RSS feeds and your marketing toolbox
Copyright 2006 Kelly Robbins
I’ve been exploring RSS feeds and how to get your company’s
information on them. RSS stands for Really Simple
Syndication and as a reader is an easy way to get short
bits of information on a topic. This saves you the time of
reading the entire article if you’re not interested in the
topic. It’s also an easy way to keep up with news on a
particular topic that interests you. Like healthcare. Or
marketing.
RSS feeds contain headlines with hyperlinks to a longer
article or web page. Many of us receive daily email updates
from healthleaders.com. Each of these headlines is an
article from another news source. These are RSS feeds.
So as a marketer, how do you get your hospital or clinics
information on RSS feeds?
Here are some steps Catherine Seda gives in the February
issue of Entrepreneur magazine.
Decide what information to syndicate as an RSS feed. Blogs,
special offers, company news, events, product announcements
and articles make compelling RSS content.
Prepare an XML file. A sample is at www.usatoday.com. Go to
the very bottoms and click on RSS feeds. You can then click
on one of the topic links and see all the articles picked
up by that feed. She also recommends checking out
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss. (That site is way to
techie for me. It explains the details of how to set it up.
That’s what IT is for, isn’t it?)
Get RSS aggregators to pick up your feeds. You can submit
your feeds to major search engines like
www.google.com/intl/en/feedfetcher.html and
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/submit. Seda says that if your
RSS feed becomes popular with readers other aggregators
will find it and pick it up.
I have to admit I haven’t done this yet. It sounds pretty
simple (for my web guru to figure out) and a great and
inexpensive way to share information about your company
using another medium.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the benefits of
marketing through RSS feeds
Not email so doesn’t run through spam filters People choose
to receive information on your topic. You not only have a
better chance of getting their attention, but they are much
more likely to read it because the feeds are topic
specific. A cost-effective way to drive traffic to your Web
site. Especially for companies that publish content
regularly (events, jobs, articles, news). Once you produce
an RSS file, you are enabling others to syndicate your
headlines without any work on your part.
Experts have said that RSS feeds will soon join email
marketing, web site banners and search engine keywords as
viable marketing tools. You owe it to yourself to
investigate.
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Author of Healthcare Copywriting Secrets Revealed and The
Healthcare Copywriters Toolkit, Kelly Robbins is a
healthcare copywriter and marketing coach/consultant. She
also publishes The Healthcare Marketing Connection
(http://www.healthcaremarketingconnection.com), a free
e-zine on healthcare marketing tips. Contact Kelly to
receive her free report, “5 critical things you must know
when writing for the healthcare industry” —
info@KellyRobbinsLLC.com or 303-460-0285.
