Offer Content Incentives - Part 2 of Techniques for Promoting Your RSS/ Atom Web Feed

In addition to promoting your partial-text RSS/Atom web feed via an ezine, you can offer premium content as an enticement.

Build a web feed that contains content, such as audio or video, that is not available via the ezine. Despite what some bloggers seem to think, the marketing purpose of promoting your web feed is not necessarily to replace your website. So in a similar vein, close the promotion cycle: promote the website from within the web feed by inserting feed item headlines such as "Get even more rich media content at the website," with the headline's description containing a further promotional message, and a link to the promised media content.

In each issue of the ezine (built from your partial-text feed), promote your web feed prominently. Better yet, if you are promoting video content, include a frame grab snapshot in each ezine issue as further enticement to learn more about web feeds.

To summarize:

Use specific pages of the website to promote the ezine and encourage subscriptions.
Use the email ezine to promote the web feed in turn, by offering premium content in the feed, as well as the convenience of a feed reader, which lets you view one (article) item at a time.
Promote the website by inserting promotional messages into the web feed, offering further exclusive content back at the website. Actually, this isn't strictly necessary. Since you are using only a partial-text web feed, subscribers will need to visit the website, via the "read more" type of link for a feed item, if they want to read a complete article. (Keep in mind that if your goal is to increase website visitors, having a full-text web feed will probably hinder you from this goal.)

You now have a closed promotion system that doesn't take away from any facet of the cycle. So if some of your subscribers forward their ezine email on to a friend or three, you may just be able to catalyze a viral promotion, which will hopefully lead to additional web feed converts, as well as site visitors.

The nice thing about this promotion cycle is that once your web feed is built, relatively simple PHP scripting can manipulate feed content to generate the self-promotional ezine emails. In essence, you are using the web feed to promote itself, albeit in email form. Subscribers have a choice of ezine format, but will hopefully be enticed by the offer of premium content in the web feed.

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