Curtis Carmichael

Web marketers must constantly keep themself updated with technology and marketing know-how in today’s ever-changing (and very competitive) Internet publishing landscape.  You can no longer ‘follow the lead’ and simply consider yourself a pure ‘marketing wizard’, IT professional or graphics pro.  On the contrary, one must wear many hats and ‘choose the path untaken’ to be 110% successful in this competitive arena.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a lesser-known web marketing tactic revolving around using RSS to automatically dump content into e-mails.  This is particularly useful if your business operation has limited time and resources.

A respected and very popular (but expensive) e-mail broadcast program called Lyris ListManager has this capability built-in, as does an alternative service at MailChimp.  Lyris ListManager can run as a hosted software solution on your own server or you can subscribe to have access to the software on a SaaS (software as a service) model with Lyris.  MailChimp functions as a powerful web-based software solution running off of mailchimp.com.

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Web marketers who stride with the idea that SEO is limited primarily to META tags, site architecture (i.e. properly formatted path names and file names in URLs), and writing SEO-friendly content (typically involving clever embedding of relational keywords/phrases within context) are misled. This is only half of the battle — getting your site’s pages linked elsewhere is also a critical component towards a successful SEO strategy.

To get started, FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com) is an excellent tool that allows web marketers to easily track how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed(s) while offering a historical analysis of your feed’s popularity and a breakdown of your feed’s most popular content (such as the top 5 headlines your visitors clicked on, etc.) What you want to do is create a Feedburner account if you don’t already have one and burn feed links through their web site that link to your feed’s XML file stored on your server.

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