Online Marketing Blog

When reviewing search marketing blogs each week for inclusion in our big list, one of the most consistent problems we see is that blog owners don’t make it easy to subscribe. Either there is no icon for the RSS feed or it’s hidden way below the fold.

Something as easy as adding a prominient RSS button near the top of the blog template with the word “Subscribe” near it can increase the number of return visitors substantially. We’ve done this ourselves and we’re now just under 6,000 subscribers.

A study by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight supports the need to display RSS subscription options as blog readers were found to be far more likely to subscribe to a blog if they say a familiar graphic for their favorite RSS reader, whether it was Bloglines, MyYahoo or Google Reader. One solution is to use our free RSS button tool which has been used by over 50,000 blogs so far.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”

This topic could easily have been broken down into at least 2 different sessions as these are somewhat disparate topics and no one really talked about blogs per se. Speakers included: Owen Byrne from digg, Rick Klau from FeedBurner, Chris Tolles from Topix.net and Niall Kennedy.

As you can see from the graph above, the number of RSS and RSS to email subscribers of Online Marketing Blog has grown substantially since we moved over to WordPress and updated the design. Participating in a little social media optimization hasn’t hurt either.

One of the metrics we look at with client blogs as well as our own are the most popular RSS feed readers and aggregators used. This influences the RSS chicklets or buttons used to promote the feed.

Checking the Feedburner stats for Online Marketing Blog there are 118 different RSS readers logged. I suspect 30 or so of those are blog bots. Here’s the distribution of top ten RSS readers from most to least popular for this blog:

There’s lots of buzz about how to use RSS for business marketing of late, particularly for business to business RSS marketing, so here are some tried and true resources as well as a few recent articles:

KnowledgeStorm Research Report: “How Blogs and RSS Affect B2B Technology Purchase Decisions” also covered by DMNews.

If you work in the B2B marketing space, then you will also be interested in this upcoming webcast: “How to Use New Media to Market to IT Professionals” which is happening Nov 2nd.

Rok Hrastnik “wrote the book” on RSS Marketing who also published “The Business Case for RSS”

Charlene Li from Forrester, “Using RSS as a Marketing Tool”

White paper on RSS by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight,”RSS‚ÄîCrossing into the Mainstream” (pdf)

PRWeb announced today that they are now offering a service that will allow their press release distribution clients the ability to map the company domain name to the RSS feed of the release hosted by PRWeb.

When you submit a press release through PRWeb and associate that press release with a RSS Group in the PRWeb control panel, the release is then published as part of an RSS feed. This feed url can be pinged to the RSS search engines and also used in an auto discovery tag for RSS feeds in the company web site. That way RSS enabled browsers and feed readers can automatically detect the company press release RSS feed and subscribe to it, even if they do not have a blog.

Here is the next installment of Online Marketing Blog coverage of ad:tech Chicago 2006:

With a slight delay, this standing room only session started off with Moderator Henry Copeland of blogads.com introducing the speakers which included: Michael Moore of Nestle Purina Pet Care, Robert Claypoole “Consumer and Professional Relationship Marketing” for Johnson and Johnson Vision Care division, Heather Sefcik of Henkel Consumer Adhesives (Duck Tape) and Brian Bloom of Ligget Stashower, a marketing PR firm that works with the Duck Tape brand.

Heather and Brian Bloom did a tag team presentation with Heather starting things off by offering a quick Duck Tape 101 history. Starting in WWII, Duck Tape today is a household name with a cult like following. Duck Tape has “become cool”.

Spotlight on Blog Marketing Interview with Phil Hollows of FeedBlitz

And now for something completely different. Since so much of what’s covered here on Online Marketing Blog deals with the marketing of blogs, I thought adding some interviews with people involved with blog marketing would be of interest to our fast growing audience of readers.

Today’s interview is with Phil Hollows, Founder and CEO of the popular RSS to email service, FeedBlitz. With an active circulation of 682,330 and 53,955 active feeds, FeedBlitz is likely the most popular RSS to email service available. I had a chance to preview some features of FeedBlitz a while back and have been using it personally and with our PR and blog consulting clients ever since. Recently Phil took FeedBlitz on as a full time gig, has secured investor financing and is hiring. What better time than now to check in with Phil for a peek behind the FeedBlitz curtain.

A while back Thomas aka Twistermc, whipped up a handy tool for creating RSS subscription buttons to place on blogs. This makes it easy for the reader to subscribe to the blog using their favoriate RSS reader or aggregator. (See the buttons down the left side of this blog) This particular tool has been very popular and is the source for many, many links to Online Marketing Blog and to the blog marketing tools page over at TopRank.

I was checking out some of these links and noticed that some pretty interesting referrers. There are quite a few prominent SEOs using the RSS Button tool including: Mike Grehan, Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, Dan Thies, Kim Krause and several others. I think that’s pretty cool actually.

While checking out the referral sources for our blog marketing tools, I came across some nifty RSS sites and resources:

• Phil Bradley - “I want to” blog for Clever things with RSS. Phil was recently named a Search Engine Watch contributor, congrats Phil!

• Peter Scott’s RSS Compendium. Excellent and huge list of RSS tools, information and helper apps.

• Create social bookmark links for blogs or web pages from Claus Schmidt - not too much unlike the TopRank Social Bookmark Creator

• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Drupal module for RSS Buttons based on TwisterMC’s TopRank RSS Button Maker

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If you are interested in RSS industry benchmark metrics, RSS marketing best practices and want 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.

Here’s the hype:

“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.”

As a thank you for taking the survey, respondents will get a copy of the overview report with the most important metrics and best practices.

This week I learned a very important lesson with RSS. Particularly with FeedBurner. A reader of this blog requested that I expand the number of posts in our feed from the default 12 to A LOT more than that. I met him half way and that created a HUGE RSS file. I did this without consulting the people that I know who are far more technically adept at RSS than I (Thomas, Amanda, Rok). Shame on me. Why, you ask?

The day after I made this edit, our handy little blog here was mentioned in a Slashdot post resulting in a TON of visits. Not one new RSS subscriber came as a result. This was curious to me and then I received an email from a reader saying that our FeedBurner feed was showing an error. The feed was too big so no one could read or subscribe.

Phil over at FeedBlitz tells me they have now added weekly scheduling options:

“FeedBlitz has now added weekly email options to simplify weekly newsletter production from blogs and other RSS feed sources. Available as a “Turbo” upgrade, you select the day of the week you want your newsletter to be released. In the wee small hours FeedBlitz collects your posts from the previous seven days and mails them out to your subscribers, automatically.”

This is a good feature since a lot of blog readers don’t want daily updates and blog owners can use this feature to present their week’s blog postings as an email news letter.

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