Tips for marketing with RSS

Bill Flitter, president of Pheedo, gives us five tips for marketing with RSS. Here’s the cliff note’s version.

1. Identify feed characteristics. Understand that some feeds are displayed in entirety, ie Bloglines, and others show only the headlines, ie, MyYahoo. You need to know how content is being presented to provide an effective marketing message.
2. Tell a story. Don’t sell a product. RSS consumers want engaging content. Readers want to learn about the specific topics discussed in their chosen RSS feeds.
3. Keep the creative fresh and new.
4. Build a relationship with the potential customer.
5. Choose and define your audience wisely. With RSS your audience is small but extremely targeted. With email marketing, it’s about reaching a mass audience while competing with spam filters and trust issues. From a targeting perspective, RSS could not be more different.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that last point of targeting your audience for lawyers and other professionals starting blogs. You can accomplish your goal of enhancing your reputation as an expert in a niche area by being focused. It’s better to have 500 readers who are prospective clients than 5,000 readers whose interests are all over the board.