Want to deliver content directly to your shoppers instead of relying on them remembering to come back to your site?

That’s what this series article is all about.  I’ll give an overview of seven different ways to deliver content to your users instead of waiting for them to visit your site.

In this part I’ll explain how to use RSS feeds and product feeds to attract customers.

RSS Feeds

What are They?

RSS Feeds for Content Delivery

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds allows content to be easily displayed in a variety of places.  One of the most common pieces of content to be delivered by RSS are blog posts to feed readers.

RSS Feed Readers have become a popular way to read many different blogs without having to visit each blog to check for updates.  Many separate blog rss feeds are  delivered right to your feed reader instead.

RSS feeds can be used in many ways – and are actually the basis of some of the other content delivery systems that will be described later in this article.  Some, like the example at right, are raw RSS feeds that are fed into feed readers.  Other RSS feeds are product feeds that put your products into shopping comparison sites like Google Base and Shopzilla.  Still others display specific information on a website, like the LiveWire Blog section of the Vortx.com homepage.

How Can They Help You?

If you have content that is updated frequently, like a blog, products, sales or promotions an RSS feed can effectively deliver your content to your subscribers without them ever having to visit your website or blog, and the easier it is for them to read your content, the more likely they will read it!

Product Feeds

What are They?

Product Feeds for Content Delivery

Product feeds are specially formatted feeds (some are RSS feeds!) that take a list of your eCommerce products and insert them into a comparison shopping site like Google Base or Shopzilla.  When a shopper visits one of these comparison shopping sites, they search for a product and can narrow or sort the search results to find the ‘best deal’ from all eCommerce stores that have submitted their products.

How Can They Help You?

By inserting your products into a comparison shopping site via a product feed, you increase the visibility of your products, your store, and add links to your site from trusted sites.

Even if your product isn’t the ‘best deal’ in the search results, quality descriptions and product photos could bring that shopper into your store to look around.  Inbound links are precious – product feeds provide that many more ways someone could find your products and your site.

Remember…

To take full advantage of these tools, consistency is key.  It takes work to create and promote content, but that effort will pay off in dividends as you see your web presence improve.

All of these content delivery options can be used together to place your content (marketing!) into as many channels as possible, effectively increasing the number of people who are exposed to your business and your products or services.

Subscribe to our RSS feed or our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss Part 2: Email Marketing

Which of these tools have you used?  What’s worked well for you?  Any suggestions?  Our current poll on the right is a quick and easy way to respond!

Tags: blog, blogging, content delivery, email marketing, facebook, facebook marketing, feeds, marketing blogs, newsletter, newsletters, product feed, rss, rss feed, twitter, twitter marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Email Marketing, General E-commerce, Google, Marketing, SEO, Tools, Web Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.