Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

Are you ready to start week 3 of the 30 Day Autoresponder Challenge? We ended last week by setting up a special offer for new subscribers. (By the way – I’m pretty excited because I had  my first sale earlier today!).

Now with a better monetization process in place, we can return today to new content for the list. Then tomorrow, we’ll get back to conversions.

So the steps I’m going to take today are…

• Set up a Blog RSS Broadcast
• Activate the Blog RSS to go out 1/week

Here we go…

Why Use A Blog RSS?

Before I work with the Blog RSS, it would probably help you if I explained what it is (and does), and why I’m implementing it now.

First, all blogs (and many other websites) have a syndication feed called an RSS (real simple syndication). Think of it like a radio frequency. When a new post appears on a blog, the RSS sends out a signal to all the “towers” (i.e., “feed readers”) to let them know that there is a new post. People use feed readers to bring content to them, instead of going back to visit sites. Bloggers use RSS because it helps us to get our message out to more people in an automated way.

You can tell a website has an RSS feed by looking at the address bar. If you see an orange (sometimes it’s a different color) icon with 3 white, quarter circles, then it has an RSS.

You can also display RSS feeds from other websites as well, and I find this to be quite useful in generating automated content in my Squidoo lenses and Ning communities.

Now when it comes to Aweber, they have a nifty application of the RSS. Instead of displaying the RSS feed in a website, Aweber lets you send the feed to your subscribers’ inbox. So what this essentially does is create an automated ezine for the content you create on your blog transformed into occasional emails. And with the ability to design your broadcast, and add enhancements of your own, Aweber’s Blog RSS Broadcast makes for a very cool publishing tool.

What will happen for your readers is they will receive an email from you with excerpts from your blog content based on time and quantity specifications you determine. I’ll talk more about that at the end of today’s session, but for me, I’ll be sending my broadcast every Friday. Any post I’ve added to my blog since the previous Friday will be included in my broadcast. At the end of each article’s excerpt (about 50 words or so), a link will bring my readers back to that blog post to finish reading.

By the way, this is one of the features Aweber implemented quite some time ago that reminds you that they are always on the leading edge of email marketing.

And the bottom line is using a Blog RSS Broadcast is a great way for you to add current, time-sensitive content to what is otherwise an evergreen list.

Set Up Your Broadcast Layout

To set your blog broadcast in motion, login to Aweber and click Messages/Blog Broadcast.

You’ll need the source of your RSS. In my case, I use  my blog’s RSS feed, http://AskBobTheTeacher.com/blog/feed. If you don’t have a blog yet, you can use any RSS feed (including mine, an Ezine Articles topic, Twitter feeds, whatever). If you’re real adventurous, you could make a Yahoo Pipe and combine multiple RSS feeds together into one. That’s a bit out of the realm of the 30 Day Challenge, but I thought I’d throw that out there for you :)

Once you enter your blog RSS feed into the field, you’ll need to pick a template. You’ll find a few dozen templates to work from inside Aweber, all of which can be customized (or you can start from 0). I suggest you start with a template you find appealing based on its color scheme and layout. The rest can be customized.

Once you load a template, you can then make changes, but there are a few things you want to leave alone. The tags that Aweber uses to pull in content need to stay (with a couple of exceptions).

You’ll see tags like {!rss_itemblock}, {!rss_item_title}, etc. The {!rss_itemblock} and {!rss_itemblockend} must remain if you want each article excerpt to show in your broadcast. This block and blockend is a content placeholder, and any formatting you do to the area between these tags will apply to each article that is pulled in from the RSS.

Here are the tags, and what they do:

• {!rss_channel} – your Blog title, as entered in your blog settings
• {!rss_channeldescription} – your blog’s description, as entered in your
  blog settings
• {!rss_itemblock} – the section of the blog broadcast that pulls in each
  new post
• {!rss_itemblockend} – the end of each post, and the RSS area of the
  broadcast
• {!rss_item_title} – the title of each blog post
• {!rss_item_date} – the date the post was originally published
• {!rss_item_description} – the excerpt of the blog post
• {!rss_item_link} – the URL of the individual post (this shows up in the
  hyperlink of the HTML version)
• {!contact_address} – your business address
• {!remove_web} – the unsubscribe link in the newsletter

I put in bold the tags you don’t want to mess with; the others are more optional. Your contact address and unsubscribe links are already at the bottom if you don’t include them here; but you can control where they show up if you like.

Since my blog has a longer description and title, I can remove those from the template and use my own text instead.

I also don’t include the date in my template because I’m already sending it out just once per week. So the date isn’t really necessary.

To work with the way your template looks, you may want to work with another program. Personally, I find working with the Aweber templates inside the WYSIWYG editor a bit annoying. If you’re just changing some text, it’s perfectly fine. But if you want to change things like the colors of the background, the width of the columns, etc., then using a more specialized HTML editor is better.

So I copy the source code of the template into FrontPage (you could use Dreamweaver, NVU, SiteBuildIt, or whatever), and I work there to tweak the layout.

I take off the {!rss_channel} and {!rss_channeldescription} from the subject line, and the top of the broadcast template. I change it to something more relevant to my idea of a weekly digest.

Under this title area, I have a navigation bar with 4 links. I link back to the homepage of my blog, my event schedule, my IM Success Library, and the IM Success Tribe.

I add an intro message to my broadcast, then the {!rss_itemblock} tags, and finish with a message close. After my name, I include a PS which encourages my readers to forward the broadcast to others who may benefit (getting free viral marketing going). And I also add the {!signature} tag like I do with most of my other messages.

The blog broadcast I’m using includes a second column with more links, which I delete and replace with my photo (remember the importance of branding). I include a brief “About Bob The Teacher” to reinforce my credibility in teaching internet marketing.

I also add a section that provides quick links to the most important internet marketing resources, those things I get asked about the most: hosting, domains, autoresponders, teleseminar system, and an online payment processor.  Of course, I do use my affiliate links for each of these. I also give my IM Success Toolbar, which is one of the productivity tools I made to help people have easier access to my lessons and the main internet tools that we tend to all use. That also has recordings of some of my interviews to give free content as well.

The final section of the broadcast I add a contact section. Here I’m including my links to Twitter, Facebook, and my helpdesk.

After a few more tweaks of font sizes and colors, I then take the source code, copy it, and paste it back into the source code of the Aweber broadcast.

To see how my blog broadcast looks, just wait for Friday’s in your inbox if you’re already subscribed! (If not, you can subscribe here)

Send Out Your Blog Broadcast

After your layout is polished, you then need to determine when it will go out.

I’m making mine a weekly digest of my lessons, and I want it to go out early enough on Friday to catch my readers’ attention for weekend reading. So I’m choosing 10 a.m. Friday. You can choose to send yours whatever day of the week you like; or you can send only when you have a certain number of new posts. If you do this, then every time that number is hit (say 3 new posts) the broadcast is sent. If you only write a post a week, then your digest would go out every 3 weeks or so. If you publish 12 in a week, then 4 broadcasts would go out that week.

The final option that’s new to the broadcast is whether to send your broadcast automatically (or not). I suggest you set this to automatic if you get busy and forgetful. This way, the broadcast will go out at the time and day you specify. However, if you want to make sure you change the intro and exit message (or anything else) of the broadcast each time, then uncheck the box. Just be sure to have a reminder somewhere (perhaps in your Freemind to do map) so you don’t forget to send it out.

The rest of the settings are the same as your typical broadcast message: syndicating with it’s own RSS feed, as well as posting to Twitter. I’d definitely suggest you use both of these to help get your message to more places, and eventually pick up new readers.

That’s it for Day 15. It’s going to take a few minutes for you to tweak it to be the way you want it. And after you get the first broadcast, you’ll want to come back and make additional changes. But the cool thing to remember here is once you set up the blog broadcast, you’ve added an additional message every week or two for your readers based on current posts you’re publishing.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Remember, to see the video walk through of the steps I did today, as well as all 30 days of the challenge, be sure to get the video option at DiscoverAutoresponders.com.

p.p.s. Have a comment or a celebration to share from today’s steps, or the previous 2 weeks? Post it below!

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