Many businesses periodically send newsletters by postal mail to help keep subscribers current on their affairs or industry-related news, for the goal of maintaining a faithful customer base to whom they are able to market additional products or services. With pervasive usage 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 actually better served by publishing news feeds in lieu 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 efficient than newsletters in delivering the message? And if that’s the case, can a person with essentially no knowledge of news feeds and with computer skills limited to sending email and browsing the net actually publish a news feed independently?
Putting aside the obvious advantages of news feeds in the above list, an essential question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the headlines feed is whether the info is time-sensitive. If the company is publishing information regarding such topics whilst the stock market, property, investments, weather, services or services, competitive analyses, product catalogs and prices (and you can probably add more to the list), the potency of the newsletter dramatically diminishes whilst the delay between the “event” and the delivery of the info about the function increases. If your newsletter is published every three months, an average of the info is six weeks old! And it’s not just that the info arrives too late to be important to the recipient, but also because recipients can come to understand the newsletter is irrelevant to their affairs and tune out. Unfortunately, meaning it is likely to be viewed as pre-approved offers and tossed in 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 do something on it? (At my postoffice, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so that you can conveniently toss away your pre-approved offers without even taking it home.)
Recognizing this time-sensitivity problem, businesses have been depending more and more on email broadcasting to a request list. You’ve seen the come-on — “Sign up for the email list” ;.To numerous, that is viewed as volunteering to receive spam. Even if one does reluctantly submit their email to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will often trash that email, and for the email that does complete (and most of us know how effective spammers have become), the email 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 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 without having 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. For example, if you were enthusiastic about listening in on investment advice from a consultant who publishes a news feed, you may subscribe 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 would be to spam – in other words, to send unsolicited information to others with the intent of gaining some advantage – than news feeds aren’t 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 in 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 really need to hire or pay someone to do your news feed for you?
The good thing is that RSS News Feeds could be incredibly easy to publish if you choose the proper publishing tool. Numerous tools are “out there” (some much simpler than others!) for publishing news feeds; some are online services such as Enfeedia, some are programs you download. Some are free, some are not. For maximum ease, pick a news feed publishing tool you use by filling in an easy form so that you’ll require not learn any technical skills to make the most of the ability of news feeds; it is as simple as writing email.
How will you tell others about your news feed? In 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 is common practice to install an industry-standard RSS “button” in 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 one’s news feed, select a feed publishing service that gives the capability to actually display your news items entirely on your website, blending in with the look of your internet site, and such as the methods to subscribe 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 can actually improve the career of your internet site searching engine results placement (SERP).
If you decide on Enfeedia to host your news feed, you can simply tell others your “account name”, and they will have a way to gain access to and read all of your news feeds there. Amari Bailey Therefore it is as simple as saying, “See my news feeds at Enfeedia, my account name is _____” ;.
What does it mean to subscribe to a news feed? This will depend on the service you use for subscribing, but typically it means that you specify the address for news feeds of interest to you, and the service keeps a listing for you so that it is simple to read your feeds when you want … with all the current news shown. With a MyYahoo personal page, you can sign up for alerts when items are posted onto news feeds to which you subscribe, even by cell phone in the event that you wish.
With contemporary browsers, you can bookmark news feeds – exactly like you can bookmark a website – and get signals when new items being obtainable 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 ahead, will popularize news feeds similar to the growth in pervasiveness of websites throughout the 1990s.