12 Need-2-Know RSS Tools

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If you publish a blog or RSS feed, this issue is a must-read for you. Below you will find 12 reviews of the best RSS tools and resources on the Net.     WDFM is sponsored by... eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit Washington DC, October 20-23, 2008 Keynotes from Home Depot, Symantec, New York Times, Hotels.com Increase the Effectiveness of Every Marketing Dollar Optimize the Value of Your Online Marketing Justify your marketing ROI across the board Make your website more valuable to your customers Make yourself more valuable to your company Register Now! Coming Attractions: The next 3 issues of this newsletter are... Future of Email Marketing, Part 2 Trends in Web Metrics and Analytics Blogosphere Marketing Did someone forward this email newsletter to you? If so, welcome. I invite you to subscribe yourself so you can receive our upcoming issues as soon as we publish them. Subscribe to this newsletter at http://wdfm.com. Best RSS Tools and Resources: As you know, RSS feeds and blogs are two technologies tied closely together. There are tools out there you can use to squeeze every drop out of your investment in these technologies. Over 200 RSS tools were considered for this issue. Out of those 200 sites, we hand-picked the top 12 that are worthy of your attention. Now, without further ado, here's Managing Editor Eileen Shulock with those top 12 RSS tools and resources you need on your radar screen. Take it awaaay, ES... RSS Search Tools Search4RSS http://www.search4rss.com There are many RSS search engines out there, some better than others. We like Search4RSS to search for our RSS feeds because it has a few nifty features. When you use it you get the results on a traditional search engine results page. Enter a topic of interest, such as "direct marketing," and you receive a list of matching topic feeds. You also see snippets of feed content by the feed source on the left, and a list of topical blogs on the right. If you click on a snippet of feed content, you are taken to an intermediary screen with a description of the feed and a graph showing you how important that feed is in terms of subscribers. Finally, you can link to the site to subscribe to that feed yourself should you so desire. RSSMicro Search http://www.rssmicro.com This tool allows you to search by keyword for individual RSS posts, which is why it is called a "micro" search. For example, at the time of writing we searched for the keyword "Internet marketing" and found 18,900 posts (we suggest you narrow your search term a bit more than we did to get more targeted results). Each search result links to an individual post, and you can of course also see the source from whence that post came. We like the fact that each post has a "FeedRank" scoring system, which takes into consideration both the number of subscribers to the parent feed and the quality of the content. If that same content has been distributed by multiple parties, the FeedRank is lowered, because the scoring system looks for unique, rich content. BoardTracker http://boardtracker.com This is an RSS feed you can set up to feed you the results of its search through discussion boards, using keywords that you specify. What you get is an RSS feed of those discussion board conversations of specific interest to you. In using the tool, we learned that the more specific the keyword you select, the better your results will be. For example, the keyword "Internet marketing" delivered an overwhelming number of discussion threads that took too much time to read through and follow. Instead, we tried "online fashion retail"and received a manageable number of very informative discussion threads. This is a very handy tool in two other ways -- you can track mentions of your brand name across discussion boards, and you can track discussions happening at a specific URL of a discussion board by keyword.     WDFM is sponsored by... Email Delivery Rates Above 95 Percent! Yes, you can do it. Silverpop’s latest white paper shares 16 “Must Dos” for ensuring your messages land in subscribers’ inboxes. This comprehensive, 11-page report includes all the insights you need. Download your copy from Silverpop today. RSS Submission Directory RSS Specifications Feed Submission List http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm This site offers a list of dozens of RSS search engines and directories where you can submit your feed so people can find it. There are general RSS search engines where you'll want to submit, including sites like Syndic8, Feedster and Technorati. There are also content-specific feed directories for categories such as sports, real estate and software news. In addition, you should submit your RSS feeds to more "traditional" blog search engines, because people do search for blogs and then may elect to subscribe to the RSS feed from your blog. Each resource listed links directly to the submission page for that site. RSS Measurement Tools Clicky http://getclicky.com Clicky is a fascinating little tool that delivers your site analytics to you by RSS feed. You do have to insert two lines of HTML code into your site to make the tool work. It offers analytics of similar quality to Google Analytics, and will slice and dice information as desired (actions, time per visit, bounce rate, etc.). The fun part is that you can receive all of this data via RSS. For example, every time a search result leads a visitor to your site, you will get an RSS post that also shows you the search term your visitor used to get there. Every time a new site links to you, you'll get an RSS post with the URL for that site. For those addicted to analytics, this is a must-have tool. It can be used in addition to your more "traditional" analytics programs. Feed Compare http://www.feedcompare.com Is your feed bigger than your competitor's feed? Now you can find out. This tool enables you to compare the number of subscribers to your RSS feed to the number of subscribers of up to three competitor feeds. At the time of writing, this service only worked for sites that run their RSS feeds on FeedBurner. However, if you can find FeedBurner-hosted RSS feeds from your competitors, this is a super sleuthy way to get some competitive intelligence. Of course, if you run your feed via FeedBurner it will work even better. :)     WDFM is sponsored by... Download: Gartner's White Paper on Managed File Transfer Whether you're a graphic designer or a CMO, how you send, receive and track files affects your business, from productivity, budget to efficiency. Get your free: White Paper "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed File Transfer" ($1,200 value) Fact Point White Paper: The Business Benefits of a Managed File Transfer Service 14 Day Trial of The YouSendIt Service Get it Now RSS Bookmarks delicious RSS Bookmarks http://delicious.com/tag/rss Here is a quick and easy way to keep up with the world of RSS. Every time a member tags the word "RSS" in delicious, the informational post is sent to you by RSS. New information is frequently added, and each piece of content is also tagged as to whether it pertains to RSS tips, tools, readers, widgets, social media, blogging and so on.. RSS Feed Mixer Feedroll http://feedroll.com/rssviewer/ A "mixer" or "combiner" tool enables you to combine several RSS feeds from various resources into one RSS feed and publish it on your site. Let's say you want to offer a feed on your site that covers business news. Using the Feedroll application, you first choose your sources for your RSS information from a dropdown menu (for example, business feeds from The New York Times, Yahoo, The Motley Fool and the BBC). You give your feed a name, select formatting options (do you want subscribers to see each article entirely, or only the headlines?) and then -- voila! -- you cut and paste the code generated and you are in the RSS business. There are many tools out there that will "mix" various RSS feeds for you into one stream. This one intrigues us because we are not sure how the rights to content usage are handled, but it seems that some of the world's best content is right there for your use.     WDFM is sponsored by... Get Your Justification Report for Attending DMA08 Show Need help convincing your boss to let you out of the office to attend DMA's Conference & Exhibition-Las Vegas? Use Attendee Justification Tool Now! Go-To Tools for RSS Feed Validator http://feedvalidator.org This is a very handy and very good tool that checks your feed to see if it is working correctly from a technical point of view. For example, we tested a feed (you simply input the URL for that feed in the search box), and we were informed that while the feed was working, there were several issues that might prevent it from working its best with the various RSS readers out there. The results show you line by line where the problems are occurring (the lines are highlighted in yellow). You are given the reason for each difficulty and suggestions as to you can do to your code to fix each one. RSS Toolbox http://www.rss-tools.com/rss-directories.htm This is the go-to site should you wish to find specific RSS tools or just want to see what's out there. You can find RSS software, tutorials, readers, aggregators, analytics and even sources for all those cute little RSS buttons that you need to put on your site. Page2RSS http://page2rss.com If you are a frequent reader of a blog that does not offer an RSS feed (the horror), this tool will check any page/site URL that you input and deliver any updates to that page/site via RSS. If you are an RSS addict and the world has not caught up with you yet, this is a good one to know. Advertising Tools AdSense for RSS Feeds http://www.google.com/adsense If you are a publisher who accepts Google ads on your site to make money for yourself (otherwise known as the Google AdSense program), you should be aware that you can also ask Google to place relevant ads within your RSS feed. To do so, you log into your AdSense account, select the "AdSense for Feeds" ad unit as the type of ad you would like to receive and follow the steps from there. Attention Bloggers and Twitterers: You can link to the contents of this newsletter at the following URL and know it will live there permanently: http://www.wdfm.com/publish/rss/ Web Digest For Marketers, 79 Pine Street, #102, New York, NY 10005 © 1995-2008 Chase Online Marketing Strategies, All Rights Reserved. To cancel your subscription to Web Digest For Marketers and FYI From Web Digest For Marketers simply click on the link at the very bottom of this document.

9/22/08 IN THIS ISSUE * Feed Finders * Mixers & Blenders * Feed Optimizer * Measuring RSS * Internet Direct    Marketing Tip    of the Week * And More... Internet Direct Marketing Tip of the Week Consider the Source of Your Co-Reg Partners If you have an email newsletter, you probably have co-registration deals with similar types of newsletters. When vetting such partners, you want to have a good idea of where their traffic is coming from. When researching co-registration partners, examine the following criteria: 1. Inbound links to their site from which they draw traffic. Are they good or bogus sites? 2. What promotional campaigns they employ to get new subscribers and visitors to their site. 3. What type of advertisers currently run ads on their site and in their newsletters. Are they paying advertisers or affiliate programs? 4. What other co-registration partners do they have? LC Subscribe to this newsletter at no charge here. About WDFM Larry Chase's Web Digest for Marketers (WDFM) is a complimentary weekly email newsletter featuring mercifully short reviews and links on marketing-oriented websites. Get Larry Chase's top picks in over 40 marketing categories. Go to Larry Chase's Search Engine For Marketers. Advertising in WDFM This newsletter reaches over 40,000 decision-making marketers. Started in April 1995, WDFM was the first email newsletter about marketing on the Internet. Click for WDFM's latest media kit Housekeeping Want to stop receiving Web Digest For Marketers and FYI From Web Digest for Marketers? Just select the link at the very bottom of this email and you'll be removed from the list. But I'll miss you terribly. :-) If you received this issue from a colleague and you want your own subscription, you can get that by visiting http://wdfm.com and filling out the subscription form. It takes less than a minute. I encourage you to pass this issue of WDFM along, provided you do not change the copy, you keep the opening and this closing material, and you notify me. Ok, you don't have to notify me, but if you do, I will thank you personally. :) Thanks for reading all the way down to the bottom of this newsletter. :) Cordially, Larry Chase: Publisher Web Digest For Marketers http://wdfm.com Author: "Essential Business Tactics f/t Net" Sample chapter at http://LarryChase.com Ph: (212) 619-4780 Contact Larry