Ask Laura About Blogs vs. RSS

Confused About Which You Should Use? – Ask Laura (12/22-23/04)

A customer isn’t sure whether or not to use a blog or an rss feed for his marketing website. It takes some time to hash out the details on his target market, the website he wants to promote, his marketing objectives, and his available time.

Hello Laura:

I am looking for more enlightenment please! I have followed your advice and started an RSS feed. I followed it again and learned from Rick Butts on (using free) blogs (to gain rank and positioning).

But now I am not sure when to use RSS or Blog and how best to tie the two together. Perhaps others among your clients have the same query. I would very much like to see some guidance on this on your website. Or have I missed something and can you direct me elsewhere?

Regards
Stephen

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Hi Stephen!

Great to hear from you again!

You’re right I have had this conversation one-on-one with at least 2 of my other clients…posting something in the Member’s Area isn’t particularly helpful because everyone’s needs and best marketing strategy will differ. That’s one of the reasons I offer personal assistance…

How you use either a feed, or a blog, or both is really quite a personal matter based on many factors:

a) how much time do you have?
b) what you are hoping to gain from using other media.
c) the type of relationships you build with your clients.
d) ‘where the money is’ for your particular service or products.

So I’ll just take a moment on each point here and you and I can collaborate further on the specifics if you like…

a) It is my personal opinion that blogs are time hogs when you already have an established html based website. Adding an RSS feed, on the other hand, to an established website is as fast as writing email. For instance I manage and maintain 9 feeds right now. Takes me less than 10 minutes per day to add one item to each and ftp to each server. It would take me over 1/2 hour to complete one blog post. I’m playing around with this concept right now on my personal site. I’m in the midst of some testing (in public) on which media drives more traffic – blogs or rss feeds. Of course I’m using a blog to do this testing and as it stands I haven’t had time to update it for over 2 weeks – . At any rate if you want to follow the stream it starts here: http://www.smartzville.com/blog.htm (as a Stampede Secret customer you personally won’t learn anything new there).

b) The gain – What is your primary goal for the website you’re marketing? Traffic? Search enging positioning? Relationships? Branding? List building? (Again what you’ll get from either RSS or a blog, depends on the age and size of the site you’re promoting.)

c) Relationship building/branding. You’ve probably figured out by now that if you want to build a relationship with your clients or a ‘following’, a full blown blog would be your best option. If you want to build a list – then I personally would use an RSS Feed to drive traffic, and get your opt-in email form on every page (with an enticing offer to subscribe). And if you’re just looking for page rank based on keywords, Ricks information on using Blogger for this purpose alone is very good. (ed. note: Rick’s information is no longer available for sale.)

d) Where is your income? Is it in the ‘back end’? Or in the front lines? I guess this ties into (b), the goal, which really should have been the first question I asked…

Let’s keep talking…or just take it from here if you don’t want to collaborate – I know how busy you must be this time of year, but I’m here to help.

Laura Childs
www.stampedesecret.com

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Further notes in this stream passed by email are:

“I do see here in this conversation that increasing your search engine ranking for your existing website is your number one priority. If spending time daily writing fresh content for your site is not a stretch for your time, then I would suggest creating a full blown blog, hosted on your own site, that allows you to edit the dynamically generated RSS Feed. Stay on topic in the blog and ensure that all posts are keyword rich. (The keywords that you want to be in the top 10 for in each paragraph, blog title, post titles, etc.)

So Stephen, as we continue on in this conversation, tell me what type of blog you’ve decided on…

1) cutting and pasting text from your pages into blogger with link backs or,

2) actually writing and managing full blown fresh content into a blog on a regular basis.”

Then, a few days later in response to another query regarding keywords and topics in blogs vs. rss feeds:

“Use a seperate blog/feed for every topic. If two of the sites you are promoting are targetting the same keywords you can marry them into one feed or blog. Again, the big issue here is of time – for every feed you create you’ll want to submit it to the 40+ directories for maximum exposure.

Stephen if you have any time take the free keyword course – I’d worked online for 8-9 years and learned heaps from that free course regarding keywords. Even if you just pick up one tidbit of information from it, it is time well spent.”

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Parts of this letter have been edited to protect the integrity of ideas from the email author. I will never post full names or any contact information, although I keep copies of all my correspondence should I ever need to provide proof of authenticity.

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