Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your tar

The problem with most RSS marketing plans is that the marketer doesn't really go beyond providing a simple RSS feed for all of his online news or his blog. But since you've been reading this column for a while now you know for a fact that RSS offers so much more.

To get started the right way you need to correctly plan your RSS Marketing strategy, starting by deciding how you are going to deliver your RSS content.

The right way to go, even if you're only starting out with a simple RSS strategy, is to provide individual RSS feeds for:

--> your individual target audiences,
--> your different types of content and
--> even your different content topics.

Think of this as a consequtive list of how to develop your RSS strategy.

--> TARGET AUDIENCES Start by listing the target audiences you want to deliver your content to via RSS. Each of your audiences has different content needs, resulting in different groups of RSS feeds that need to be created for these target audiences. One group for the media, the other for your employees, the other for the general public, the other for your existing customers and so on. You can even go further and divide your master groups in sub-groups, based on their prevailing interests.

--> CONTENT TYPES Now consider the different types of content you want to deliver to these audiences. For example your latest news, your blog posts, your how-to articles, your press releases, your podcasts, the latest posts from your forums, direct communications messages and so on. In most cases these types of content don't mix well together. If someone wants to receive your blog updates, which are full of your company representatives' personal opinions and commentary, they don't want to receive your corporate-speak press releases.

If someone is interested in what's happening in your forum and what the latest forum posts are, they don't want to receive your how-to articles in the same RSS feed, simply because these two types of content are so much different. And so on. Essentially, you will need to provide separate feeds for each of the different content types, and you will need to determine what content types you wish to deliver to each of your target audience groups and sub-groups.

--> CONTENT TOPICS Finally take a look at each individual content type for each individual target audience and further break that down by content topic, if needed. And if you're trying to cover many different topics for each content type, you will need to provide different RSS feeds for these different topics, because, again, people interested in topic A are not neccessarily also interested in topic B.

While this may sound complicated, it's really simple once you start doing it.

The point is, this is about giving your subscribers choice of what they subscribe to. Instead of forcing them to subscribe to everything, allow them to subscribe to only what they want and need.

Quite simple, right?

Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your targ

Think of this as a consequtive list of how to develop your RSS strategy.

--> TARGET AUDIENCES Start by listing the target audiences you want to deliver your content to via RSS. Each of your audiences has different content needs, resulting in different groups of RSS feeds that need to be created for these target audiences. One group for the media, the other for your employees, the other for the general public, the other for your existing customers and so on. You can even go further and divide your master groups in sub-groups, based on their prevailing interests.

--> CONTENT TYPES Now consider the different types of content you want to deliver to these audiences. For example your latest news, your blog posts, your how-to articles, your press releases, your podcasts, the latest posts from your forums, direct communications messages and so on. In most cases these types of content don't mix well together. If someone wants to receive your blog updates, which are full of your company representatives' personal opinions and commentary, they don't want to receive your corporate-speak press releases.

If someone is interested in what's happening in your forum and what the latest forum posts are, they don't want to receive your how-to articles in the same RSS feed, simply because these two types of content are so much different. And so on. Essentially, you will need to provide separate feeds for each of the different content types, and you will need to determine what content types you wish to deliver to each of your target audience groups and sub-groups.

--> CONTENT TOPICS Finally take a look at each individual content type for each individual target audience and further break that down by content topic, if needed. And if you're trying to cover many different topics for each content type, you will need to provide different RSS feeds for these different topics, because, again, people interested in topic A are not neccessarily also interested in topic B.

While this may sound complicated, it's really simple once you start doing it.

The point is, this is about giving your subscribers choice of what they subscribe to. Instead of forcing them to subscribe to everything, allow them to subscribe to only what they want and need.

Quite simple, right?

Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your tar

If someone is interested in what's happening in your forum and what the latest forum posts are, they don't want to receive your how-to articles in the same RSS feed, simply because these two types of content are so much different. And so on. Essentially, you will need to provide separate feeds for each of the different content types, and you will need to determine what content types you wish to deliver to each of your target audience groups and sub-groups.

--> CONTENT TOPICS Finally take a look at each individual content type for each individual target audience and further break that down by content topic, if needed. And if you're trying to cover many different topics for each content type, you will need to provide different RSS feeds for these different topics, because, again, people interested in topic A are not neccessarily also interested in topic B.

While this may sound complicated, it's really simple once you start doing it.

The point is, this is about giving your subscribers choice of what they subscribe to. Instead of forcing them to subscribe to everything, allow them to subscribe to only what they want and need.

Quite simple, right?

Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your tar

--> CONTENT TOPICS Finally take a look at each individual content type for each individual target audience and further break that down by content topic, if needed. And if you're trying to cover many different topics for each content type, you will need to provide different RSS feeds for these different topics, because, again, people interested in topic A are not neccessarily also interested in topic B.

While this may sound complicated, it's really simple once you start doing it.

The point is, this is about giving your subscribers choice of what they subscribe to. Instead of forcing them to subscribe to everything, allow them to subscribe to only what they want and need.

Quite simple, right?

Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your tar

Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your target audiences at once or publishing multiple topical RSS feeds, which always remain the same. The easiest to do, can be done with any RSS publishing tool on the market …

CUSTOMIZABLE RSS FEEDS

The more and more complex you get with the different feeds you're offering, the more difficult it is for your visitors to select what exactly they want, simply because an individual subscriber might be interested in 10 of your 100 feeds, but he doesn't want to be subscribed to that many feeds by your company.

In this case the best way to go is to also offer your visitors the opportunity to customize your RSS feed ? they decide exactly what content type and content topics they want to receive in one or a few RSS feeds they'll be subscribing from you.

The opportunities here are quite endless, as you can allow them to customize their feeds based on topics, content types, authors and more.

If this is the way you need to go because you are offering so much content via your RSS feeds that it makes it difficult for someone to subscribe to only one or a few feeds from you, you will need your RSS publishing solution to support feed customization.

SEARCH-BASED RSS FEEDS

Search-based RSS feeds are a subset of customizable RSS feeds, and they work just like a search engine. You type in a certain keyword or keyword combinations and the search engine gives you the most relevant or the latest results for that keyword combination.

You can do the same with RSS, allowing your visitors to enter specific keywords and then get the content from you only based on those keywords.

PERSONALIZED RSS FEEDS

Giving users the choice to customize the content they are receiving from you is one thing, but certain content may actually demand you to personalize the feed using your subscribers personal information.

The most basic variation, used to lift response, is addressing your subscribers by name or using other data about the customer from your database, such as his address, previous purchases etc.

In other cases a bank might want to deliver information directly relating to your bank account, directly via RSS, such as your latest credit card transactions, and so on.

RSS FEEDS WITH CONTENT TARGETING

Now imagine that you want to create individualized campaigns to individual subscribers, based on the information you already have in your database about their activities, demographics and so on, for example to send a promotion for product A only to those subscribers that might be most interested in product A.

In this case you will need an RSS solution that can pull this data from your database and then segment your subscribers based on the actual data.

AUTORESPONDER RSS FEEDS

Since their introduction, e-mail autoresponders have become a relatively mainstream internet direct marketing tool, although they haven't really made their way to the world of public relations.

The concept is simple ? a certain action by your visitors on your website triggers a sequence of e-mail messages, delivered to that visitor, provided you have his e-mail address, over a period of several days.

Direct marketers use th