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Article Title: How To Increase Your Sales Traffic By Publishing Customer Reviews As RSS Feeds
Author: Stephen Carter
Word Count: 952
Keywords: customer reviews as rss feeds, customer reviews, rss feeds
Contact Email Address: articles@randommous
Website: http://www.randommo
Category: Marketing, Search Engine, Internet, ECommerce, Advertising
Description: Many of the biggest players on the web know a simple truth
that most other webmasters overlook. They know that customer
reviews provide for a source of constantly updated content
that potential customers find to be an invaluable source of
information. By combining customer reviews with RSS feeds,
you too can ride a new wave of shopping (or social) traffic.
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Title: How To Increase Your Sales Traffic By Publishing Customer Reviews As RSS Feeds
It is a simple truth. Yet while many of the biggest players on
the web know it, most webmasters overlook the fact that
customer reviews can provide for a source of constantly updated
content that potential customers would find to be an invaluable
source of information.
It is also true that by simply combining customer reviews with
RSS feeds, you too can ride a new wave of shopping (or social)
traffic.
Traffic! It is the one problem that webmasters continually
face, and which can NEVER be fully solved. How to find visitors
in a reliable, repeatable, and cost-effective way.
Because without visitors, all your beautiful content might as
well be locked away in a vault--no one is ever going to see it.
If the purpose of your site is to sell, you will sell nothing.
If the purpose of your site is to build a social network, you
might remain its only member. You need traffic to succeed. Lots
of it.
In this article I am going to consider just one traffic
building initiative--
wave of popularity. It involves harnessing the power of RSS
(Really Simple Syndication) feeds to build traffic.
You are probably aware of RSS as a means of syndicating news
content. Websites that produce news have been building
XML-formatted news stories for years. These files are retrieved
by other websites, the new stories are extracted, and the
content is placed (on these publisher sites) before a public
ever-hungry for new information.
The arrangement has worked well for everyone. Those who have
displayed the RSS feeds have gained content to feed their
visitors. Those who have produced the RSS feeds have obtained
backlinks to their websites, which has helped to bring in new
traffic. In fact the arrangement has worked so well that
webmasters have been encouraged to move beyond simple news
syndication.
This makes a lot of sense. News articles hardly represent the
only content that surfers are looking for. Recipes, shopping
coupons, MP3s, schedules for local events... The list of
possible things that people search for is endless, and if you
can provide "new" instances of such information, then RSS
represents an ideal means of getting that information in front
of the people searching for it.
Sure, it used to be the case that everything you wrapped up in
an RSS feed had to take a very simple form. Every item in your
news feed was reduced to a title, a url (to the source of the
information)
reader.
But RSS has sprouted wings over the years and now you can
package practically any data structure into a feed that you
like. Because of this there is no reason why we cannot suitably
package customer reviews into a feed.
But what exactly would we put into an RSS-formatted customer
review feed? And is this a good idea?
Let me answer the second question first. Yes! It is a very good
idea to package customer reviews as RSS feeds. Why? Because if
you think about it, a customer review is very much like a news
item. It is a packaged opinion that has been released for the
express purpose of swaying the mindset of someone who is
looking for information on the very topic it addresses,
whatever that topic might be. To the person searching for the
information, this review is news indeed, and more often than
not it is welcome news.
So what should go into the feed? Well, a summary of the review,
seems obvious. That can be used as the title element, and a
snippet of the review can be used as the description.
But there are other elements to a review that we have grown
accustomed to over the years, and they can go into the feed
too. Pros and cons of the reviewed item can be listed and
highlighted. We can put in a numeric rating for several
different attributes of the item being reviewed (for example,
quality and robustness of the item, its ease of use, value for
money, and so on). We can put in images too. Stars to represent
the numeric ratings, maybe. A picture of the item. We could
even put in a link to the profile of the reviewer if we wanted.
When we do these things, the final formatted customer review
feed can look very enticing indeed.
Of course, the prospect of collecting reviews, let alone
formatting them into RSS feeds might very well seem daunting to
the average webmaster. But there are low-cost commercial
applications available which will do all of this work for
you--for example, the review engine known as Red Queen at
http://www.randommo
Furthermore, you can now upload customer reviews (in RSS
format) to Google Base and make them available to the various
Google outlets. Admittedly these are early days for webmasters
hoping to profitably hook into Google Base traffic sources, but
the prospects are exciting nonetheless.
One thing that seems certain is that customer reviews as RSS
feeds represent an as yet untapped opportunity for webmasters.
Customer reviews have long been profitably used by big players
on the web (Amazon.com being an obvious example) but have not
been fully exploited.
By coupling this popular opinion-based source of information
with the technology of RSS syndication, savvy webmasters who
take the reins today are sure to get first mover advantage on
this new means of marketing, and build the traffic they need to
assure the success of their online businesses. And, of course,
there is really no reason why you should not be one of them!
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Stephen Carter is the developer of Red Queen,
a powerful web-based customer review engine that allows
webmasters to manage customer reviews on their web site.
http://www.randommo
See also "How To Publish Customer Reviews As RSS Feeds"
http://www.randommo
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