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Email Communication Is Dying. What's Next?
by: Oleg Ilin
Currently there are 3 main types of broadcast Internet messaging systems that you can use to deliver newsletters, e-zines and other informational materials to your customers.

I'm not going to cover here internal or intranet messaging systems, the main focus of this article is on the virtual world outside your local/corporate network.

The main Internet Broadcasting Systems are:

- Email broadcasts that are sent through sender's ISP and received with the email client of your customer (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Web Mail systems, etc.)

- RSS Feeds delivered through web-based RSS Aggregators.

- Completely customizable and personalized multi-media messages that are sent through RSS Channels and received with branded RSS Readers (such as Private Mail Reader and Feed Demon).

E-mail communications used to be a very efficient way to deliver information to your prospects and customers. This was working well until we got spammers - thousands of unethical people trashing your inboxes with annoying junk offers without any permission on your part. Nobody really wanted these products, ISP customers were irritated with email-boxes full of irrelevant content, to say the least.

Big and small ISP companies (Internet Service Providers) responded by developing anti-spam filters and society at large was forced to work out a set of anti-spam laws regulating the use of e-mails.

So legitimate internet marketers had to accommodate themselves to these unpleasant changes by implementing various forms of opt-in verifications. In other words, now the customers have to confirm in some way that they give you permission to send them e-mails.

And you inevitably loose a percentage of your customers who for some reasons doesn't want to go through the opt-in process.

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Anti-spam filters are now so tight, that they easily throw in the bulk folder even legitimate e-mails. How it could happen? Well, you may accidentally use some of the "bad words" - such as "free", "buy", "purchase", etc (there are hundreds of "spam words" and the list grows every day). You know very well what happen to the bulk folder emails - they are as good as trash. Chances that recipient will ever read bulk emails are slim to none.

You also loose some of your readers when you try to enhance their experience by sending emails in html format (which would allow you to add colors, and pictures to your email, use different fonts, etc).

You might want to go even further and insert audio or video streams into your emails to give your readers the opportunity to better comprehend the featured topic.

You might want to do other neat things....

Well, don't bother. Sorry to disappoint you, but your efforts will be in vain. Major ISPs consider html to be the format for commercial emails and as such it triggers spam filters almost automatically.

Some analytic companies estimate that you can easily fail to reach as much as 70% of your customers in the nearest future. According to Doubleclick, one of the e-mail delivery leaders, the average rate of opened e-mails in 4th Quarter of 2004 declined 11.4% from Q4 2003, and is now only 32.6%.

Very bright picture, isn't it?

Luckily, there is a solution, and it comes in a form of RSS technology (Really Simple Syndication).

To put it simply, RSS Feeds are the streams of information presented in xml format. This syndication allows webmasters to find the feeds of interest written by other authors and easily place them on their own web sites (with authors permission, of course). The Big Benefit is that this information is automatically updated every time when the particular RSS feed is updated.

In case of RSS aggregators, readers simply subscribe to the feeds and read them through web-based user interfaces (one of the popular RSS aggregators, for example, is My Yahoo - find the RSS Feeds of your choices, add them to your My Yahoo page - and you will receive the update on what is new on these feeds and will be able to read it in user-friendly format (you don't have to learn xml). Each time you go to MY Yahoo you will be informed which of these feeds were updated in the last 3 days.

And finally, there is a third option - RSS Readers. It gives readers the ability not to worry about the information of their choice being blocked by ISP anti-spam filters. They can simply download RSS Feed Reader and enjoy the benefits of private media-rich environment from your computer!

You don't have to go to any websites to get these data and you're not forced to receive this information, you decide where and when to receive it. (Whereas with e-mails you're facing the fact that anybody could send them to your mailing address).

There are a many good RSS readers out there. Some are free, other offer free trial. The most well-known is FeedDemon (has free trial), then goes SharpReader, NewsCrawler, Awasu, PMR etc.

Now it's your turn to explore the benefits of RSS technology. Use RSS messaging system of your choice and stay ahead of your competitors!

About the author:
Oleg Ilin, the president of 1EzHost L.L.C.- custom web design and development company, invites you to visit http://www.1ezhost.bizand get your unique and result-driven website done by professionals. Free gift for you: 2 valuable internet marketing e-books: http://www.1ezhost.biz/onoff1.php


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The Topic Of Your Website

The first thing you will have to deal building your website has nothing to do with the web design itself, it's me related to content writing but it must be defined and will effect the rest of your actions. So first of all you need to decide what the topic of your future website is. Topic is very closely connected to another web design issue: keywords. The keywords you select will depend upon the topic you have chosen. When thinking about website topic ask yourself a few questions: What is the goal of the site you are making? What are you trying to achieve with your site. Specify a goal, preferably in one short sentence.

Take a sheet of paper and a pen and put all you can think out about your future website. Brainstorm! Just put everything that comes to your mind: what you want to give to your visitors, what the site is about, what you want to accomplish with your website, what is your experience in the area you would like to select as topic? The more points you could think up the better. Then sort it in the number of importance. Think what points can be deleted without harm to your project. Delete them. Leave only what is REALLY important. Try to get your goal out of those points.

Choosing topic is like choosing the topic for college research paper. You should try to select reasonable balance between too wide and to narrow topics. Narrowing down your website topic might be very helpful. If you have narrower topic that means you have less competing topic thus it will help you to get better position among your competitors. However if the topic is too narrow nobody will ever bother to search for it. Let me give you example: you want to build a website devoted to website design, but if you try to develop this website guess how many websites you will have to beat to get on the top? I got 4,030,000 pages devoted to website design according Google . To check this number just enter http://google.com and then enter "website design" in the search form on the first page. Now let's see how many sites Google indexed with the topic "Flash website design". I got about 22,300. As you may see the result of indexed web pages is four millions smaller. So creating website about flash design will be much smarter then just to make "website design" site and be lost in those millions pages. Note that "Website design" and "Flash Website Design" are not only keywords, the Flash website design is a part of website design but it is smaller part. Searching search engines keywords related to the topic you have selected may be helpful in making decision about your website topic. I'll teach you how to select "right" keywords to obtain better position on the search engine listings in the next articles.

Do not hesitate to reset your goals. Try to think about audience of the website. People like to visit websites with the original and unique content. Will your website be able to provide your visitors with such content? Will visitors come back again and again or they will simply close the browser window and forget about your website?

The better the plan the less work you will have to make. So if you could define the topic and define it clearly you may proceed to another step of website building: choosing a domain name.

Click Here

This article may be reprinted and distributed with no charge until the credit line below remains without changes.

Thanks for reading.

About the Author:
Oleg Lazarenko
Production Manager of
Metamorphosis Web Design Studio ?
Flash templates and Web Templates
http://www.metamorphozis.com

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