It’s amazing how quickly the internet marketing crowd jumps from one fad to another based solely on who’s got the latest ebook out.

Blog and Ping is dead…. even though it still works if you use it right.

Remember the brief flare of press releases? They still work incredibly well even though they’re sooo 2005.

It won’t be long before tag and ping is forgotten as well.

And RSS. Wasn’t that supposed to be revolutionary? Now all IM folk are using RSS for is to put newsfeeds from Yahoo and Google on junk adsense pages.

But creating your own feed and allowing others to use it seems to work quite well to get incoming PR as well as driving traffic.

I recently started creating sets of 52 weekly “tips” articles, published only by RSS feed, with links to my related sites. After a few weeks of publishing so people could see the quality, I posted the availability of the feeds for publication as content in forums and email lists related to the subjects, and today I found my RSS-fed articles on one subject placed on the front page of a PR 7 website, and on sub-pages of several other sites with PR values ranging from 3 to 5.

These are fairly active websites and the traffic coming in from these sites is significant.

I’ve also noticed traffic coming in from personalized homepages at Yahoo and Google, as well as online feed aggregators. I’m sure others are receiving the feeds in their desktop clients as well.

RSS publishing has, thus far, been far more effective for me than article marketing which takes four weeks (in my experience) before you start seeing high quality backlink results in Google, and rarely results in long-term placement of your link on a high PR page.

RSS publishing is like article marketing without the article directory submissions, with the added benefit of the possibility of a personal subscriber base thrown into the mix.

Why was it abandoned? Maybe just too geeky. Maybe the requirement that you actually publish something of value was too great once people discovered that feeds full of spam get few results. But I’m not complaining. I have no competition trying to edge in on my new great placements on other people’s sites.
Are there other marketing methods that IM has left abandoned in its wake that you could revive with a Web 2.0 twist?

You’ll have less competition for eyeballs with those old methods, and possibly great results as well.

Tag and Ping Fallout
It didn’t take long for the first tag and ping spammers to hit the ground running after the release of Tag and Ping. In fact, the very next morning Charles Heflin in his SEO20/20 blog caught screenshots of an overloaded Jots page.

Just this morning, I went to Jots.com and noticed that one user has taken up the entire 1st page of results…..The user “Richiz” has hit Jots so hard that (at the time of this writing) Jots had to shut down temporarily.

And Splork from Lost Ball in High Weeds noticed the spam affecting Technorati too:

Now granted I haven’t been paying much attention to tag and ping until recently, but a couple of tags that are currently popular in the last hour are nothing more than spam. They can’t even spell correctly. “Loose Weight” or “Lose Weight”. You decide. The Adsense tag is also popular this particular hour and interesting in that if you go to one of the weblogs it is simply an ad for a clickbank product on Adsense. Actually if you go to the top 5 they are all ads for something.

Technorati seemed to be working on the problem by Sunday afternoon, and as I write this the hot tags seem to have returned to normal. Jots is currently “down for maintenance”, which can be loosely interpreted as “we’re shutting off the spam till we get a fix in place”

I didn’t track closely, but I didn’t even notice a blip in the results of del.icio.us and blinklist. Presumably they already had some pretty good systems in place to keep the junk from hitting the front page.

It’s sad to see marketers taking the low road with tag and ping, but it seems as though most of the bookmarking sites have gotten the problem under control already.

RSS Revenues
This weekend I was introduced to a new feed aggregator called FeedShow. Feedshow is a web-based aggregator that lets feed publishers participate in revenue generation through the display of AdSense ads running in the feeds. The adsense ads only appear in the feeds of participating publishers, and they’ll rotate between FeedShow’s and the feed publisher’s accounts.

The method to sign up as a blog publisher is particularly easy. Simply post an entry to your blog that looks like this:

--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]
provider=[Google]
uid=[pub-8870932556899172]
option=[8411175611]
--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]

where uid is your Google Publisher Id and Option is your channel code.

The feedreader is pretty slick, with the added advantage of being available to you wherever you are, as long as you can find some access to the Web.

It doesn’t seem to have a lot of users yet, and much of the navigation of the main site is in french, but it’s worth taking a look at in any case. It costs nothing to sign up, and if you’re already using AdSense, it’s an easy matter to plug in your codes and give it a whirl.

This particular site may not be the future of RSS, but it might spawn some ideas for the “next big thing.”

Web 2.0 Idea Management

Another site I stumbled across this weekend is Wridea.com. Wridea is an Idea Management application based on Getting Things Done that’s pretty slick. It’s got a nice interface, and a lot of flexibility.

There are five core principles in GTD. Collect, create ideas in wridea, Process, move them to another categories and pages or delete them, Organize, create pages or categories for next actions, projects, waiting for and someday/maybe, Review, browse your ideas easily and finally Do, this is your thing.

It’s free, and worth giving it a run-through to see if it’ll work for you.

I’m about to embark on an experiment using RSS.

I have used RSS a lot… but always made a feed of posts or articles that exist on a particular site. The feeds all had just a brief teaser of text and hopefully anyone who saw it would click on to my site.

But, I thought, I wonder if I could use RSS in the same way that I use articles, namely, to get my links on other related sites in my niches.

The best way to do this, of course, is to offer those sites something really useful to add to their site in the way of content — not just a snippet with a link.

So, what if, instead of offering a feed of pages hosted elsewhere, I offer a feed with a FULL mini article that they can post directly on their site. Within the article, I’ll link to my own web properties, but ensure that the links open in a new window so the host site won’t have to worry about losing traffic.

I’ve got a few content writers working on sets of 52 tips articles that are 150 to 300 words in length to offer weekly tips in some of my niches, and I’ll drip the content to the feed once a week.

Once that’s set up, I will need to find publishers willing to host them, and probably create ready-made scripts to display the tips on their sites — since the majority of people don’t have the technical know-how to do something like that.

And I’m posting before doing, just in case there are other people out there who are thinking about doing the same thing. Please contact me and maybe we can work together — even build a free content one-stop shop that would serve the same function as article directories do for article writers.

Write a comment or send me an email if you’ve got ideas or if you’re interested in exploring the concept further.