Publishing E-zines Via Rss
Publishing E-zines Via Rss
By Rok Hrastnik, Sat Dec 10th
Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik
It's clear that RSS and e-mail in fact need to be used together,as opposed to either one replacing the other.
While RSS might not be used by as many people as e-mail, you canbe sure that those that do use it and subscribe to your feedswill get your content without fail. In addition, many alreadyprefer to receive information via RSS instead of e-mail, makingRSS an absolute must as a supplement to e-mail delivery.
Let's now take a detailed look at exactly how RSS and e-mail canwork together.
1. ANNOUNCING YOUR E-ZINE VIA RSS
What's the use of an excellent e-mail e-zine if it's blocked byspam filters or lost in the recipient's mailbox? No matter howhigh quality content you prepare, if it's not received it can'tbe read and then acted upon to drive sales your way.
Namely, you need to stop thinking of your e-zine in terms ofe-mail delivery, but rather consider it as a vehicle to presentrelevant and related content in a specific context of anindividual e-zine issue, which can then be delivered to yourrecipients in multiple ways.
Just consider newspapers, which are delivered in print format,on the Web, via e-mail and RSS as well, all this to assureoptimum delivery according to end-user preferences.
While most e-zine publishers will never consider presentingtheir e-zine in print format and delivering it via traditionaldelivery services, you need to explore all available means ofonline delivery. After e-mail, RSS is the first that comes tomind.
Using RSS to announce your e-zine via RSS is the simplest andleast expensive way to get started with RSS and it will help youmake sure that your valuable content in fact does get delivered,at least to the audience using RSS.
A) THE PROCESS: E-MAIL E-ZINES
What is the process behind traditional e-zine publishing?
--> The publisher provides an e-mail e-zine subscription box, inwhich visitors enter their e-mail addresses, thus giving consentto the publisher to receive his communications and at the sametime building his subscriber database.
--> The e-mail address is saved in the publisher's subscriberdatabase.
--> The publisher prepares an e-zine issue, usually creating anHTML document with either full-text e-zine issue articles andnews or summaries of articles with links to full-text articleson his website.
--> The HTML document is packaged as an e-mail message by thepublishers' e-mail publishing solution and then sent to hissubscriber database using e-mail as the delivery channel.
--> E-mail messages "travel through the internet" and are eitherstopped on the way by various spam filters and other"barricades" and are then either deleted automatically ordelivered to the subscribers' e-mail accounts.
--> Subscribers download these e-mail messages when they log-onto their e-mail account and can then manipulate them, eitherdeleting them, moving them to another folder or reading them.
How can we now transfer this process to publishing your e-zinevia RSS as well?
B) THE PROCESS: RSS CONTENT DELIVERY
We first need to understand how RSS content delivery works.
--> The publisher creates an RSS feed, basically just a simpleXML file structured in a specific way, and provides a link tothat XML file on his website and through other sites, searchengines and directories. The file needs to first be created andthen uploaded to the server, before a link to it can beprovided. Fortunately, there are many tools available that willdo this for you easily.
--> The visitor to the website subscribes to this RSS feed, byeasily importing the link to the RSS feed in to his RSSReader/Aggregator, instead of giving the publisher his e-mailaddress. In terms of subscriptions, the process is reversed.Instead of the visitor giving his e-mail address to thepublisher, the publisher rather provides the visitor with asingle URL, which then the visitor "puts" in his aggregator.
--> The publisher now prepares a new story or article to includein the RSS feed. Usually, he first publishes this new story onhis website and then simply prepares a summary and puts it in tothe RSS feed/file. In this case, the summary in the feed simplynotifies the reader of new full-text content being madeavailable and pulls him to click-through to the full-textarticle on the website. Alternatively, the publisher could alsoprovide full-text content of the story in the feed.
--> As soon as the publisher updates the RSS feed with the newstory, the subscriber can retrieve it and read its content. Thefeed content is immediately available to the subscriber, withouthaving to face any spam filters on the way.
All of this might sound complicated, but it really is not. Let'snow take a look at the process from the e-zine publishing pointof view.
C) THE PROCESS: RSS E-ZINE DELIVERY
--> The publisher creates an RSS feed intended to specificallynotify subscribers of new e-zine issues and promotes it on thewebsite. The feed should be promoted directly below the e-mailsubscription box, serving simply as an alternative to e-maildelivery. Visitors have the choice of subscribing either viae-mail or RSS.
--> The publisher now takes the HTML document he alreadyprepared for the e-mail version of the e-zine, and puts itonline like any other webpage. What you basically need to do ispractically take the same presentation and format that youalready prepared for the e-mail e-zine and place it online foranyone to see.
--> The publisher then creates a new story or content item inthe RSS feed, which is basically just a short summary of thee-zine and links it to the webpage he prepared earlier.
--> Once subscribers retrieve the feed, they see a new contentitem with the e-zine title and its description. After clickingon the title they are taken to the web version of the samee-zine that was also delivered via e-mail.
D) THE TECHNOLOGY
As you can see this is a simple process and it only takes about5 minutes more to do than just doing an e-mail version, and itwill ensure that your content is now accessible to all thosethat prefer RSS to e-mail, it will generate additional exposurefor your content by being included in RSS search engines anddirectories and it will generate more search engine visibilityfor you.
The best part is that the technology to publish an RSS feed insuch a way is widely available and there are quite a few toolsto choose from.
If simple e-zine delivery via RSS is your starting goal, adesktop solution should work very nicely. Just try outhttp://www.feedforall.com, which is the market leader in thiscategory, or the less advanced but freehttp://www.usablelabs.com/productFeedSpring.html.
Keep in mind that only using RSS for e-zine announcements is thesimplest way to go and that there is much much more you can dowith RSS.
In the next article of the series we'll take a look at how youcan measure the readership of your RSS e-zine version and thentake on other ways RSS and e-mail can work together.
About the author:Learn how to take full marketing advantage of RSS and get allthe expertise, knowledge and how-to information for implementingRSS in your marketing mix, from direct marketing, PR,e-commerce, internal communications and online publishing toSEO, traffic generation and customer relationship management.Click here now: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/
