1. Unleash RSS Marketing in Japan
data: 07.10.08
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Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July. It's great to finally go international:) Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly. I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it. But, I do believe it will be worth the wait. I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books. Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:) How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
2. Unleash RSS Marketing in Japan
data: 30.09.08
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Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July. It's great to finally go international:) Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly. I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it. But, I do believe it will be worth the wait. I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books. Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:) How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
3. Unleash RSS Marketing in Japan
data: 11.08.08
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Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July. It's great to finally go international:) Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly. I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it. But, I do believe it will be worth the wait. I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books. Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:) How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
4. Unleash RSS Marketing in Japan
data: 05.07.08
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Just got word from my Japaneese publisher that Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is scheduled to be released in Japan in print end of July. It's great to finally go international:) Japan is getting the short 2007 edition of the book ... and yes, the longer US 2007 edition is still being written, unfortunatelly. I can't believe how many times I've postoped it already. Actually, I'm quite ashamed of it. But, I do believe it will be worth the wait. I also wanted to thank Geoff Livingston for putting Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS on his list of 25+ Great New Media Books. Geoff, thanks for the extra motivation to help me finish the 2007 edition:) How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
5. Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity?
data: 12.06.08
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OK, I admit it. I'm on a fighting streak today. Just one of those days. After discussing how Yahoo! Pipes may facilitate content theft and unfair use, and bashing against Amazon for not taking better advantage of RSS advertising, it's time to take on e-retailers, online service providers and basically anyone that does transactional messaging. Let's take a look at my inbox. Today I received ... A transactional e-mail "from PayPal" A transactional e-mail "from eBay" A transactional e-mail "from Amazon" And some other brand names as well Of course, none of these e-mails were actually from PayPal, eBay or Amazon. Simply spam, as every other day, intended to capture my private data. Even if PayPal really sent me an e-mail, I would never read it or respond to it, simply because I would consider it spam and would never believe that it's actually from PayPal. As I'm sure you've noticed as well, transactional e-mail messages have become a horror story for the big brands, with spammers constantly trying to take advantage of their well-known brand names. But here's the catch ... There is no SPAM with RSS, at least not in this form When you receive content from an RSS feed that you proactively subscribed to, you can be 100% certain that the message is legitimate and from the publisher to whom you subscribed RSS is perfectly capable of delivering personalized transactional information RSS is perfectly capable of delivering protected personalized transactional information, granting access only to those with the required username/password combination RSS transactional capabilities are easy to implement, if your user database is in order So why aren't any of these guys using RSS to deliver transactional information? PayPal, eBay, Amazon ... I really want my transactional messages from you. But when I receive them, I don't believe them. Please start delivering them via RSS and make me a happy customer ... a happy customer that actually trusts messages from PayPal, eBay and Amazon. How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
6. I Want a Lower Conversion Rate!
data: 12.06.08
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In parts 1 and 2 of Conversion Benchmarking Hell we discussed why benchmarking your conversion rates against industry figures just doesn't work, basically saying that conversion benchmarking is the one of the greatest hoaxes in internet marketing. The key message throughout the two articles was that conversion rates tell only a small part of your internet sucess (or failure) story, but never enough to enable you to come to any concrete conclussions, at least without taking a look at all the other relevant data. Today, to bring the final point home, we'll take a look at an example of when the conversion rate missleads you into making the wrong decision. I Want a Lower Conversion Rate The following data is from a real example we had a couple of months ago. When selling a DVD package, we split-tested two different price points againts eachother: $54.95 and $77. Here are the conversion rates (CR) for both of the tests: Price Point $54.95 $77 CR 6.8% 4.2% Price point $54.95 generated 61% more sales quantity than price point $77. Just by looking at the CR, it would seem that $54.95 is the better way to go, right? The results stay the same even after we add the sales quantities and other data: Price Point $54.95 $77 Reach 1,000 1,000 CR 6.8% 4.2% Sales Quantity 68 42 Revenues $3,736 $3,234 Even with a bigger price tag, the $77 price point generated 13.5% less revenues. But is it better? The CR would certainly indicate so, but not when we also add the margins: Price Point $54.95 $77 Margin $10 $32.05 Reach 1,000 1,000 CR 6.8% 4.2% Sales Quantity 68 42 Revenues $3,736 $3,234 Profits $680 $1,346 Essentially, the $77 price tag generated more profits, even though it generated a smaller CR, smaller sales quantity and smaller revenues. Clearly, in this case, using the CR, sales and revenues to determine the best price tag would result in lower profitability of the project. Instead it was better to opt for a smaller conversion rate, less revenues and smaller sales quantity, but better profits. So how important the CR really is? What do you base your optimization decisions on? Will be discussed in future posts ... How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
7. Selling Eric T. Peterson's Books
data: 12.06.08
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Eric T. Peterson continues showing the practical implications of his visitor engagement metric by analyzing his own website, questioning what he can do to increase the sales of his books to visitors referred to his site by some of the bloggers that are delivering traffic with high engagement but low sales conversion. Now, I haven't studied his visitor engagement metric well enough yet to really comment it as it applies to this example, but let's try some basic optimization techniques to see how those could increase his book sales. 1. Establish a Call-to-Action at the Bottom of Each Blog Post I'm not familiar with Eric's clickstream paths, but the first question is, how many of his visitors from the referring blogs are actually exposed to his "Buy My Book" Call-to-Action (CTA). How many actually click to his first page, where the CTA is more exposed, even if below the fold? The first thing to do would be to add the CTA for the book directly below each blog post, actually building on the blog post to try to directly sell the book then and there. Basically telling them what to do, after they're done reading the post --> buy the book. 2. Provide Multiple CTA Options However, as Eric states in his post, a good deal of the visitors entering his site from the problematic blogs actually start the purchase process, but don't finish it. He is generating some interest, but not enough to have them to complete the purchase process. And then we still have the prevailing majority that don't even start the purchase process. This would demand some testing, but my first instinct would be to go with a soft offer, such as a free whitepaper, and then try to make the sale through the whitepaper and the additional 7-day, 14-day or more e-mail or RSS follow-up sequence. At least in my own tests adding a free whitepaper offer + follow-up sequence always increased total sales, CR and profits. 3. More Compelling CTAs Eric does offer free chapters of his book on the first page. However, to capture more leads, it might work to test offering a full free e-book VS just sample chapters. Usually, I wouldn't be interested in free chapters unless I was already in the purchase process ... but if you give me a "10 KPIs That Make or Break Your Internet Sales" free e-book, I just might budge. 4. Provide Multiple CTA Opportunities Following the steps above, Eric would put a CTA for the book below each blog post. But to really maximize the opportunities, I would also put a CTA (perhaps a different one, but one that would still lead to the book purchase in the end) in the top right hand corner of the website. 5. Optimize the Purchase Process Add more information (sales letter, list of chapters, testimonials, add risk reducers etc.) to the product landing page Shorten the sales process to fewer steps Make purchase buttons much more visible How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
8. How Traffic Sources Impact Test Element Conversion Rates
data: 12.06.08
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Website conversion rates are some of the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring how well your internet marketing works. However, measuring conversion is daunting task, since conversion rates themselves do not tell us enough to really asses our performance adequately or benchmark our website against industry averages. One of such problems, covered in the previous example, is that a higher conversion rate may actually be costing you money. We took a look at a real DVD sales example where 2 price points were tested. The higher price point generated a lower conversion rate (CR), but greater overall profits due to a higher margin. In this case, looking at the CR, but not looking at overall project profitability, would lead us to making the wrong decision. Today I want to cover one last example of CR measurement problems, before we move into actually using CR to measure and optimize your performance. For this example, let's take a look at a single website that's testing two different elements to see which one generates a higher conversion rate. Element #1 Element #2 CR 5% 7% With the above numbers, we're looking at the aggregate CR data for each element, trying to asses the one we should go with to reach the best possible results. Not looking at any additional data, Element #2 would be the clear winner. But in this case, the website did the test using two different traffic sources. Today we won't look at all of the traffic source specifics, such as costs, sales, CPO or profits, but just at the implications of what using different traffic sources means for your CR. Element #1 Element #2 Total CR 5% 7% Traffic Source #1 CR 8% 4% Traffic Source #2 CR 2% 10% When evaluating these numbers let's presume that both the traffic sources: generated an equal amount of traffic in total, generated an equal amount of traffic per test element, cost the same, generate the same value per converted customer. This would of course never be the case, but adding additional data would just further complicate things at this point. So, looking at the data, it's clearly evident that Traffic Source #1 generates a high conversion rate for Element #1 and a lower conversion rate for Element #2, and vica verca. When doing your online advertising, this is a very realistic scenario. Each traffic source caters to different audiences, who will react differently to your marketing messages. In this case, each traffic source's audience responds better to an individual test element. Everything else being equal, this means that determining any of the two test elements in the test as a clear winner would be a big mistake, wasting you customers and money. What's the solution? Quite simply, if and when your tests prove that different traffic source audiences respond differently to your different test elements, the only solution is to implement a solution that allows you to display the winning element for that traffic source to the audience that comes through the source. Essentially, both of the test elements are winners. You need to select both. How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
9. Directly Grabbing RSS Subscribers and Getting Syndicated Through Pheedo RSS Advertising
data: 12.06.08
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Pheedo just released a new RSS advertising concept, called FeedPowered Advertising, that helps you generate new subscribers to your RSS feeds using RSS advertising, through Pheedo's RSS advertising network or through other ad networks. The Key Facts Their new RSS ad format ... [a] Displays the latest content items from your RSS feed, including video content with direct "watch" links [b] Allows the user to also add your content (directly from the ad) to del.icio.us, digg, Reddit, Furl or e-mai it to a friend How the New Format Integrates DM, PR and Brand The implications of this are quite strong. [a] The ad format allows you to syndicate your RSS content to targeted online media, displaying your content there directly to generate more brand awareness, build your credibility and get new readers by actually demonstrating your value [b] Furthemore, the ad itself contains further syndication options that will virally spread your content through the key social networking sites [c] The ad functions as a direct subscription generation tool, enabling you to quickly capture new subscribers through other sites ... and actually works towards increasing your conversion rate by first demonstrating the content and so making the subscription decision easier and more educated, thus generating better qualified subscribers/prospects In essence, the ad format integrates PR, direct marketing and brand advertising. Is it perfect? While it is an amazing idea, it does need some further refinement. Further Improvements Needed [a] Looking at their example on their site using Internet Explorer 7 shows that the feed subscription option in the ad is not highlighted through the IE7 native RSS Reader, making it less intuitive to subscribe [b] The existing example is clearly targeted to RSS Aware users. But data shows that more than 80% of RSS users are not actually aware of using RSS. The ad format also need to include other subscription options, in addition to the RSS button, such as Add to MyYahoo! [c] The ad also needs some space at the bottom to better entice viewers to subscribe, using enticing copy and perhaps bribing the viewers to subscribe by offering them a free whitepaper [d] For direct marketers, the ad format should also allow an in-between data capture window, allowing the direct marketer to capture prospect information prior to being given access to the feed [e] The next step would be for Pheedo to add additional metrics for advertisers, such as new subscriber retention and long-term customer conversion, and perhaps even the CPO. If you want to check it out yourself, here's the screenshot (working version available here): I'm a little biased here, because I've always dug Pheedo work, but in my opinion this is the best RSS advertising development yet ... and finally an RSS advertising tool to generate real results by taking advantage of the power of RSS. How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
10. MarketingStudies.net Back Online and Comments Working Again
data: 12.06.08
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After a rather painful week, MarketingStudies.net is back with its full functionality, including comments. As already noted, we started the move to a new hosting provider about a week ago, when the comments on this blog were again turned off by the old hosting provider without notice. The move went relatively smoothly, thanks to the great MovableType architecture and excellent cooperation from both the old and the new hosting providers. Plus, we're now running on MovableType 3.3, which really is light years ahead from the old 2.x versions. The only thing that really went wrong with the move were the sub-domains. Everything else was smooth. Quick Steps for Changing Your Hosting Provider and Installing a New MovableType Version If you're thinking of doing the same, here are the quick steps: a) Sign-up for your new hosting package and contact your new hosting provider. Contact them in person and explain to them what you're doing and that you might need a little more assistance from them to finalize the transfer. b) Make a replica of all of your files from the old hosting provider and upload the exact folder structure with all the files to the new hosting provider. c) Export the SQL database with your MovableType data, directly from the SQL interface. You want a full copy of your database with practically everything. d) Install your current MovableType version on the new server. Do not just copy the files from the old MovableType installation, rather do the installation again on the new server. e) Import your old SQL database from the old server into the new SQL database on the new server. Make sure you import it into the new database created by MovableType. You should now have all of the data and settings from MovableType on the old server in MovableType on the new server. f) Log-in to MovableType on the new server. You will probably need to modify the server paths for storing files, so open the settings for each blog and change the server paths if needed. g) Rebuild your files on the new server. h) Install a new MovableType version on top of the current one, of course on the new server. i) Once everything is working, ask your domain host to point your domains to your new server IPs. This is it. Good luck! How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
11. I'm Not Spamming You!
data: 12.06.08
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... but someone certainly is, using a non-existant MarketingStudies.net e-mail address. If you receive an e-mail with the subject "Got It, I Think" from tahaseggdzf@marketingstudies.net, or something simillar, it's spam. Not from us though ... This is how it works: (a) The spammer finds a number of open relay e-mail servers, which allow the spammer to send e-mail using an e-mail address that's not "hosted" on the e-mail server and often without even having a user account at the server provider. (b) He or she then uses your e-mail address as the "Reply To" e-mail address in the spam messages and sends out the spam blast. (c) Everyone receiving these e-mail messages will now think they are coming from your domain, unless of course they have enough knowledge about the subject to check the headers of the e-mail messages received. Those show that the e-mail is in fact not coming from MarketingStudies.net. The funny thing about this spam is that the spammer didn't include any links in his spam e-mail. Looking for ways to stop this, but I'm affraid it might be impossible ... How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
12. F Trains: Another Example of Getting RSS Wrong
data: 12.06.08
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RSS Specifications point to the F Train from NYC and their RSS feed, which lets you watch traing schedules and changes. The essential idea of course is good --> use RSS to get your latest and most important content to your prospects and customers. Train schedules certainly seem relevant enough for someone in NYC to subscribe to them. But again, someone is missing the point. If I want to know about traing schedules and changes, I don't care about all schedules and changes. I just care about the routes I take. If I'm only taking the Queens-bound route, don't talk to me about Manhattan-bound trains. F Trains, great idea, but now makes this a little more usable and allow people to select which routes they're interested in and then give them an RSS feed just for those. How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
13. RSS Marketing With Christopher Knight: Use E-mail to Promote RSS
data: 12.06.08
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How does EzineArticles.com, one of the largest websites to help you syndicate your content, use RSS for their marketing? To answer this question, we interviewed Christopher Knight for the 2007 edition of the RSS marketing e-book (coming shortly). But if you want to know more, click here to read Christopher's summary. BTW - did you know that EzineArticles.com publishes more than 40,000 RSS feeds? How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
14. Quick RSS SEO Tips
data: 12.06.08
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WebProNews has a short summary from Amanda Watlington's tips for SEO optimization of your RSS feeds: 1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati 2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme 3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters 4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly 5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters 6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item 7. Provide email updates for the non-techies 8. Offer an HTML version of your feed 9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering: 10. Full text, not summaries 11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10) 12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post) 13. Keyword-rich item [title] 14. Your brand name in the item [title] 15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container 16. Compelling site [description] 17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss) 18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site: 19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course] 20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories 21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords 22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts 23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this] Do you have more tips? (a) Post them in the comments form below. (b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
15. What You Can Do With Amazon RSS Now?
data: 12.06.08
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If I keep this up, I might actually get the reputation of picking on Amazon.com as a hobby [just take a look at Is Amazon Missing the RSS Advertising Opportunity?, Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity? and Get the Most from RSS Marketing ... Take Your DM Hat Off!]. It's just one of those things. You see a company that could really go above and beyond with RSS and really use it to drive revenues, but they just don't do it. But at least they're showing some activitiy lately ... [in addition to removing their list of relatively useless category feeds, which used to be available here] a) Gold Box Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It finally has an RSS feed with your daily deals. But, unfortunatelly, the RSS feed only provides brief information about the product, instead of also giving you a direct purchase link, some of the latest product reviews and other information that could facilitate the sale. Also, there's no personalization, or so it seems. Why not give me an RSS feed with just the special deals for me, based on my previous purchases? b) Plog This is one of the genius Amazon ideas. Each Plog is personalized to the individual user, giving him the latest blog posts from Amazon's authors (just from the authors' whos books you've purchased), and it also comes with a targeted RSS feed, matching the Plog content you see when you're logged-in. You can also subscribe to additional blog content manually. Also, Amazon is promising that we'll be soon able to track latest releases, changes to our orders and "much more" through our plogs, which will presumably also come be published in our targeted RSS feeds. Amazon, please keep this up. Make us happy:) c) The Amazon API But let's be fair to Amazon. Even though their end-user RSS feed offering is poor, they do provide developers with the ability to create their own RSS feeds from Amazon, by integrating with their API. Here are some examples: RSStalker.com - provides a variety of Amazon product tracking options via RSS, such as a 10% price drop feed that lets you know when a product that RSStalker is tracking via Amazon drops 10% in price; RSS feeds from your wishlists; last 25 price changes in a selected Amazon category, and more. Baebo - provides a persistant search RSS feed for Amazon products, based on your keywords. More great examples floating around ... How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.
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