How To Increase Your Sales Traffic By Publishing Customer Reviews As RSS Feeds
by Stephen Carter
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--one
that happens to be enjoying a growing 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), and a short snippet, or description,
to hook the 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, it's 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.randommouse.com/redqueen.
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!
About the Author:
Stephen Carter is the developer
of
Red Queen, powerful customer review software
that allows webmasters to take advantage of the traffic building potential of
customer reviews published as RSS feeds. To learn more:
How To Publish Customer Reviews As RSS Feeds
Source of this article:
www.goarticles.com
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