5 more reasons to love RSS

5 more reasons to love RSS

1. You can subscribe or unsubscribe whenever you want - instantly and without having to trust an email newsletter “unsubscribe” feature.
   
2. You can keep all your news and blogs separate from your email.
   
3. RSS feeds are easy to manage. Entries from each feed are automatically grouped together in chronological order highlighting new articles.
   
4. You can publish RSS feeds on a web page without doing anything to them, giving you a zero maintenance automatically updated information feed on your website.
   
5. RSS feeds can be used to provide you with a personalised news feed based on post categories or tags. Email subscriptions cannot be customized so easily.
   

Do you know what it is yet?

Welcome to your new best friend a little orange symbol (the RSS icon) that, once understood, just might save you a whole heap of time by delivering information that you otherwise spend hours searching for.

The chances are you have seen this symbol hundreds if not thousands of times before. In fact you've probably seen it so often that you now ignore it. However I am here to tell you that you should sit up (straight) and get into RSS in a big way.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (a web 'standard' format) that allows website owners and blog publishers to offer their content as a 'feed'. A feed is, in effect, a website page that is designed to be read by an RSS reader.

Typically RSS feeds are used to distribute news articles and are, of course, central to blogging however as its popularity grows so does the number of uses.


So what can you do with a feed?

Firstly you can subscribe to a feed. Let me give you a great example to illustrate why I love RSS. I recently had a technical query with a piece of software which was driving me nuts. Having tried and failed to get any sense out of the outsourced customer support line I finally found a really busy forum on the topic.

I immediately posted the details of my 'issue' and then subscribed to the RSS feed. Over the next few days my RSS reader pinged into life to let me know someone had posted a reply and hey-presto a couple of days later the answer landed as someone had manged to pinpoint the problem and offer a solution. I was delighted and after thanking the poster I unsubscribed.

What do you need to subscribe to a feed?
The first thing you will need is an RSS reader. These come in a number of guises:

• a standalone application similar to an email client such as Outlook
• a browser-based reader - the latest browsers have some inbuilt RSS functions
  
• a website RSS service - such as bloglines.com
  

Example of a standalone RSS newsreader (Newsfire) showing an article from this blog! (very cool)











How do you subscribe to an RSS feed?
Once you have a reader you can start clicking on the orange button. This will normally take you to a page which allows you to select your preferred reader.









How do i-KOS use RSS?
i-KOS use RSS at the heart of our web-based project management system allowing clients to subscribe to their 'projects' and thus be notified as every milestone is reached. This really makes people feel connected to i-KOS and meets our commitment to working openly and transparently.

Do you affiliate?

Affiliate Marketing is big business and growing at a rapid pace (60% year on year - see graph). In 2006 sales of goods and services through affiliate channels was calculated at £2bn. Convinced yet?

So what is affiliate marketing? Put simply it is a commission only transaction between a Merchant (typically the owner or seller of goods or services) and an Affiliate (the owner of a website, blog or e-mail list).

This then is a commission only sale model. Perfect right? Well actually it is rather good but there is much to know. In order to expedite your learning curve I have tried to list some of the most important factors to succeed in this arena, this has been written from the perspective Merchants perspective:

1. Tracking - Merchants must be able to track every in-bound link from their affiliates. This is a unique identifiable link that follows the user from the affiliates webiste (blog, email) to the landing page and then all the way through the website to the all important sales acknowledgment (confirmation) page.
   
   This then allows the merchant to pay the affiliate for the sale.
   
   
2. Incentive, incentive, incentive - You really need to contemplate how much you are willing to offer the affiliate for a sale (or booking, or enquiry...). This is commonly reffered to as the CPA amount (Cost Per Acquisition) In doing so you must consider that your cost-of-sale will be vastly reduced. You are not paying for advertising after all. Secondly you need to do your research to find out what others are offering.
   
   If you get this right you will have the opportunity to unleash a small army of affiliates who will invest in gaining and driving traffic to you. Get it wrong and you will quickly (and wrongly) conclude that affiliate marketing is not for you.
   
   
3. Pay fast - many affiliates are small businesses or one-man-bands who will be investing in advertising such as Google Adwords. In doing so they are paying either on account or every fortnight. You need to pay them promptly or they will leave.
   
   
4. Identifying & Vetting Affiliates - you maybe aware of an old business adage known as the 80-20 rule whereby 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients - well in affiliate marketing this figure is even more acute say 95-5. This means that finding the right affiliates is all important.
   
   
5. Return to Sender - every business gets products returned for one reason or another. If you are paying affiliates for sales generated you need to consider how you handle returns. There are two options here:
   
   
• You pay your affiliates each month for sales generated in the preceeding month less returns. Most affiliate networks work this way.
  
  
• You factor your average return percentage into your CPA offer. I think this is a far better business model for all unless you are willing to share the details of each person who returns an item.
  
  If you are running and online only business you will also need to know about the distance selling rules.
  

Whilst big brands might have a dedicated affiliate program manager most companies use an Affiliate Network who act as a broker. However this can be very expensive with sign on fees often running in the thousands, monthly account management fees PLUS networks fees (sometimes call an override fee) which is typically 30% of what ever you agree to pay the affiliates. Something else to factor.

Shameless plug - If you found this useful please note that i-KOS offers a comprehensive Affiliate Program Management scheme for merchants whereby we run every aspect of your campaign - Please call (01322 277255) or mail me to discuss myles.davidson@i-kos.com

The reason why your mum was right

The most valuable lesson I have learned about running an agency is to listen to my clients.

People choose to work with agencies and consultants to gain insight and buy-in expertise otherwise lacking in their organisation.

to be really effective you must get to know as much about the clients business as possible - in the shortest time of course (no client wants to pay for your learning curve).

The truth is that by listening to your clients you get to really learn about business.

Through truly open exchanges of knowledge with your client you will often be privileged to information that even trusted employees of that business never get to know.

The art is to soak up this information so you may pass on the knowledge learned to the next client.

What is an Affiliate Network?

An Affiliate Network provides the mechanism that allows merchants (sellers) and publishers (website owners) to transact on a commission only basis.

Publishers can use an affiliate network to find suitable programs for their website, blog or broadcast e-mail. Networks are free for affiliates.

Merchants can use networks to publish an online 'media pack' detailing their proposition and commission for introducing a lead that results in a sale or agreed action. Networks charge merchants.

An online media pack usually comprises a set of banner adverts but can also include complete HTML newsletters, advertising copy, image resources and increasingly text and data feeds (RSS, XML).

The network offers both the merchant and affiliate with tracking, reporting and payment fulfillment.

Some networks to Google: Commission Junction, Tradedoubler, Webgains, Affiliate Window, Agency3, Cleverat, OMG.

Prepaid Cards for your business

Prepaid cards, often (incorrectly) referred to as prepaid credit cards are relatively new in the UK. To date they have been marketed to people who typically cannot get credit or a credit card however I think prepaid cards would be great for businesses.

One idea I have is to get a prepaid card for everyone at i-KOS so that I can pay their bonus directly to a card in their name. In doing so I hope that whenever they use their card it reminds them that this is their reward. The alternative (default) method is to add it to their wages however I always find this simply gets swallowed up in bills and everyday life.

I took this idea to a couple of card issuers and was really pleased when I was told they could even offer second line embossing (to add our company name to the card). Over the coming weeks I will let you know the reality of applying for multiple cards.

For a great comparison website see www.which-prepaid-card.co.uk

L is for Landing Pages

More than 60% of e-commerce websites are wasting investment in search because they are not backing their marketing up with content or landing pages to create visitor engagement. [Logan Tod, May 2006].

With the value of paid search estimated to reach £2billion in the UK in 2007 it is essential that businesses understand the importance of landing pages. Chances are you already know what a landing page is or have guessed it by now - it is the page that is used when someone clicks an advertisement or a search-engine result link.


The ideas is to ensure that the page displays content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link and has been 'optimised' to get the maximum return (enquiries, sales...)

The things you need to know:

1. Test and test again. You should never be afraid to try out hunches as long as you employ split-testing (aka A-B testing) - you may want to look up multivariate testing
   
   
2. Make sure your can analyse and interpret the results - Google Analytics is free but you may want to get a pro to set it up and run reports
   
   
3. Tune your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign by running multiple niche campaigns each going to the most relevant landing pages
   
   
4. Great copy is essential (employ a copywriter or at least read www.copyblogger.com
   
   
5. Offer incentives to ensure people register and opt-in for future communication (permission e-mail lists could earn you serious money).