Excuse me, can I just ask you to stop what you’re doing whilst I attempt to sell you some­thing that you may not be inter­ested in, open minded about or recept­ive to?

If you’re in busi­ness for your­self you prob­ably get a fair amount of unso­li­cited tele­phone sales calls, emails and mail shots on a daily basis. How you react to these attempts to grab your atten­tion and more import­antly for the issuer, your cash; depends largely upon the skill of the mar­keter who is try­ing to grab your atten­tion and your desire or need for the product/service they are attempt­ing to sell.

There’s a whole industry out there which is geared towards cre­at­ing the ulti­mate sales call, the per­fect email or the most innov­at­ive mail shot which will grab your atten­tion and motiv­ate you towards a purchase.

These tech­niques are tried and tested and if appro­pri­ately tar­geted, are very power­ful in them­selves for gen­er­at­ing busi­ness. You may use them your­self and if you get busi­ness from them, I’ll have no need to explain further.

How­ever the prob­lem with this type of mar­ket­ing, often called “Inter­rup­tion Mar­ket­ing”, is that it’s increas­ing becom­ing inef­fect­ive for the very nature of its defin­i­tion. That is to say it “inter­rupts” which in turn just adds to the unwanted clut­ter in the already cluttered lives of your aver­age busi­ness per­son. As a res­ult many of us simply switch-off to the mes­sage that is being delivered.

Angelo Fernando gives an excel­lent over­view as to why illus­trated with a scen­ario we can all relate to, in his art­icle “So, Inter­rup­tion Mar­ket­ing Isn’t Work­ing!” Worth reading!

Now I’m not say­ing that unso­li­cited mail-shots, emails or tele­market­ing doesn’t work and should be canned as a tech­nique. This is not the case so long as such “inter­rup­tions” are tar­geted at named and pre-qualified indi­vidu­als (by “pre-qualified” I mean that it is known that the recip­i­ent has a need or desire for the product being marketed).

How­ever there is another technique.

Into the mar­ket­ing mix comes a new upstart when it comes to using the web as a mar­ket­ing tool which is a form of “Push Mar­ket­ing”, namely; RSS Feeds.

RSS Feeds and Feed Readers

The best way to explain what RSS feeds are is to show you an example on a web­site that most Brits can relate to.

Take a look at the BBC News site at http://news.bbc.co.uk

In the top right hand corner you’ll see a little orange icon next to the link “News Feeds”

This icon and link indic­ates that RSS feeds are avail­able on the site. Park this thought as I’ll explain more shortly!

Time to get your ima­gin­a­tion working!

If you’ve decided to keep abreast of the news using the BBC News site; to ensure that you get the latest news as it’s repor­ted, you’ll need to make sure that you visit the site every half-hour or so just to make sure you don’t miss anything.

This is fine if you’re only fol­low­ing the updates on one web­site, in this case the BBC News site; as it’s easy to make a men­tal note or even put a reminder in your Out­look™ or on your phone to keep re-visiting the site.

How­ever, things start to get com­plic­ated when you fol­low mul­tiple web­sites that update their con­tent regularly.

For instance, let’s ima­gine, in addi­tion to the BBC site, you also want to be informed of news art­icles as they hap­pen on the Times web­site or on those favour­ite blogs that you like to read.

If you keep abreast of changes on many dif­fer­ent blogs or web­sites, then it starts to become a chore to visit each dif­fer­ent web­site in turn, read what’s new, and then move on to the next site. If you relied upon email updates then you’re going to get inund­ated with the things and before long you’re into “Inter­rup­tion Mar­ket­ing” ter­rit­ory and you’ll quickly start to ‘blank’ what’s being sent to you.

This is where RSS Feeds are the Killer App!

RSS feeds allow you read updates from numer­ous web­sites when it’s con­veni­ent to you in a single place i.e. on a webpage or in a piece of soft­ware on your desktop, without hav­ing to visit mul­tiple websites.

If a web­site “Pushes” its con­tent to you via an RSS feed and you may “Sub­scribe” to that feed, after which you can then read that con­tent from each web­site in a single place using an RSS Reader when it’s con­veni­ent to you and without being inter­rup­ted by emails.

That’s what those orange feed icons are on the BBC, Times Online and Google Blog sites that I men­tioned earlier, namely their RSS Feeds. By sub­scrib­ing to each RSS feed in an RSS Reader (some­times called an RSS Aggreg­ator or RSS News­reader) such as Google Reader, you can choose to read each favour­ite web­sites’ updates quickly and eas­ily from one single web page which can be set as one of your browser’s Home Pages.

This is all fine and dandy as far as inform­a­tional sites go; but where do RSS Feeds make an impact when it comes to mar­ket­ing a product or service?

Again using your now prac­ticed ima­gin­a­tion, think of your own website.

Could you write con­tent that is of value to your poten­tial cus­tom­ers? Per­haps it could be reviews of your products with case stud­ies of how they can be prac­tic­ally used, or per­haps you could offer tips and tech­niques that people in your industry would value. If you can, then start post­ing art­icles to your web­site. If people value your con­tent enough they’ll start sub­scrib­ing to your RSS Feed (assum­ing it’s set-up to pro­duce one) which means you’ll start to get a sub­scriber list of people you know are inter­ested in what you have to say. Worth its weight in mar­ket­ing gold!

All this and without hav­ing to inter­rupt people to tell them about your com­pany, ser­vices, products or expertise!

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