I read an interesting article the other day by Pamela Parker over at the ClickZ Network. She interviewed Dick Costolo CEO of Feedburner who shared some interesting research on emerging trends in RSS advertising that have a direct impact on business bloggers. Whether you business blog to build relationships and trust with your target market, or you business blog to monetize through targeted contextual advertising, there are some valuable insights and trends that you should be aware of.

Out of the brief summary of findings that Dick shared with Pamela, there are several developing trends that will significantly impact your business blogging effectiveness no matter how you monetize your business blog. I’d like to I’d like to call your attention to three here.

Three developing trends that will significantly impact your business blogging effectiveness

1. Readers (and advertisers) want relevancy — so give it to them with a mix of longer posts mixed in with shorter ones

One of the challenges that advertising via RSS based on contextual targeting is that many bloggers predominantly publish short posts. With shorter posts there’s often not enough content to accurately align ads with content. Dick is saying that publisher feedback has revealed “people are paying much closer attention to the relevance of this particular ad to this specific post.”

Whether you’re looking for higher relevancy for ads you place on your blog, or looking to have people actually “stick” once they hit your business blog — the message is the same.

Be sure to mix longer/article-type posts with shorter “drive-by” posts.

When you do, you’ll not only get higher relevancy from contextual ads (including Google Ad Sense,) and enhanced stickiness for your target market. You’ll also get better search engine rankings and higher organic search engine placement when you know the rules of keyword injection and placement in your business blog.

2. A tight niche equals targeted traffic

In response to the targeting challenges of contextual RSS advertising, companies are moving to analyze and use the overall content of a site, rather than individual post content. Very important info if you’re looking to monetize your business blog with RSS ads or Google Ads.

If your focus is more on developing relationships and building trust with your target market, this is just as critical, if not more so. Keeping your business blogs tightly focused on a specific niche, or small blend of directly related niche areas, will yield highly qualified traffic and better pre-qualified prospects.

Sure you need to set up multiple business blogs with this approach. But once you learn the same set-up, structure, and inter-linking strategies that students of the How to Master Business Blogging multi-media course use — you’ll see it’s one of the most highly effective, low cost approaches your can use to develop relationships with a highly qualified audience.

As the marketplace moves and the photosphere matures business bloggers with widely diverse blogs will struggle more and more.

3. Don’t make your readers work

One theme from Feedburner’s testing that validated our strategy and approach to the content of our RSS feeds. Their findings are that click-through rates from RSS feeds back to sites are decreasing. The company says this is happening across all the feeds it manages.

We’ve never believed that RSS feeds should be used as a vehicle to drive site traffic. It’s a medium all on it’s own. You want to be sure your feeds not only contain education, relationship building content … AND you should be sharing potential solutions with your readers that would help them achieve the benefits you’re talking about with ease.

If you have a product or service (or can recommend someone else’s) that will save them time, money, or needless trial and error — you have an ethical duty to share that with your readers. And that must be done in the feed content so they can read it right in their RSS reader and not have to click through to your site (unless of course they want to buy. :))

Contrary to popular opinion held by those in the blogosphere — RSS and blogs are in their infancy when it comes to widespread acceptance by the general public. Things are going to start moving fast and furious as more people become familiar with the technology and it becomes more convenient to utilize. You’ve not only got to be fully prepared with the exact strategies, steps, and techniques for how to business blog. You’ve got to keep up to date on emerging trends in the marketplace, on the internet, and within the photosphere.

Prepare yourself to ride the wave of change, and you’ll reap the rewards that come from being in the sweet spot on the face of that huge wave. (Sorry — living in Hawaii has an impact on my analogies, especially when you’re watching the surfers on the reef break outside your office. :0)

Have fun! That’s what work should be!

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — How to Master Business Blogging.

He’s know as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club.


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