system converts it to XML for you. Doing it all manually is not effective or efficient, so I suggest you not do that! The idea is to use RSS to make your life easier not harder. More on these systems later on.
With the better publishing systems you do not even have to know a lot of HTML because they will allow you to post your item as text and it will format the line breaks for you. As long as you put a double hard break at the end of each paragraph of text, your article will look fine. You can add bold or italics or underlines as needed. But, the better your HTML skills, the more creative you can be in how your posts will look.
Also, if you have the necessary expertise and tools, you can add graphics, Flash, audio, video, or anything else you want to jazz up your pages. Do NOT add executables (EXE) files to your posts. That creates all kinds of problems for your readers and is forbidden by most, if not all, publishing systems. Also, if you add multimedia to your newsletter, I strongly recommend you do in a way so that your reader can choose to view it or not. Not only is that the courteous thing to do, but it also will prevent you from locking up your reader’s computer. Although most people have fairly sophisticated computers these days, there are still people who might not be able to or do not want to view these kinds of files. Remember, your reader is in control here, not you.
Doing daily posts, which I consider the ideal schedule, may seem like a lot more work, but, in reality and once you get the hang of it, it really is less time consuming than doing one big issue a week. Also, a lot of email publishers have gone back to doing text-based newsletters to avoid some of the filtering of email that is going on. HTML email is often blocked or the HTML is disabled unless you specifically ask to see it.
Text newsletters are dull and boring. The Internet is a visual medium first and foremost. Yes, it is for the transmission of content, but that content has to be visually appealing to your readers. There is nothing appealing about a long text message that uses rows of unimaginative characters like #,@, * or others to try to add some zest to all that text. If you want to keep your readers, yes, provide them with lots of great content, but also present that content in a way that captures their imaginations.
Finally, there is a very strong marketing reason for using a blog type of format. I will explain it in detail in the marketing section.
You want new subscribers for your newsletter, right? That means you need to get new people to see your newsletter, right? That means getting traffic to your newsletter page, right? One of the best ways to do that is to get the search engines like Google to spider your newsletter every time you add a new item to your weblog. What would you say if I told you there was a marketing tool that could do that? It’s called pinging weblogs and I’ll explain how that works in another article.
The change from push to pull means also means a shift in how you think about subscriber counts.
Email publishers are also concerned about how many email addresses are on their lists. However, it has been shown that many of these lists are full of "dead letter addresses" – email addresses where no one ever checks the mail. This is especially true of those newsletters who either offer free advertising for subscribing or belong to one of the email ad co-ops that require the advertiser to subscribe to every newsletter carrying their ad.