Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

Yesterday, I sent out my last free monthly e-letter. What with all my blogging (here and elsewhere), articles, tip sheets, white papers, e-letters I do for clients and weekly submissions for MicroEnterprise Journal, I’m just all written out. And, besides the subscribers can automatically get new stuff from here with a “Real Simple Syndication” feed. Seems simple doesn’t it? Good for them, good for me.

Well, duh point to da (used to be natural) blonde. I told my readers they could subscribe to my RSS feed and get fresh news, views, tips all the time to read at their leisure. I’m getting emails saying “I think I did it wrong.” and “What’s RSS?” “What’s a reader?” “Where do I go?” “What does it costs?” So, if you’re one of these folks, my apologies. I was in a rush and didn’t think of my audience.

Some of you are likely already subscribing to RSS feeds and don’t even know it. For example, you’re using MyYahoo or MyMSN which is serving as a news aggregator/collector and delivering to you. As Marketing Sherpa notes,

Currently at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.That’s right — roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, Huh? if you asked them what RSS was.

An RSS (Real Simple - ha - Syndication) feed works rather like the cyber version of the old ticker tapes and the newswires. You can subscribe to whatever individual RSS feeds you like (there are thousands, if not millions, for everything from my site to the New York Times) and whenever there’s something new, it shows up as a headline in your aggregator (reader). You can then click on the headline and read the full article when and if you’re interested (you can also get the full article feeds delivered.) It can save you a lot of surfing and bookmark time. (As a data junkie, my bookmark list quickly gets way too long.)

You can also sign up with an aggregator service which makes all this totally transparent to you (you don’t have to know any tech goobledy-gook) and there are increasingly specialized ones, such as the National Library of Medicine’s PubFeed.

Google offers a free web-based aggregator/reader beta (well, of course!) reader.google.com. To subscribe to my feed, go here. You can search by name/title (Mary Schmidt, Joe Bob’s Bait blog) or if you know the feed, you enter it and hit “subscribe.” Google will then list all new content as it comes in. I just tested this by subscribing to myself, and it popped right up, no muss, no fuss.

Other free reader/aggregator (downloads) include: feedreader and news gator.

My feed (the “address” for aggregators to find) is http://www.maryschmidt.com/feed/

Read More: Marketing Sherpa. (02/20/06) 50 Million US & UK RSS Users Do Not Know They Use RSS — How to Reach Them. Free access to this and other articles for a limited time. If you’re marketing on the Web, Marketing Sherpa should be a “go to” resource for you.

Tag: RSS