Mary Wagner has interesting article at InternetRetailer (links below) about how eBags.com is using RSS to notify their email subscribers when their Hot Deal of the day has been posted on their website. eBags.com is promoting the existence of their RSS feed via email they send to registered customers.

The article goes on to show distributing messages to customers via RSS can be 1/10th the cost of email marketing. What surprises me is that the fee example given (courtesy of the VP of RubiconSoft) is $2,500 for one month.

This sounds excessive to me. If you manage to educate your site visitors to the benefits of subscribing to an RSS (or Atom) web feed, there's no reason you need to spend $2500/m using someone else's services to run your feed. Run it yourself, and save a bundle more. It's true that you will have bandwidth costs, but I'm more than certain you'll still spend less than $2500/m. Unless you have to hire additional IT staff, and cannot distribute responsibilities to existing staff.

On the other hand, if you hire a company to write the content that you release via RSS, that's another story. But let's assume that is not the case. Here's what you need to do to get yourself set up:

Step 1: If you are not using a CMS (Content Management System) to manage your website, or if the content you intend to distribute in your web feed is not otherwise published on your site, you will have to manually create the XML feed file, which becomes the receptacle for feed items.

Step 2: Determine whether older items get removed from the feed file, or whether they stay. If they stay, then consider that any time a new person subscribes to the feed, even years later, they will see every single content item ever published to the feed.

Step 3: If the process is not otherwise automated, install software on your web server that will allow the "feedmaster" or designated writers/ editors to add, update, or remove feed items. This might be as simple as installing a web script to manipulate the feed file, and an HTML page with a feed entry/update form. If you cannot write this script and form yourself, or cannot find a free package, then you may need to hire a programmer to do this for you. Still, the total cost should be a one time fee of no more than $1000, unless you want bells and whistles. (Note to programmers: Write an RSS/ web feed manipulation script and HTML interface, keep the selling cost low - say, $200-300 - and no doubt you'll have a lot of takers.)

Step 4: Start adding content items to the feed, ad infinitum.

Step 5: Promote the feed and educate your site visitors on the benefits of web feeds. Provide incentives by giving feed subscribers some bonuses not otherwise available via email or even from the site.

For those interested, I plan to release a free, barebones OpenSource script and interface to manipulate your RSS feed over at my webfeedmail.com site, say in a few months. Unless there's a sudden huge demand and I can find some time to devote to it. :)

Links/ Sources: InternetRetailer - Mary Wagner - Cutting Through the Clutter.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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