SoulCanon: Webcomics Marketing Strategies : Feeds

RSS Feeds
Part of a 13 part series: Exploring Webcomics Marketing Strategies

Many predict that emails validity as a marketing tool quickly fading because of spam and I would say there is a good case for it. The good news is there is a replacement that could make a webcomics a little easier to market to a targeted audience. It's called RSS.

RSS stands for 'Real Simple Syndication', a XML standard for publishing content . Now for those of you who don't know 'diddly' about XML, think of it as 'customizable standard' for formatting information into a plain text making it readable by any system. This 'readability' makes information easily disseminated in any way that can be imagined. Why is this good? If the information is good it can spread as fast.

Many applications are already on the market designed for reading rss
Right now 1%* of internet users use an RSS reader or aggregator ( they read RSS ). It is expected to explode in the near future as users discover the benefits of RSS
FireFox already has 'Live Booking' ( RSS reader ) built into the browser and the other browser are already building it into their next releases
RSS readers can't be spammed since the reader/aggregator is retrieving the information rather than having it sent to them.
RSS is like sending an email to the people and only the people who are interested in what you are marketing because they choose what is retrieved by the reader/aggregator/browser

How does this apply to webcomics?

Search Engines spider RSS more often than html
No more 'memory leaks': Imagine you have a site that updates sporadically. What if they were instantly notified every time you made a post? No more 'remembering' what day your webcomic updates or patrons forgetting about your website completely when you have long periods between posts.