I’d like to ask your forgiveness while I re-use an overused analogy here.
If your only marketing objective is to drive awareness of your message then why do you drive people to a site?
This is like going to a cocktail party and trying to get a girl to come back to your place for small talk.
If there’s no conversion, no purchase, no download, then why do you care if someone comes to your site to get that message. I would argue in many cases it would be better if they didn’t have to come to your site to find the message.
When I asked Steve Rubel why he decided not to keep both his Life Stream and his blog his initial response was because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.
I was kind of surprised that was his reason. I haven’t worried about duplicate content or SEO in general for my blog in almost a year. The only two stats I really care about are RSS subscriber numbers (because I don’t think RSS is dead) and comments, be they comments on the blog, Twitter, FriendFeed or somewhere else. (BTW if you haven’t please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.)
Other than my own name I don’t care anymore what key words I rank highest for. If this site were trying to sell something, or run advertising then I’d care.
I care more about people reading my next post then I do about who read my last post.
And I don’t really care if they do that here or somewhere else.
And if Google’s not smart enough to tell the difference between good content re-purposed on a good site, versus good content scraped on a spam site then that’s their problem not mine.
My personal take is that I want my content all over the place. That’s why you’ll see this post on my life stream, on my blog and on the Thinkers and Doers blog. My blog is the main source, it’s why I wrote it but it’s also relevant to those other sites. You’ll also see this post on Social Media Today and My Venture Pad. Plus if you or your company is a subscriber to Lexis Nexis, Thomas Reuters or you have a Kindle, you can find my blog which is syndicated through Newstex.
If that penalizes me in Google then so be it.
Image via my Flickr Stream
This post was originally posted on New Comm Biz
- Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr
Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?
One of my proudest moments at Highway 12 Ventures was when Mark Solon was demonstrating how he subscribed to RSS feeds in his feed reader to his partners.
But even as new people adopt RSS I keep hearing rumblings that some people are abandoning their feeds. Mashable even posed a poll to ask their readers if the were still using feed readers. It’s no surprise that their readers still overwhelming do.
Is RSS the best way to read news and blogs?
With the rise of social media technologies that provide alternatives to RSS, we have to wonder: what is the future of RSS? Is social media a better alternative?
I know many of you have expressed that thanks to Twitter and other social networks pushing content to you that you read far fewer, or at least don’t pay as much attention to, your RSS feeds. For me I know that initially this was the case for me, but now I find myself reading even more than before. In fact I find myself searching for, not just more, but more original content.
I think social networks and status style sharing accentuates the head but tends to bury the long tail. For some people RSS may not be important but I think for early adopters, trend watchers and anyone who wants to be at the front of their industry still has to actively subscribe to feeds.
Another case for RSS is this article by LifeHacker on 2 different ways to manage all your social networks. The problem is that the RSS solution would never be adopted by the mainstream worker. It’s just too much work for the average person. Messing with settings, filters and 3rd party applications is akin to low level programming. It will always be relegated to the hypo-g33k.
What about you. Do you find yourself using RSS more or less?
Related articles by Zemanta
- Diigo Demo Video: Posting to Twitter (newcommbiz.com)
- Conversations as Data: We need new UI (newcommbiz.com)
- Turn Your Commenters into Connections (slyvisions.com)
- Toluu - A Positive Experience with RSS Feeds (imjustcreative.com)
- Feedmil.com - A Search Engine For Feeds (killerstartups.com)
Recent Comments