Marketing Profs

As an alternative to email, RSS is becoming an increasingly important content delivery channel that allows marketers to deliver all of their content, fully upgrade all of their marketing initiatives and establish lasting client relationships.

Whether direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communications, online publishing, SEO, traffic generation or customer relationship management, RSS brings the power of delivery back to the hands of marketers.

But most marketers still do not know how to actually get started with RSS, especially when trying to take its power beyond basic blogging.

Here's a seven-step plan to help get you started. It includes a personal RSS marketing checklist to help you get the most from RSS marketing.

1. Start using RSS as an end-user

The first step to getting started with RSS marketing/publishing is getting your own RSS aggregator, subscribing to other RSS feeds and just seeing and understanding how it all works.

There's a variety of RSS aggregators to choose from, including the following:

• Web-based RSS aggregators: my.yahoo.com, www.pluck.com, www.newsgator.com, www.bloglines.com
  
  
• Desktop RSS aggregators (software): www.awasu.com, www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon, www.stevenwood.org/stories/2003/06/08/voxLite.htm
  
  
• Integrated RSS aggregators (integrate with IE or Microsoft Outlook): www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ (browser with integrated RSS features), www.newsgator.com, www.pluck.com, www.attensa.com/index.php?ys=1

To find feeds of interest to subscribe to, cruise RSS feed-specific search engines such as www.feedster.com.

2. Plan your RSS feeds

Planning your RSS feeds might be the most important thing you do for RSS. It's the one factor that decides between RSS marketing success and failure.