RSS & Blog Portals

09/19/2005

What happens to eCommerce websites and blogs, or those where conversions are an important strategy, if RSS is the next killer app?

By that I mean the more people subscriber to readers the less likely they'll be to click-in and spend time on your site or blog. How will RSS impact conversions like email subscriptions, sales, Google Ad Sense and other web-based advertising?  How RSS impact developement and posting of value-add content like white paper downloads, podcasts or vlogs?

Wayne Hurlbert, the smart divo behind Blog Business World, has a very interesting post - Google Hub Sites: a blog goal. Wayne addresses how turning a blog into a portal can help lift search rankings. Great tips. Now, let's take Wayne's idea of a blog hub and spin it. Might creating a blog portal also encourage click-ins? 

Alex Brown is successfully creating blog portals that link to RSS fed websites and blogs. His first was for Wharton Admissions MBA Blog. Alex's strategy is told in Diva Marketing Blog's Biz  Blog  Profile Series. Recently he developed a portal blog for Clear Admit.

So I ask you, will RSS be the killer app that changes or destroys website/blog content? It might be unless we go back to internet marketing 101 and offer content that is relevant to our readers. But interestingly, if we follow Alex's model ... RSS just might be one strategy that will help us create relevancy and better blogs/sites.

Read more about RSS as a website strategy.

 

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The idea of a blog as a portal is a great extension of the blog as a Google hub site or as a mini-directory. As such, I fully expect a few blog portals to make an appearance very soon.

Posted by: Wayne Hurlbert on Sep 19, 2005 10:35:48 AM

As you can imagine, this is a topic pretty close to my heart. After all, if no one is looking at a website, what's the point in investing in design, right?

Well actually, one of the arguments for spending a couple of bucks on design is that it DOES drive traffic to the site itself.

I suspect that as rss develops, it will pick up design info from the site, and convey that along with the feed info. In essence it becomes a method of auto-caching whole sites for offline perusal.

I'm a bit wary of the whole rss broohaha. It's an incredibly important technology, there is no doubt. But penetration is extremely low, and will likely remain so for quite some time.

As an aside, I've really got to fix your comment box, it's all messed up!

Posted by: Peter Flaschner on Sep 20, 2005 12:20:30 PM

Interesting Peter. We can see graphic ads in blogs...why not the blog design elements?

Also, we need to add back the RSS feed too.

For those who don't know, Peter is the talented designer of Diva Marketing's new skin.

Posted by: Toby on Sep 20, 2005 12:25:39 PM

Hmmm. Peter, I have to disagree. I think RSS will pickup exponentially. With all the major search engines getting on board with both blog search and feeds, I think a)bloggers will be more tempted to rss-enable their blogs to grow traffic and b) users will adopt RSS (even if they don't know what it is and just call it "adding content") to customize their My Yahoo and My MSN-type spaces.

Do I think this will kill blogs? No - not at all. I think ultimately, it will drive blog traffic. Most people just skim headlines or summaries via RSS. If your subject matter is valuable to them, they'll still click through!

Posted by: Aimee on Sep 21, 2005 1:12:40 PM

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