What Works in the Real World?
Traffic
15% of our annual site traffic last year came in by our blog, feeds, feed information, and feed script generator.
In February over 33% of our site traffic came in from our blog, feeds and feed related items. In March 45% of our site traffic checked out information on blogs and feeds. Blogs and feeds are both very hot topics!
Search Engine Benefits
Blogs provide daily fresh content for search engines and viewers.
For blogs, we use www.Blogger.com and each topic has its own search engine indexable HTML page auto-generated by Blogger.
Additional Benefits
RSS and atom feeds provide great syndication information and generate click-ins.
Blogs allow you to show your expertise and who you are while soft-selling your products/services.
What We Do
We have 3 feeds: our monthly newsletter, Tech Notes articles, and our blog, Web-World Watch.
We have found that our syndication has increased when we removed our company name from the headline. We now name the feed for our newsletter Naked-Net Tips, our Tech Notes article's feed is called CompuGeek Secrets, and our blog is called Web-World Watch. Try to use keywords in your blog title and postings.
Two of our feeds are RSS feeds, our blog is an Atom feed.
We have a feed script generator, paid by a monthly subscription, to allow webmasters to snatch on the fly customized JavaScript to integrate our headlines into their site. They select the styling to match their site and can select any of our 5 featured feeds. We decide what feeds to offer. 3 of the feeds offered are our own.
We post to our blog daily, update our newsletter feed monthly, and Tech Notes feed bimonthly. For your blog feed to show up in My Yahoo! you need to update it at the minimum every 3 days, or the listing next to your feed title will say "no new posts".
Client Trends
90% of every new web design client in the last 6 months has purchased a feed for their website and most are now using a blog or adding one as well.
Clients are coming to us asking for a RSS feed as they have heard of it, but are not sure what it is exactly or how to use it, but they are interested in learning more.
Our Projection
We anticipate that in the long-run, feeds and blogs will replace e-newsletters. Right now, we are integrating RSS feeds with e-newsletters to maximize opportunities to inform and generate business within our client and reader base. We find that the feeds are gaining in popularity due to the new mainstream introduction of the My Yahoo portal and Firefox browser with the integrated feed reader. With Internet Explorer 7.0 coming out in late summer with an integrated RSS feed reader, there will only be additional interest and increased use as Internet Explorer still holds an 89% share of the browser market. This will expose a huge population to feeds and their daily usage as an information gathering tool utilizing "Pull" technology.
This is technology that is here to stay and will only become a more important tool to getting your message out to the world as time goes by.
© 2008 McCord Web Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.