Many businesses periodically send newsletters by postal mail to help keep subscribers current on the affairs or industry-related news, for the purpose of maintaining a faithful customer base to whom they are able to market additional products or services. With pervasive utilization of the net 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 lieu of newsletters.
You can 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 so, can anyone with essentially no knowledge of news feeds and with computer skills restricted to sending email and browsing the net actually publish a news feed independently?
Putting aside well-known features of news feeds listed above, a significant question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the headlines feed is whether the info is time-sensitive. If the business enterprise is publishing information regarding such topics because the stock market, property, investments, weather, new products or services, competitive analyses, product catalogs and prices (and you are able to probably add more to this list), the effectiveness of the newsletter dramatically diminishes because the delay involving the “event” and the delivery of the info about the function increases. In case a newsletter is published every three months, normally the info is six weeks old! And it’s not only that the info arrives too late to be crucial that you the recipient, but in addition because recipients can come to learn the newsletter is irrelevant for their affairs and tune out. Unfortunately, meaning it is likely to be viewed as junk mail and tossed to the trash without opening. Why would I value an investment opportunity if, by the time I receive that advice, it’s too late to behave about it? (At my postoffice, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so you can conveniently toss away your junk mail without even taking it home.)
Recognizing this time-sensitivity problem, businesses have now been depending more and more on email broadcasting to a membership list. You’ve seen the come-on — “Register for the email list” ;.To numerous, this really is viewed as volunteering to receive spam. Even when one does reluctantly submit their current email address to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will often trash that email, and for the e-mail that does complete (and all of us know how effective spammers have become), the e-mail from the legitimate businesses usually gets lost amidst all that spam. What exactly does it matter if the business enterprise has avoided the development, distribution, and delay problems associated with newsletters by using email, if ultimately 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 headlines feed is instantly available online. Recipients can volunteer to receive the info with no it “pushed” at them, so there’s no sense of spamming associated 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 were enthusiastic about listening in on investment advice from an expert who publishes a news feed, you may contribute to that news feed – without giving your current email address away – and whenever new information is published, you may receive a sign and operate on that information in real time. Imagine … literally within minutes after the advice is published, you may read and act upon that new information.
If your intention is to spam – in other words, to send unsolicited information to others with the intent of gaining some advantage – than news feeds are not for you. Your targets will 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 to the proposition by the seduction of the message.
But think about the question of publishing news feeds? Is it easy, or does it require some special computer skills? Do you want to hire or pay someone to do your news feed for you personally?
What’s promising is that RSS News Feeds can be incredibly simple to publish if you select the best publishing tool. Numerous tools are “out there” Katianna Stoermer Coleman (some 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, select a news feed publishing tool you employ by filling out a simple form so that you need not learn any technical skills to take advantage of the ability of news feeds; it can be 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 a website address except it presents the headlines feed using contemporary browsers. (Older version browsers don’t support news feeds.) It’s common practice to put in an industry-standard RSS “button” on your website that, when clicked, displays your news feed and provides the headlines feed address for subscription purposes (see more about subscribing to news feeds below).
For powerful promotion of your news feed, select a feed publishing service that offers the capacity to actually display your news items entirely on your website, blending in with the design of your website, and like the way to contribute to that news feed. On-site display of new items coupled with frequent posting of news is an exceptionally easy way to include fresh content to your website that can actually improve the position of your website searching engine results placement (SERP).
If you choose Enfeedia to host your news feed, you can simply tell others your “account name”, and they will have a way to get into and read your entire news feeds there. So it can be as simple as saying, “See my news feeds at Enfeedia, my account name is _____” ;.
What does it mean to contribute to a news feed? This will depend on the service you employ for subscribing, but typically this means that you specify the address for news feeds of interest for your requirements, and the service keeps a listing for you personally to ensure that you can easily read your feeds once you want … with the current news shown. With a MyYahoo personal page, you are able to subscribe for alerts when items are posted onto news feeds to which you subscribe, even by mobile 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 for sale in news feeds that you bookmark. And in its “Leopard” operating-system, Apple integrates news feeds using 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 comparable to the growth in pervasiveness of websites during the 1990s.