PART 2 –Five simple (and nearly free) ways you can start monitoring your RSS feeds to maximize your marketing with business blogs

In PART 1 of “How To Measure The Impact of Your Marketing With Business Blogs and RSS” we looked at why it’s so important for you to make business blogging and RSS feeds a major part of your online marketing (if you want to be in a key position when consumers want to buy that is.)

And — although it will take some effort on your part to make marketing with business blogs, podcasts, and RSS work for you and your company — I think you can see from just the few statistics we looked at in PART 1 that it is well worth it. But really … to be brutally honest (and being anything but that wouldn’t be fair to you) — you don’t have any choice.

So here are five quick ways you can start monitoring the impact of your marketing with business blogs and RSS feeds so you can test your approaches, track consumer actions, and improve your results.

Here are five simple your business blog and RSS marketing results can be analyzed:

1. Track new feed subscribers

You must continually increase your subscriber base if you want to increase traffic. It’s a simple relationship.

If you have a self-hosted business blog like WordPress, then a service like FeedBurner can help track the number of subscribers to your business blog. Some of the better third-party hosted blog services like Blog Harbor offer internal tracking of RSS feed traffic. There are some other options out there as well if you don’t want to give up your URL in your feed as you do with FeedBurner, or host your blog with a provider like Blog Harbor.

No matter what option you choose, implementing some type of RSS subscriber tracking will be helpful. That way the baseline data you gather can be added into the mix when monitoring your business blog and RSS marketing.

2. Develop free “premium” content for readers to download or subscribe to, and track those click-throughs or subscriptions.

This is one of the most effective methods for maximizing your marketing with business blogs. Just like you’d do on a regular web site, you need to create highly targeted reports, ebooks, or newsletters/ezines that directly compliment the niche focus of your blog.

Yes – I did say newsletter. Although a recent study by Pew Research showed that 25% of all web surfers are bypassing web sites all together, they’re still looking for targeted information/education about and around their interests. If you’ve already established credibility with your blog content and have proven you can add to their growth with an email based publication – then it’s a pretty good bet they’ll register for it.

Another consideration is that you’ve still got 75% of the market catching up with the technology. These are people who are still accustomed to the standard email delivery of content. This strategy makes sure you capture them as well.

A free report or ebook would work just as well. But don’t mislead or offer junk just to get a read on the quality of your traffic. That’ll certainly tick people of and have them dropping both your feed and your email delivered content.

Business Coaching Corner: This is not the place to try out some new download or ezine format. You need a solid benchmark and a proven track record to compare your on-blog downloads against. Use a free publication, download, or report that’s proven itself online or offline in another marketing channel.

The quality of your initial “free premium” content will firmly position you in the minds of your target audience. Whatever free content you offer is leaving a first impression with subscribers that will not be easily changed.

3. Monitor click-throughs from posts and feeds

Although you can’t track specific people, you can tell which content or product offerings drive usage. And the way you do that is with tracking links that lead people out of your feeds and posts. If you’re using a halfway decent web analytics software program (something like ProAnalyzer or DynaTracker,) this will be a snap for you.

Given that RSS is an additional way to reach customers, you should consider testing the cost efficiency of different ways to get customers to subscribe to your feeds or free premium content offers.

4. Measure the time spent on the target site with visitors originating from your posts or RSS feeds.

Any top line traffic analysis software will allow you to track visitor footprints and movements around the destination site readers link to out of your business blog. This information will help you assess when people view, how long, and where they go on your site. It’ll help you determine what type of content to publish, and how many pieces to publish at a time And this data can even help you determine what time of day to publish.

If you have an e-commerce site, track purchases and related metrics. And look at how you can engage these customers and extend your relationship beyond the steps you’ve taken (like step #2 above) once they reach your site.

5. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple) — Minimize your costs and start out slow

When you’re going to get started monitoring and measuring your business blogging and RSS marketing efforts, don’t make this a big ordeal. It doesn’t need to be. Most of the time all that’s needed is the re-titling of pages or encoding URLs, not creating special HTML or landing pages. This keeps the costs of monitoring the marketing impact of your business blogging and RSS feeds painless on the pocketbook.

Remember — the key to getting consumers to keep revisiting your business blog and reading your RSS feeds is that you must continually supply new content that readers find relative and valuable. Though RSS currently reaches a relatively small user base, it’s growing fast. And RSS feeds (and your business blog posts) have a direct impact the search engine positioning of your main site when it’s set up properly, so RSS reaches it’s marketing impact far outside the blogosphere.

Starting to use and measure business blog and RSS marketing today can be an important addition to your marketing mix. It reaches consumers who might not otherwise engage with your content, and when set up properly — draws them in as prospects and then clients.

In today’s internet dependent marketplace, every company with a properly structured business blog and a robust Web site is a content provider. Start thinking about and testing how to make business blog and RSS marketing work for you.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


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