Just got a notice from Amazon (thank you) that they soft-launched RSS feeds for tags.
But first, how do their tags actually work?
You can tag any product you like, including your previous purchases, with a keyword that best describes the product.
Easily search and access products tagged by others, using the keywords you're interested in.
Tags are also used as a way for Amazon to provide you with personalized recommendations.
The good part is that Amazon now added RSS capabilities to their tags, available through most tag pages.
Subscribe to RSS feeds for the tags you're interested in, and get latest product releases that match these tags.
Use the RSS feeds to display Amazon products on your website, using the appropriate tags, to earn affiliate commissions.
Share RSS feeds for tags with your friends, as a recommendations vehicle.
More information here.
An excellent RSS e-commerce application from Amazon!
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
I have to apologise to Amazon for missing on two of their RSS content delivery options, which I previously missed.
Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.
1. Product Discussions
Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement ... especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.
The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.
2. Customer Reviews by Author
Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
What works best in RSS marketing? How are RSS subscribers different than e-mail subscribers? RSS publishing best practices if you want to sell?
These and other practical questions are all revealed in the 2nd part of the RSS interview with Bryan Eisenberg. Without doubt, this is one of the best and most practical RSS marketing interviews we've done so far.
In part 1 of the Bryan Eisenberg RSS interview we focused on how the GrokDotCom.com is going beyond traditional RSS Radars by employing intelligent content aggregation tools, instead of relying just on contextual filtering, and what kind of results they are achieving.
In part 2 of the interview we move beyond RSS Radars to their overall RSS marketing strategy.
In this interview find out about ...
1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why?
2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds?
3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds?
4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership?
5. What's the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content?
6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?
Click here to listen to the MP3 file [8:33 minutes; 2 MB]
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Defining Online Conversion: Combining Action and Exposure Elements
Conversions aren't just about new sales or subscribers versus your website visitors.
First, let's review the conversion rate definition from Defining Online Conversion: What Is It?:
The conversion rate is a % of unique actions that result from unique exposures.
The conversion rate metric can be used to measure anything you want to track, analyze and optimize, and is by no means linked only to sales or subscribers and your website.
Here are just some quick examples of conversion rates not used as often as the standard sales/visitors CR:
sales / e-mail clicks
sales / e-mails delivered
order finished / add to cart
sales / ad impressions
phone calls / website visits
product recommendations / product views
etc.
There are countless combinations available, depending on what specifically you want to measure and optimize.
Let's return to our conversion rate definition for a second:
The conversion rate is a % of unique actions that result from unique exposures.
As you can see from the definition, the conversion rate is a combination of actions and exposures, with a simple formula of:
conversion rate = actions / exposures
Consequently, conversion rate optimization begins first with defining what you want to measure and optimize, and then by defining the action and exposure elements that help you get to the numbers you need.
Let's presume you want to measure the overall effectiveness of your e-mail e-zine in driving sales.
The overall effectiveness of your e-mail e-zine can be measured as a conversion between the number of unique e-mail messages delivered [exposures] to your list and the number of unique sales generated [actions] from the e-mailing. [CR = unique sales / unique delivered e-mail messages]
However, this will only give you the overall effectiveness and a trend to watch over a longer period of time, telling you whether you are increasing or decreasing your overall effectiveness. It does not tell you what you need to optimize to increase your sales.
To determine this, consider the steps needed to make the sale via the e-mail campaign.
It starts with getting the click from the e-mail message delivered to your website. Increasing the number of clicks requires increasing the attractiveness of the Calls-to-Action [CTAs] in the e-mail message.
Hence you need to know how effective the CTAs are in driving recipients from the e-mail to the website, by measuring the conversion between the number of unique e-mail messages delivered [exposures] and unique clicks [actions] to your website [CR = unique clicks / unique delivered e-mail messages].
This will of course only give you the basic information --- getting more will require measuring each individual CTA.
A click of course does not mean sales, so the next step is measuring the conversion from the e-mail clicks [exposures] to purchases [actions] --> [CR = unique purchases / unique e-mail clicks]. This will help you optimize the actual landing pages to which you lead the subscribers to your e-mail list, using your e-zine.
And finally, to fully optimize your process you may want to measure the conversion on the sales process level to help you optimize each step that leads to the purchase after the click, such as how good the product landing pages are in getting clickers to add the product to the shopping cart [CR = unique add to carts / unique e-mail clicks].
Much like everything else in series so far, this is just a simplistic demonstration, here primarily for the purpose of helping you see how to combine action and exposure elements.
In the case of e-zine optimization for sales, you would also need to measure relevant clicks (since only relevant clicks will increase your sales), different CTAs, open rates and so on.
The point is, combine different actions and exposures to come up with conversion rate formulas that will impact your bottom line.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Only a few more weeks until the ACCM (Annual Catalog and Multi-Channel Merchant Conference) event in Boston, one of the best DM conferences of the year.
If you're in Boston or are coming to the conference, drop me a note.
I'll be speaking on RSS and other new internet marketing media, together with Scott Voight of Silverpop.
If you're at the conference, definetly reserve the Monday 3 PM slot to come hear us. The last presentation we did together with Scott in London was a huge hit, and we promise not to dissapoint:)
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
While RSS has certainly become well-established with most marketers, few are using it to its full advantage.
Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.
The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).
Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.
But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.
1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy
It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.
2. Start using RSS for business intelligence
Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.
3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy
Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.
4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor
Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.
5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level
Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.
6. Promote your RSS feeds internally
Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.
7. Promote your RSS feeds externally
After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.
8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds
Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.
9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media
Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.
10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand
Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
I interviewed Greg Reinacker of NewsGator end of January, as part of the interview series for the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book.
NewsGator is one of the leaders in the Enterprise RSS space, a provider of top-breed RSS Readers and also a branded RSS Reader vendor.
So, you can imagine we had alot to cover.
In part 1 of the interview, find out about how Windows Vista and Internet Explorer are changing the RSS landscape ...
How are Vista and Internet Explorer changing the world of RSS marketing and RSS content consumption?
How much and how quickly will they make an impact?
Are they really the game changer every marketer expects them to be?
What changes can we expect?
How can marketers take advantage of the advances Vista offers for RSS?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 8 min.]
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
In part 2 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how online media can take advantage of RSS beyond publishing RSS content.
Why should online publishers care about branded RSS Readers?
Does it still make sense to provide a branded RSS Reader, especially with the wide adoption RSS is getting through Internet Explorer 7?
What kind of value can publishers bring to RSS Readers?
How can online media enhance the user experience through third-party content via RSS?
Is visitor ownership still a possibility, or are services like MyYahoo! owning the game? How can online media compete?
How can small businesses compete with large portals and large media sites?
Does syndicating your content via RSS mean that you're giving up content?
Is RSS becoming a significant traffic driver?
How can companies profit from pulling together relevant content on a specific topic from third-party sources?
Is there a difference in how summary and full-text feeds drive visitors to your website? When to use which?
Best practices for re-publishing third-party content on your website
Can you put ads next to re-published RSS content on your site? How to do it?
Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 14 min.]
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July.
It's great to finally go international:)
Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly.
I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it.
But, I do believe it will be worth the wait.
I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books.
Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:)
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.
Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.
David's idea is simple:
Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated
This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."
But, there are two problems:
Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients
This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.
Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.
More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)
How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing?
Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers.
Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
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