Many businesses periodically send newsletters by postal mail to help keep subscribers current on the affairs or industry-related news, for the goal of maintaining a devoted customer base to whom they could market additional products or services. With pervasive use of the web for information dissemination, and with RSS News Feeds gaining momentum as a robust online communication tool, one needs to ask whether businesses are now actually better served by publishing news feeds in place of newsletters.
There are obvious convenience factors that favor publishing news feeds over newsletters: No newsletter design delays or expenses, no printing delays, no printing costs, no postage costs, no mailing lists. But are news feeds more effective than newsletters in delivering the message? And in that case, can anyone with essentially no familiarity with news feeds and with computer skills limited by sending email and browsing the web actually publish a news feed on their own?
Putting aside well-known advantages of news feeds listed above, an essential question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the news feed is whether the information is time-sensitive. If the business enterprise is publishing information regarding such topics while the stock market, real estate, investments, weather, services or services, competitive analyses, product catalogs and prices (and you are able to probably add more to the list), the potency of the newsletter dramatically diminishes while the delay between the “event” and the delivery of the information about the function increases. If a newsletter is published every three months, typically the information is six weeks old! And it’s not merely that the information arrives too late to be very important to the recipient, but additionally because recipients should come to understand the newsletter is irrelevant with their affairs and tune out. Unfortunately, that means it will be regarded as pre-approved offers and tossed in to the trash without opening. Why would I worry about an investment opportunity if, by the full time I receive that advice, it’s too late to act about it? (At my post office, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so you can conveniently toss away your pre-approved offers without even taking it home.)
Recognizing this time-sensitivity problem, businesses have been depending more and more on email broadcasting to a membership list. You’ve seen the come-on — “Subscribe for the email list” ;.To many, that is viewed as volunteering for spam. Even when one does reluctantly submit their email address to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will often trash that email, and for the email that does cope with (and most of us discover how effective spammers have become), the email from the legitimate businesses usually gets lost amidst all that spam. So what does it matter if the business enterprise has avoided the development, distribution, and delay problems related to newsletters by utilizing email, if in the end the message never reaches welcoming ears.
News feeds effectively overcome the shortfalls of newsletters and email broadcasts. With news feeds, nothing is ever printed or emailed, and the news feed is instantly available online. Recipients can volunteer for the information with out it “pushed” at them, so there is no sense of spamming related to news feeds. The audience for the information can receive that information at their convenience and can receive alerts or “signals” whenever new information is published. For example, if you were thinking about listening in on investment advice from a specialist who publishes a news feed, you might sign up for that news feed – without giving your email address away – and whenever new information is published, you might receive a sign and operate on that information in real time. Imagine … literally within minutes following the advice is published, you might read and act upon that new information.
If your intention is to spam – put simply, to send unsolicited information to others with the intent of gaining some advantage – than news feeds aren’t for you. Your targets will simply not listen in to news feeds that don’t interest them! Spammers are stuck with email and mass mailings with the hope that recipients will accidentally open the spam and get teased in to the proposition by the seduction of the message.
But what about the question of publishing news feeds? Is it easy, or does it require some special computer skills? Do you need to hire or pay anyone to do your news feed for you personally?
The good thing is that RSS News Feeds may be incredibly easy to publish if you select the right publishing tool. Numerous tools are “out there” Morgan Harvey (some much easier than others!) for publishing news feeds; some are online services such as for instance Enfeedia, some are programs you download. Some are free, some are not. For maximum ease, choose a news feed publishing tool you utilize by filling in an easy form so that you might want not learn any technical skills to take advantage of the ability of news feeds; it is as simple as writing email.
How do you tell others about your news feed? In any communication you do (your business cards, your website, articles you write, etc.), include your news feed address. It’s the same to a website address except it presents the news feed using contemporary browsers. (Older version browsers don’t support news feeds.) It is common practice to put in an industry-standard RSS “button” in your website that, when clicked, displays your news feed and provides the news feed address for subscription purposes (see more about subscribing to news feeds below).
For powerful promotion of your news feed, select a supply publishing service that provides the capability to actually display your news items directly on your website, blending in with the style of your site, and like the way to sign up for that news feed. On-site display of new items in conjunction with frequent posting of news is an exceptionally easy way to include fresh content to your website that could actually improve the position of your site in search engine results placement (SERP).
If you decide on Enfeedia to host your news feed, you can just tell others your “account name”, and they will have the ability to get into and read all of your news feeds there. So that it is as simple as saying, “See my news feeds at Enfeedia, my account name is _____” ;.
What does it mean to sign up for a news feed? It depends on the service you utilize for subscribing, but typically it indicates that you specify the address for news feeds of interest to you, and the service keeps a listing for you personally to ensure that it is simple to read your feeds whenever you want … with all the current current news shown. With a MyYahoo personal page, you are able to subscribe for alerts when items are posted onto news feeds to that you simply subscribe, even by cell phone in the event that you wish.
With contemporary browsers, you are able to bookmark news feeds – just like you can bookmark a website – and get signals when new items being available in news feeds that you bookmark. And in its “Leopard” operating-system, Apple integrates news feeds having its Mail program, bringing news feeds to mainstream online communication. Such moves by Apple, and by others which are sure to come, will popularize news feeds akin to the growth in pervasiveness of websites through the 1990s.
