Many businesses periodically send newsletters by postal mail to help keep subscribers current on their affairs or industry-related news, for the purpose of maintaining a dedicated customer base to whom they can market additional products or services. With pervasive utilization of the net for information dissemination, and with RSS News Feeds gaining momentum as a strong online communication tool, one needs to ask whether businesses are now better served by publishing news feeds instead of newsletters.
You will find 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 if that’s the case, can a person with essentially no familiarity with news feeds and with computer skills restricted to sending email and browsing the net actually publish a news feed on their own?
Putting aside the most obvious benefits of news feeds listed above, a significant question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the news feed is whether the info is time-sensitive. If the company is publishing information regarding such topics whilst the stock market, real estate, investments, weather, services or services, competitive analyses, product catalogs and prices (and you can probably add more to this list), the effectiveness of the newsletter dramatically diminishes whilst the delay involving the “event” and the delivery of the info about the event increases. In case a newsletter is published every three months, an average of the info is six weeks old! And it’s not only that the info arrives too late to be vital that you the recipient, but also because recipients will come to learn the newsletter is irrelevant with their affairs and tune out. Unfortunately, meaning it will soon be viewed as junk mail and tossed to the trash without opening. Why would I worry about an investment opportunity if, by enough time I receive that advice, it’s too late to act onto it? (At my post office, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so that you can conveniently toss away your junk mail without even taking it home.)
Recognizing this time-sensitivity problem, businesses have already been depending more and more on email broadcasting to a request list. You’ve seen the come-on — “Subscribe for the email list” ;.To many, this is viewed as volunteering to receive spam. Even when one does reluctantly submit their email to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will often trash that email, and for the e-mail that does get through (and all of us understand how effective spammers have become), the e-mail from the legitimate businesses usually gets lost amidst all that spam. So what does it matter if the company has avoided the development, distribution, and delay problems connected with newsletters by using email, if in the long run the message never extends to 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 to receive the info with out it “pushed” at them, so there’s no sense of spamming connected with news feeds. The audience for the info can receive that information at their convenience and can receive alerts or “signals” whenever new information is published. As an example, if you’re enthusiastic about listening in on investment advice from a counselor who publishes a news feed, you may donate to that news feed – without giving your email away – and whenever new information is published, you may receive a signal and operate on that information in real time. Imagine … literally within seconds after the advice is published, you may read and act upon that new information.
If your intention is always to spam – quite simply, to send unsolicited information to others with the intent of gaining some advantage – than news feeds are not for you. Your targets will not tune 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 to the proposition by the seduction of the message.
But think about the question of publishing news feeds? Can it be 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 news is that RSS News Feeds may be incredibly simple to publish if you choose the right publishing tool. Numerous tools are “out there” Katianna Stoermer Coleman ( some much easier than others!) for publishing news feeds; some are online services such as for example 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 need not learn any technical skills to make the most of the energy of news feeds; it is often as simple as writing email.
How do you tell others about your news feed? In just about any communication you do (your business cards, your website, articles you write, etc.), include your news feed address. It’s very same to an internet site address except it presents the news feed using contemporary browsers. (Older version browsers don’t support news feeds.) It’s common practice to set up an industry-standard RSS “button” on your own 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 one’s news feed, select a supply publishing service that offers the capacity to actually display your news items entirely on your website, blending in with the look of your website, and like the methods to donate to that news feed. On-site display of new items in conjunction with frequent posting of news is an incredibly easy way to add fresh content to your website that may actually improve the position of your website browsing 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 be able to gain access to and read your entire news feeds there. So that it is often as simple as saying, “See my news feeds at Enfeedia, my account name is _____” ;.
What does it mean to donate to a news feed? It depends on the service you utilize for subscribing, but typically this means that you specify the address for news feeds of interest for you, and the service keeps a list for you personally to ensure that you can easily read your feeds if you want … with all the current news shown. With a MyYahoo personal page, you can register for alerts when items are posted onto news feeds to that you subscribe, even by cellular phone if you wish.
With contemporary browsers, you can bookmark news feeds – just like you can bookmark an internet site – and get signals when new items being for sale 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 in the future, will popularize news feeds similar to the growth in pervasiveness of websites throughout the 1990s.
