Back in December of 2007, I decided that I wanted to try something new and fresh with my website. I was also getting tired of the standard websites with their uniform look and I didn’t really feel like I was getting any benefit from it. So, I did a bit of research and decided that I wanted to try a blogging platform and after a bit more research, I chose Wordpress.

Before I fully converted to the blog, I was receiving approximately 900 unique visitors each month.

• By January, one month after I converted, I was receiving 1300 unique visitors.
• By February it had grown to 2500 unique visitors
• In March, it had grown to 4000 unique visitors in the month.

That is four times the traffic I started with!

So, let’s look at the top five reasons why you need a blog (in my biased opinion, WordPress is the way to go so I will reference WP throughout this post but you could use any blogging platform to achieve these same benefits…):

1. Blogs are User-Friendly and Very Easy to Use

The upside to having blog software as opposed to a website is that it is very user-friendly. The blog uses a GUI, or a graphic-user interface, which means that that everything that you may need to do is laid out in simple to understand graphics. The blogging software also conforms to the standards of most other software programs. For example, the graphic icons you see in Microsoft Office programs are very similar to the graphics you’ll see inside of your blog.

The reason that this is so important is that YOU can update your OWN website and you don’t need to pay high prices in web design fees to do so! There is no messing around with HTML code, you can avoid having a dull, lifeless site that people only visit occasionally and instead, you can update it yourself and give people a reason to return again and again and again.

The other upside to this is that when you want something changed quickly, you can do so. You no longer have to wait on a web designer or a virtual assistant, you can just pop in to the dashboard and update the page you need to make changes to and click save and boom – you’re done!

Making regular posts is also easy to do. In a few, short clicks and then some keystrokes for the body of your post, you can have fresh, new content on your blog immediately. If you’re feeling particularly creative one day, you can write a series of posts and save them all to post on future dates. For me, I will write eight or nine blog entries at a time and save them to post one or two days apart. This is also useful if you are going on vacation. In February, my husband and I went to the Dominican for a vacation and before I left, I wrote blog entries to cover the week I was gone and just posted them in advance. On the days that I specified, my blog entries showed up on the blog!

2. Blogs Are Easy to Navigate

All blogs follow a fairly standard style of formatting and navigation. Although each template may look different, they all contain the same standard elements. When I visit a blog, I always know where to go to see Recent Posts. I also know that on the majority of blogs, I will be able to find a place to subscribe to the blogs feed. A feed is simply a syndication of your blog entries. That syndicated text is then sent out to your blog visitors feed readers and is sent out to the search engines, etc. This is part of the reason that blogging is so powerful in getting people to your site.

Have you ever visited a website where every menu has been different and each sidebar contained different text depending on where you were on the website? Those types of websites are confusing and they don’t lead the website visitor where they should be going. With blogging software, it remains standard and is always updating itself. When you make a change on one sidebar, it automatically updates on every other sidebar which eliminates any sort of confusion for your website visitors.

A great book I want to recommend is Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think.” Even if you don’t design websites, you want to read this book. A lot of the reasons that I love blogs are outlined in his usability section. He references making websites more functional by following his principles but what is so great is that a blog already conforms to many of his standards.

3. People Can Subscribe to Your Blog and Stay Current

Now, I want to explain what RSS is first. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What it is is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. People who are into blogging will use your RSS feed to do a few things:

• They may subscribe to receive a daily digest of new content. Think of how powerful this is in terms of keeping you in touch with your target market. If someone receives constant, updated messages from you, you are always in their line of sight and they will see what you are up to, new products or services you are launching and how much knowledge you have on your chosen subject.

• They may also add you to their feed reader. I have a program that I use called Feed Demon and this software program tracks all of the blogs I am interested in by capturing and updating the feed that comes from the blog. Each day I can open up this software program and have an instant summary of every blog I have subscribed to and I can review what it is people are talking about. This allows me to stay current without having a thousand bookmarks in my internet browser or trying to remember which blogs I liked to read. The same is true for your visitors. They want a quick, easy way to be reminded that you exist and that you are posting things that they want to know about.

Normal sites don’t do this for you unless you are putting out a monthly ezine that contains all of your business updates. By having the blog, you can nearly cut out the monthly ezine and just let the blog do the work for you!

4. Search Engines Love Them and They Are Content Managers

In fact, it’s so easy to build content on your blog that I have actually created info-products based on content I had blogged about over the past year. Info-products become simple to do because you aren’t creating fresh, new content each and every time. What you blog about could become an article which could turn into an e-book. Blogging gets you into the habit of writing and creating which then allows you to easily and effortlessly create info-products.

Your visitors will also love this because when they show up on your site looking for assistance in your chosen profession, they can find a whole archive of great content. Most of my blogging clients will archive their past newsletters or e-zines on their blogs so that their clients can read past issues without having to download PDFs or visit thirteen or fourteen different web pages.

Search engines love blogs for a number of reasons. Number one, they love the fact that fresh, new content is being posted all of the time. Even if you are only updating it once a week, you will still see the benefits from it. Each and every time you post something to your blog, the search engines are automatically pinged and if you have pinging software installed, which is free and simple to use, it’ll automatically ping the different services that should be pinged.

Number two, search engines love hyperlinks and trackbacks. Hyperlinks are links to other people’s websites, blog entries, audio files, etc. and track backs are special links from someone else’s blog entry that let the other person know you’ve blogged about him or her. It also posts YOUR entry on their site for other people to read. This is how blogging also becomes so viral.

5. They Become an Active Networking Source for Your Business

For me, I have met a number of brand new people through my blog. Some of these people became clients, others were just frequent readers that became friends and others asked me to collaborate with them on special projects. By having a blog, you can become a place where people visit to learn about what it is you are writing about but also so that they can meet you, get to know you and someday work with you. You can build a community and allow other people to meet through you which then allows people to talk about you and get your name out there.

If you think of standard networking, you think of people showing up to an event for about an hour, rushing through the crowds trying to get business cards and then leaving the event and never really having a true feeling of connection. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this. Blogging gives your interested parties a place to come to learn about you. They can start to see how you both would benefit from knowing each other and they will be more apt to approach you over time. This is a much more effective way to network and you don’t need to worry about your business card being thrown in the trash.

Another way that it becomes a networking tool is when you reach out to other people’s blogs. Once you start blogging, you will quickly realize that the whole world is blogging and there are many great things to be read. By visiting other people’s blogs and leaving comments on their posts, you will do two things: one, you will introduce yourself in a non-threatening or non-imposing way to someone you may not have wanted to just e-mail in the past and two, by showing that you have interest in that subject on their blog, you’ll gain interested visitors who share similar interests.

Erin Blaskie is the owner of Business Services ETC, The VA Coach and VA Matchmaker.  She services internet marketers, coaches, speakers and solopreneurs with their everyday operational needs which frees up their time to focus on the big picture.  She can be found at www.erinblaskie.com.

Blidget is a new tool/service/offering from Widgetbox that allows you to create a widget out of your blog. (What is it about Web 2.0 that requires every new tool to have a celebrity couple name?)

By turning your blog into a widget you can make it easier for people to syndicate your content while still maintaining some of your branding. Creating a Blidget only takes a few minutes, and depending on your blog software, installing it may be a one-click affair.

If you’d like to add BBC’s widget to your own blog, click below:

Good article over at eWeek called “RSS Offers Relief from Enterprise E-Mail Overload.”

It talks about how email has fallen out of favor as a way of distributing information to large groups of people, and how certain businesses are starting to use RSS.

The article also covers some negatives of RSS, including:

• Problems with adoption and inertia from some users
• How RSS feeds can reduce page visits, and
• How RSS can create bandwidth bottlenecks for popular feeds.

This definitely isn’t one of those “email is dead” articles, but instead shows how forward thinking companies are looking to RSS as a new distribution channel.

Just wanted to point your attention to another in a great series of posts from Brian Clark of Copyblogger.

This one’s called Permission Marketing 2.0, a riff on Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing and the fact that anything being revisited today needs to have a 2.0 on it to be taken seriously. Kind of like dot com in the late nineties.

One of my favorite lines…

Somewhere along the way, people became overly obsessed with search and forgot everything else. Many businesses today would disappear if their rankings tanked. And that’s no way to run a business.

Too true.

So what is PM2.0? It’s all about RSS my friends. Read on….

For many of you this may seem basic, but there’s a first time for everything….

Have you ever wondered how us “blogging experts” keep up on dozens or even hundreds of blogs a day? Do we visit dozens or hundreds of Web sites a day hoping that each one has posted new, worthwhile post(s)? Don’t we have lives? Don’t we have businesses to run?!?

The answer is that we subscribe to the feed from these blogs and collect them in one central location. I prefer NetNewsWire (Mac only!) while others prefer the browser-based Bloglines.

Unfortunately, subscribing to a blog feed is counter-intuitive. The very action we’ve been trained to do with Pavlovian perfection–clicking on a link–instead presents us with a page of XML mumbo-jumbo.

To that end, I’ve put together this little movie (at 10.2 MB it’s actually not that little) that walks you through the subscription process. Soon you’ll be able to subscribe to blogs with the best of ‘em, keeping up on important industry information and staying ahead of your competition.

How to Subscribe to a Blog Feed: The Movie!

When I opened Bloglines the other day to check my feeds I saw a notice about an opening for a director position to oversee future development of the app.

As you probably know, Bloglines was acquired back in February by Ask.com. Bloglines creator Mark Fletcher assumed the director position, but left the company in June to pursue other interests.

I’ve written an op/ed on my Allbusiness.com blog, Strategic Business Blogging, so let me invite you to read that post as well.

One thing I learned during Blog Business Summit is that for most people RSS is over their heads, like Goodyear blimp over their heads.  This isn’t their fault, it’s ours.  We, as the blogi masters, just haven’t done enough to help people get it (or “grok” it as I like to say).

Anita Campbell has an article in Inc Technology that brings it all down to this: “The simple reality is:  RSS still has far too much geek factor.”

The question is, then, what can we do about it?  I think it comes down to two things, education and application.

First we have to educate people what it is, how it really works, how to look for it on sites, and how to subscribe.  Then we need, we absolutely need to show people why it is so important.  Why it can save them time and help them in their day-to-day jobs.

Read on at Bloggers For Hire.

Tags: RSS, collaborative intelligence

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York earlier this year, I had a chance to start doing an interview with super blogger, past TechTV host and organizer of the Gnomedex conference, Chris Pirillo. It was to be a video interview with my new Sony Cybershot, but I didn’t have very much memory left and the interview was cut short. I’ve since corrected the problem with a 4gb and another 2gb memory stick for almost 2 1/2 hours of decent quality video on two postage stamp sized chips.

Six months later I finally reconnected with Chris (which is amazing since we’re on IM) and was able to ask him a variety of questions ranging from social media to RSS. Here’s a snippet:

“In this interview, Chris talks about his TagJag project, web traffic from social media, favorite conferences, plans for Lockergnome 2.0, his upcoming wedding with fiancee Ponzi and fun quotes like: “Google is the internet”, “Email is dead” and “Let’s not blog about blogging about blogging about blogs anymore, okay?”.”

I can appreciate the enthusiasm for RSS, but I don’t think email is dead by a longshot. RSS to email at least. In fact, during dinner last night with “Mr. RSS” himself, Rok Hrastnik and I talked about RSS being too easy to use and that it can get to a point of information overload. The closest solution is the “river of news” concept, but how many good solutions are there for that?

If you would like all the Q/A with Chris Pirillo, here is the full interview.

Speaking of RSS, if you are at the DMA 06 conference this week, be sure to check out the blogs, RSS and podcasting session from 4:30-5:30, room 135 in the Moscone North building with Stephan Spencer, Amanda Watlington and myself.

Also, there is the RSS Roundtable meeting on Tuesday night sponsored by Pheedo, PRWeb, SimpleFeed and Silverpop downtown San Francisco which should be a good discussion.

Well Dave already spilled the beans (here and here), yep I’m speaking at BBS at the end of the month.  The question is, then, just what the heck am I speaking about.  RSS Metrics.  Oh boy, yeah.  I wrote a bit about it on my blog already, but essentially what I’m going to help people work out is how to measure their audience on their blog.  This, btw, is no mean feat.  The reason Feedburner has been so successful is that they do give those metrics.  But, my talk isn’t going to just be “Use Feedburner.  Thank you.  Any questions?”.  That’s more than a little lame.  Don’t ask me how I’m going to simplify the discussion, because I’m still noodling that around in my head (ouch).

The reason, besides I was stupid enough to agree, that I’m talking about RSS metrics (and maybe blog metrics in general), is that as businesses get into blogs, bosses want to know what impact the blog is having.  Who is reading it, how often, when, what …  And while it might seem easy to dismiss these things, it really isn’t.  It is important.

If you are interested in biz blogging, BBS (as Dave said) is a great time to learn and network.  Pick the brains of folks already doing it.  Hang out with fun folks and just bask in the general blogginess.  I know that after BBS you will have a ton of new ideas and ways to start blogging or improve your blogging.   Now let me sweeten the pot a bit.  If you want to go I have a discount code for you worth $100 off any package.  When you register use code LCAS06 and the discount is yours.  There are deals to be had for hotel rooms (I use Hotwire myself) and I’ll be there Tuesday night and for the workshops and conferences.  Stop by and say hi.  I’m sure Dave and I will be hanging out somewhere chatting (look for the tall guy with the beard and the shorter geeky guy with glasses).

Tags: BBS, BBS06, Blog Business Summit

A new blog/RSS advertising option has launched this week from the folks at Text Link Ads called Feedvertising, which is a service that allows you to monetize your RSS feeds with ads. Text Link Ads will sell the ads for you, or as is the case with my blog, I combine links to my an affiliate program with Marketing Sherpa along with a few ads sold by Text Link Ads.

Not only is Feedvertising a potential source of revenue for blogs, but it’s also a clever way to cross promote other areas of your blog, company web site or other web sites that you publish.

Here is a tutorial on Feedvertising over at Tubetorial that explains how it works or you can check out the Feedvertising web site.

Co-founder of Text Link ads Andy Hagans took a few minutes to answer a few questions about Feedvertising for me. Basically Andy says Feedvertising is a way to give RSS feed publishers a lot more control over ads and the market is still very new.

What prompted you to develop this tool?

Advertising via RSS is a small but emerging market. We took a look at existing products and didn’t see anything that was very impressive, from a blogger or advertiser standpoint: pricing was often confusing and inefficient; the ads were often graphical or JavaScript-based, resulting in banner-blindness; and finally, most systems left bloggers without any control over what ads ended up in their feed.

We developed Feedvertising with the idea that bloggers should be able to monetize their RSS feeds while maintaining complete control; i.e., they can manually add their own ads or promotions, or sell space through the TLA system, or do a combination of both.

What kind of earning potential is there for advertisers and what’s the business model for Text Link Ads with this tool?

The business model for TLA is to help monetize those feeds where the blogger chooses to do so through the TLA system. We think the earning potential is great, as reaching the influencers who use RSS is a very important marketing objective for companies who are trying to gain mindshare among early adopters or bloggers. Right now we are testing the price points, so the exact numbers will probably change over time.

What do you think of the RSS advertising market? What are some innovative uses of RSS where advertising might be most productive? ie, advertising on a blog feed is one thing, advertising on a new product RSS feed is another.

Again, this market is pretty immature, but so are all marketing channels in the beginning. Our goal is to stay innovative as this channel evolves and expands. As long as we stay commited to delivering value to both bloggers and advertisers, the feature set should move naturally with that.

What kinds of blogs are best suited for this kind of advertising? What kind of traffic should a blog/RSS feed be getting in terms of hits or subscribers before it makes sense to advertise?

Without getting into numbers, it really comes down to advertiser demand. If your blog has a smaller number of RSS subscribers, but those subscribers are mostly business executives (or any other valuable audience segment), there is still going to be demand from the advertising side.

That said, we think Feedvertising is a great product for ANY blog, even a new one or one with small readership; at the very least, you can use Feedvertising to cross-promote your own feature pages, or other sites.

There are other great reviews of Feedvertising at TechCrunch and Problogger.

An interesting development transpired here at BBC, a blog conversation broke out.  BBC contributor Stephan Spencer’s post PR Firms Comment Spamming? began a small conversation with the VP of Connors Communications.  Stephan had assumed a comment left on his blog about the long tail was a PR firm touting the latest client’s software program.  Although Stephan was mistaken in his assumption, through the use of blog mining or RSS (now I’m assuming), Mike Levin the person that left the comment, was able to correct his mistake.  In fact Mike was touting the application he had developed for Connors Communications. 

An open conversation was the result, and although Stephan and Mike may disagree on the use of comments on a blog, it is clear that their exchange was civil, and exactly what companies can use a blog to develop, an open commuincation with their customer or clients. 

Sorry Mike, now it’s my turn to provide some feedback.  After going to the Connors website, I wanted to rush to read your blog since you had indicated you were a passionate blogger in your comment.  I looked far and wide and could not seem to locate that blog.  On a whim I decided to check out the hard to find navigational site map link and searched a long time again before I found the link to your company blog.  You are correct by stating in the comments here:

I read many blogs, and sometimes I am compelled to leave comments, just as comments on our blog are welcome. I think if you read a few of my blog posts, you will find me to be sincere and on the level.

I read a few of your blog posts and you are definitely on the level and sincere.  The problem or at least what made it difficult was the navigation to your blog.  If you don’t make it easy to access those blog posts people may never get to find your wisdom.  A simple “Read Our Weblog” button or link in the top left with the rest of the navigation would prove to be beneficial to you and Connors Communications.

Great job gentleman and lets keep up the blogging conversation.

KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann have begun to release an emerging media series study into how blogs, podcasts and other RSS technologies affect technology purchasing decisions.

So far only the podcasting study has been released (free with registration), but they’ve released some teaser factoids:

• 53% of respondants get business and technology information from blogs
• 59% of business and IT professionals are somewhat or very familiar with RSS
• 70% pass along content from blogs

Of course, they don’t go into detail (at least yet) on whether these people are making a buying decision on what they read at Engadget, or whether an RSS feed is helping them choose the right server or keeping them up with last night’s episode of Lost.

You can read the abstract and register for the free report here.

Thanks to Media Buyer Planner for the link.

The web works quickly, as so noted by Wendy Davis in her column today “Just An Online Minute… Facebook’s About-Face“. No sooner did Facebook put up their “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed” to keep users alerted about changes in their friends’ profiles through the magic of RSS than they were feeling the wrath of over 500,000 social netizens breathing down their neck to stop the privacy invasion. All this great publicity (and a 6%+ response rate - 500K of 9M, not bad numbers! Enough to make any direct marketer blush) thanks, in part, to the folks at Students Against Facebook News Feed.

The group has, however, issued a statement basically telling people to ‘back off’, as Facebook has impelmented satisfactory changes to it’s privacy policy.

The group’s initial impression is that Facebook has implimented most of the privacy changes that we asked for. We never believed Mark Zuckerberg was out to hurt people and that his corporation had nothing but good intentions when they launched news feed and mini-feed.

My take on this whole thing, which is obviously one-sided, is that this whole situation was a bit overblown and really shows the power of the social media zeitgeist when it’s way, way out of control.

Think about this. Plaxo has been doing this for years. I get emails all the time from them telling me that someone’s updated their content (though, it usually comes from my computer with the Plaxo toolbar installed). I also see this every time I log in to LinkedIn. In fact, just today, I can tell you who, of my connections, added friend and connections (and who they were!), updated their profiled, added their blog URL and other various administrative tasks. Tell me, what seperates these from the Facebook ordeal?

I say, there’s not much difference here, just a difference of perception. For some reason, that I’ve not the time to dive deep into here, the current generation of Facebook users (cursory view - there’s only one other person from my graduating university class on facebook..most everyone else is ‘05 - ‘10) have a warped perception that there’s privacy online. Really, since when? Google has your life in a box (and a well organized one at that). So what if your friends see that you added a new picture, seriously, with the volume of stuff (my experience with LinkedIn and Plaxo) coming though, it’s not like anyone will care anyway.

In the wise words of one Sun MicroSystems CEO, Scott McNealy “Privacy is dead, deal with it.” While I wouldn’t go so far as to say “dead”, there is a movement going on in the “identity” space, privacy certainly is not something you expect in an online social network (at least, not in this day and age, and not from Gen X)
The lesson that I take away, and the reason that we’re so in love with RSS (or News Feeds, Mini-Feeds, whatever…) is that it’s all about CONSUMER CONTROL and OPT-IN. Think about that the next time you lauch a great feature. (especially to a rabid community of 9 million). It’s that simple. Facebook made a quick about face, and was able to save face (sorry, couldn’t resist) here by implementing some very swift policy changes. Kudos to them for listening and reacting!

RSS is a great tool, just like every other great tool on the Internet, but it’s the best kind of tool when the user has the controls. If Facebook gives the controls to the users (and they know how to use them), we’ll see News Feeds come back in style on Facebook.

More info: WSJ (free article) New Facebook Features
Have Members in an Uproar

From iMediaConnection this morning comes some hints at how to track the buzz around you and your business on the blogosphere.  The tips and techniques are good ones, but they miss a couple important things.  First let’s look at the metrics they suggest:

• Technorati: Blogs linking to your site
• Technorati: Total incoming links to your site
• Bloglines: Citation search total
• Analytics: Pageviews
• Analytics: New Visitors
• Analytics: Repeat visitors
• Analytics: Referrals
• Analytics: Organic
• Analytics: Direct
• Datasource: New Members/Subscribers/Customers
• Datasource: Revenues from (direct sales/affiliates/partners/resellers/etc.)
• Alexa: Weekly rank
• Email: Opens
• Email: Clickthroughs
• Email: Forwards

Super.  Lot’s more here than just bloggy buzz, but let’s run with it.  Since I’m in charge of the metrics stuff at Qumana, well I’m usually up to my elbows in all this data.  So … what’s missing?  Well first an RSS reader.  The blogosphere is about immediacy if nothing else and you have to keep on top of it.  You need to subscribe to the RSS feeds provided by Technorati, Google, etc to be able to react and contribute to the conversation.  Bloglines and Lektora (disclosure I work for the company that makes Lektora) are two good choices.  Then for buzz and conversation measurement I really like BlogPulse.  Here is an example of a BlogPulse trend search comparing me (Tris Hussey), Debbie Weil, and Rick Bruner:

What this shows is that, well, sorry Rick … but no one is talking about you.  I tend to be talked more about than Debbie, except recently because Debbie just launched her book (man I gotta get cracking!).  Imagine doing this for your brand, CEO, competitors.  Something like this:

This compares Qumana (my company) to Ecto and Microsoft’s new Live Writer.  As you can see Qumana is talked about more than Ecto, but Live Writer is clearly a blogosphere darling at the moment.

Bottom line: check out the analytics article (there are good suggestions there), start subscribing to RSS, and add BlogPulse to your toolkit for some fast measurements on the bloggy buzz

Tags: buzz metrics, blog metric, buzz mesurement, buzz marketing, RSS

Do you RSS?  Lots of businesses wonder what blogging can do for their business.  Even more wonder about the mysterious RSS syndication format.  From WebProNews comes 11 Practical Uses for RSS in Business.

1. Use Your Own Content
2. News Headlines
3. Upcoming Events
4. Thoughts/Commentary
5. Articles
6. New Products
7. Weekly/Monthly Specials
8. Newsletters
9. New Links
10. New Members
11. Ticker RSS Feeds
12. Using Content From OTHER Web Sites

What do all of these have in common?  Simple, effective, easy transmission of information.  Concrete things you can do to ignite your presence on the web.  Some of these require something like blogging.  Putting out news, analysis, opinion, and events are made easier when you have a blog because RSS is de facto built into blogs, but things like a news ticker can be made from easily and freely available scripts and services.

So what are you waiting for?

Tags: RSS, RSS for business

bk_keywords:RSS,blog,business blog,corporate blog.
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Steve Rubel links to an AP article today about how younger email users are favoring other newer forms of communication like social networking sites, instant messaging and text messaging - and they see email as “a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file.”

Email’s problems have caught up to it, and the early adopters and the more tech savvy younger generation have been quick to catch on and are looking elsewhere for more appropriate communication mediums:

“And there is a very strong sense that the migration away from e-mail continues,” says Lee Rainie, the director at Pew.

For many young people, it’s about choosing the best communication tool for the situation.

As email emerged as a mainstream form of communication, we still used the phone, but transferred many phone tasks to email. Some things just didn’t need to be done by phone, and in fact, worked better over email.

The same goes for email and new communication mediums, but now email represents the phone and people are transferring tasks away from email by using other technologies like RSS and text messaging.

Email is not going away, it still has plenty of uses, but people are thinking outside the inbox and adopting new technologies .

JupiterResearch has published a new report, “RSS Comes of Age” that finds 63 percent of large companies planning to syndicate content via RSS by the end of this year. This growth is surprising in contrast to the low “perceived” adoption rate of RSS.

“The primary challenge to greater adoption is a lack of experience with RSS and resources to deploy it,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterKagan. “However, recent offerings from e-mail service providers (ESP) and RSS service providers are lowering the barrier for feed management, deployment and measurement.”

Reading this summary reminds me of the research report offered by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight (pdf):

“27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.”

So perhaps this explains the use of “percieved” in reference to adoption rates? Many users of RSS don’t realize they are. Regardless, RSS is a fantastic tool for communication and marketing and is one of the most distinguishing features of a blog.

RSS ad specialist Pheedo together with SilverPop, iUpload and PRWeb, are hosting a dinner roundtable on the topic of RSS advertising. Details here. This follows on a similar event they hosted earlier this month in San Francisco.

Are you curious about RSS industry benchmark metrics and RSS marketing best practices? Would you like to compare your RSS marketing results with those of your peers? Then you will be interested in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey being conducted by MarketingStudies.net.

From the survey sponsor:

“Participate in the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey, conducted by MarketingStudies.net and aiming to research the RSS marketing landscape, to receive a free copy of the full 2006 RSS Marketing Survey Report, bringing you top RSS marketing best practices and metrics to compare your RSS marketing practices with those of your peers, to improve your RSS marketing results.”

Respondents will get a copy of the overview report including metrics and best practices.

MarketingStudies.net is run by RSS Marketing guru, Rok Hrastnik, who is the author of “Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS“. He also publishes a free report, “The Business Case for RSS“.

Rok and I did an interview in March 2005 on using integrated online PR, blogs and RSS for improved results in search engines. After re-listening to that interview, it’s amazing how much can change in a year. At the time, using Technorati tags and social bookmarks was pretty new. Now they are pretty standard fare from the smorgasboard of tactics for blog link building.

If you’re attending the ACCM conference next week in Chicago, you can see Rok Hrastnik in action duing a a session called, “RSS What marketers need to know“. At the same conference, I’ll be speaking on the “15 Sizzling Hot Search Ideas for Merchants” session.

For anyone involved with using RSS for marketing, then be sure to take the 2006 RSS Marketing Survey. There’s an opportunity to share your case study which may be included in Rok’s next book and your experience with RSS may help further this channel for marketing and communication.

Coinciding with Ad:Tech San Francisco April 26-28, the RSS Industry Night Roundtable II aims to assemble a group of the top thought leaders in the RSS industry to discuss key topics that challenge all of us in RSS Advertising. This group will span the disciplines of RSS advertising, RSS manufacture, RSS aggregators and readers, and RSS purveyors and luminaries.

The event is free and seating is limited to 40 people. The event is sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb and Pheedo.

The first RSS Roundtable dinner, brought together some of the pioneers in RSS marketing and services including, Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay, NewsGator, Simplefeed, Pubsub, Feedburner, Pheedo and Forrester.

The intent of this meeting is to discuss a number of key issues facing our industry and it’s chances for continued success. This meeting will also serve as a vehicle for our key industry partners to discuss mutual challenges and viable solutions, as well as come to a mutual understanding of goals and objectives that we all have for the RSS advertising space. Lastly, we will have an opportunity to collaborate, as leaders in the industry, on how we can increase the rate of RSS adoption among information consumers. Case studies on RSS advertising success will also be presented. Attendees will also be encouraged to share their stories.

Where: San Francisco, 10-15 minute walk from Moscone (location of Ad:Tech). Event location details will be sent to interested parties.
Time: 6:30PM - 9:30PM
Date: April 27 (second day of Ad:Tech)
Cost: Free dinner sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb, Pheedo, cash bar
RSVP:: Send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address

Topics:
There are so many topics that we can collectively address as an industry, however, it’s critical that we focus on the important few that address issues of RSS growth and adoption.

We will focus on key industry issues that are preventing business adoption of RSS. Below are the high-level issues that we’ll cover. At the end of the document are additional topics that can be discussed if there is additional time.

–> Lack of standardized RSS metrics
–> Lack of presentable case studies and best practices
–> IRSS mass syndication
–> Actual RSS penetration
–> Rich-media advertising

Attendees:
Ideally, the event will attract around 40 high level leaders from within the RSS and Advertising industries including the following disciplines.

RSS Manufacturer
RSS Advertising
RSS Readers
RSS Services
RSS Convergence
RSS Research

If you are interested in attending, please send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address.

With our recent posts on RSS, I figured I’d weigh in with a quick opinion of my own. I know its heretical for a blogger to say so, but I think RSS is vastly over-hyped. To that end, I’m happy to point out Dave Taylor’s recent post where he points out an obvious truth: most RSS readers suck.

Here’s a brave admission: I don’t use any RSS reader. I haven’t for a couple of years. I tried various ones here and there, but ultimately I come back to the fact that I just don’t have time to keep up with all that information, and I’m an information junkie, blogger and researcher. I don’t know how the rest of you do it. I have simply don’t have an extra hour every day to scan the posts of the 200 blogs I love. I barely have time to read the industry sites that cover my sector (Internet advertising). Basically, I try to scan MarketingVOX daily, and then spend 2-3 hours with email and then, if I have any time left, I try to actually do some work. I’d love to read more blogs, but where do you fit it in? I’m sleeping only six hours a night as it is. I’m a drop-by blog reader; I cycle through my favorites here and there where I have time andbrowse their archives.
But it’s one thing for a blogger to admit this (and those who follow my blogging know that I’m also a catch-as-catch-can blogger, not a daily machine like some people). But what the hell does an ordinary person need with RSS? A blogger, a trend watcher, a journalist, or just info junkies, I can see the point of why they use RSS. But that accounts for the 5% of the population that already uses RSS. Why on earth would my mom need an RSS reader?

Here’s what baffles me most about RSS and the blogosphere: for all the excitement about about RSS as a reader subscription feature, it’s been virtually ignored by blog software tools as a true syndication mechanism. Why isn’t it a standard feature of every blog publishing tool that you can customize the resyndication of your other favorite blogs? E.g., I’d like flexible controls to put in the margin of my blogs up-to-the-minute headlines (or short posts, or long posts) from my favorite five (or 10, or 20) blogs. I tried to do this two years ago and all I found was some university hack. I suspect there are (but don’t actually know of) some more mature widgets out there that let you do this now, as I’ve seen it here and there on other blogs, but it’s certainly not widespread. It would be like blogrolling on crack. Seems like a no-brainer. Is there a WordPress plug-in for that?

(Of course, what blog publishing tools really need is the ability to aggregate posts and publishing them as an email newsletter, but, as Molly Shannon memorably said, don’t even get me started…)