Blogs and RSS Feeds, Oh My
Everyone knows what a blog is right? Not! How about RSS? These recently new and increasingly popular web technologies are taking off and becoming good ways for you to communicate with your customers and prospects. Blog is short for web log and became popular during the 2004 Presidential Election as blog writers all over the world opined and investigated both the president and John Kerry. There are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Many are just people, or even kids, who want to express their opinion on a particular topic. Some blogs are from reporters who go into more detail about their stories than TV, radio or newspaper allows. You can find blogs on just about any topic. They are basically online diaries. RSS has evolved to stand for Really Simple Syndication which makes for an easy way to publish your blog or other content to those who want to see it. Content comes to your desktop via a program called an RSS reader. It's very similar to email and as a matter of fact there is a free program called RSS Popper that is an add-in to Outlook that puts these RSS feeds right into your email client. The difference is that YOU pick which items you want unlike someone just sending you every email they can think of. Combined, these technologies give you a way to communicate. New product? Describe it in your blog and everyone who picks up the feed knows about it instantly. I recently put together a step by step series of posts on how to construct a basic business plan on my blog at: http://shamrockbusinesscoaching.blogspot.com and post there once per day about topics that may be of interest to the small business owner. You can either go to the blog every day and read the latest post or get an RSS reader and paste in the URL from my feed and get the daily post on your computer. See how this works? It's becoming more popular every day and I suggest that you download a free RSS reader, find a few blogs that you like and test it out. Then think about how your business can utilize this wonderful technology. Mike Shannon is the owner of Shamrock Business Coaching, a coaching practice that helps business owners increase profits. You can visit Shamrock Business Coaching on the web at: http://www.ShamrockCoaching.com
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