Why to Use It
Why would you want to allow your readers to access your content as feed outside of the carefully crafted blog environment? The simple answer is: It is always a good idea to make it easy for your customer to access your message. And if a part of your message needs other formats like audio or video, which are not available via RSS feeds, there is still the link to the original blog post. In this case the text acts as a teaser to visit the blog and watch the video or to listen to the audio content.
And why would a reader of your blog add your content as feed to his RSS reader? Feeds are a very effective method to stay on top of a topic without browsing the web for hours to check favorite websites for changes and fresh information. This saves him a lot of time, and at places where he pays for bandwidth it saves him also a lot of money.

How to Use It
RSS feeds with WordPress provide easy access to your content. And the beauty is: It is already incorporated in your standard blogging software. WordPress automatically produces feeds with your posts, and then also a feed from the comments on every single post. Modern browsers show an icon listing the feeds in the address bar or on top of the webpage display window. But to make it easy for your readers you should add a link to your feeds to the sidebar of your blog.

Add More Features
I suggest you go one step further and use Google’s Feedburner service. This allows you to offer one single feed working with all feed readers. Feedburner gives you also statistics which allow you to gauge how many people read your feeds, and a feature to offer feeds via email to your audience.

In short:
RSS feeds with WordPress are a foolproof way to make your content easily accessible to your audience on a wide variety of platforms. It is already part of the standard WordPress blogging software. To make it easy to use, you should take care that your blog theme contains a link to the feeds. If you want to get stats about the use of your feeds and additional features, Feedburner is a good choice. It is free, makes your feed even more accessible and provides a simple set of stats about the use of your feed.

How can marketing strategies with a WordPress blog foster the growth of desire in a prospect’s mind? There are several ways a blog can help you out to reach that goal:

1. Post regularly to highlight different benefits of your service without exhausting your readers.
2. Provide samples to help you prospects quickly and gain credibility
3. Ask for comments to learn what your prospects think and gain social proof
4. Control the environment to keep you audience focused.

Our marketing strategies with a WordPress blog use an indirect approach. We do not try to push our prospect to buy. We provide for our audience a context where everybody can try and feel how much safer, more enjoyable and richer his life could become by using our products or services. We provide free samples and explain how to use them. We give people the opportunity to comment on our samples and explanations. Readers can ask questions, suggest improvements and tell us how they use our content. Obviously we remove spam comments, and we will never allow people to hurt others with their comments.

Another important component of my marketing strategy is the blog feed. WordPress automatically creates feeds of posts, and also of comments. This helps to alert people about fresh content, highlighting new aspects of the offer. I use Google’s Feedburner service to get an idea how many people are really keen to see my content as soon as I post it.

Email is also a regular component of our marketing strategies with a WordPress blog. We offer email subscriptions throughout the blog and use the lists to offer extra samples and goodies. Subscribers receive also alerts when we post fresh content on the blog, and if we have any special offers.

We also mail related offers and alerts about valuable content from other publishers, provided they add extra value to our readers.

• Signup rate from people coming from my blog: 15%
• Signup rate from people coming from Google Adwords: 5%
• Signup rate from people coming from Twitter: 0%

I got lots of traffic from Twitter, and people seemed to be interested. But no conversion! Adwords remained at 5%. From my blog the traffic numbers went naturally down. I cannot write posts promoting the same offer day by day.

Putting Myself into Twitterers’ Shoes
I was scratching my head for several weeks, hoping to get at least one or two conversions from Twitter. After a while it seemed that even the click rates from Twitter went down. Naturally, because my followers knew the offer, as my blog readers did. Anyway, I was careful enough not to damage that Twitter account, it is still growing.
So, what does that mean? Is Twitter traffic useless? I do not think so, and I know that other people get conversions, signups etc. from Twitter.
I drew two conclusions: The page must be reasonable for people coming from search engines, and for people coming from my mailing list and blog, but not for Twitterers.
Thinking about the reason, I came up with the following conclusion: The signup page was, as thousands, driven by flash videos. But further investigation let me to conclude, that a Twitter link is rarely leading to a video.

Mobile Users Have Different Priorities
A little further brain wrenching reminded me, that even the emails with video links I get, do not work, as long as I open them on my mobile device, because the handset does not show flash.
In fact I use the email on my Palm to skim through the emails, to see if there is something I need to respond quickly. But all these video emails are left to my desktop, and I check them, if and when I have time and desire to do so.
Twitter is strongly geared towards mobile users. They may have difficulty to watch a flash video. And a Twitter user has often a very short span of attention. He may just to get a glimpse about what’s going on in his arena, between leaving the plane and picking the luggage. And unlike emails, tweets go away. They are not saved for later inspection.

Landing Page Must Correspondent to Traffic Source
This consideration seems to explain why my video page did not work with Twitter. And, while investigating, my brain reminded me that I should copy the ones, who get already results. Many of them seem to promote their blogs on Twitter, and then using their blogs to promote their money making stuff.

What do you think? Did you observe the same phenomena? How did you solve the problem? Please share your insight and leave a comment.

1. Traffic Generation: You need to get visitors to your website, and lots of them.
2. Initial Sale: To receive money, you need to gain trust of your audience. The willingness to give you money for a promised product is certainly an expression of trust. The price of the initial sale may or may not cover the cost of acquiring this new customer.
3. Backend Sales: If you have earned the trust of your audience, and strive to earn their trust every day again, they will buy again and again. This is where the real money is.

This is a numbered list, because it is essential to go step by step. Why? It is much easier to sell to somebody, who has already bought from you, and was more than satisfied with your performance. You just need to tell him: “I have this, do you need it?” And he will at least consider your offer. But to come into this position, you must have made already a first sale (or at least built a relationship of trust with the customer).

To get a first sale, which means a sale to a person who never bought from you before, and who probably does not know you, you must have an excellent offer. And you need to present this offer in a very convincing way. You know this long sales letters and these product launches.
If you are not completely new to direct marketing, you know probably also, that the only way to get a real good converting sales letter or sequence of sales messages only by testing. There is no way to know for sure, which headline is performing better, which picture, background color, layout outperforms all others. But the difference between a conversion rate of 1 percent and 2 percent can be the difference between a big loss and a small profit, especially if you realize that you pay for your traffic. And you do pay, either with money, or with your effort.

To get valid test results, you need lots of traffic. If you run a split test only between two headlines or two pictures or two videos, you need at least 30 conversions on the weaker one, to have a reliable result. This means to test only two variants, you need at an average conversion rate 3000 visitors. If you do not have a strong stream of traffic to your website, you may just need a year or two to test every aspect of your sales process. In this case your product will be probably obsolete before you can roll it out.

To learn how the masters are using this sequence, read The Great Formula. Mark Joyner, the author, allowed me to offer you a free download.

• be interested in the topic
• believe that you can give a valuable input
• give you at least some trust

You need to have that in mind if you start to channel traffic to you new web business, no matter what is the source of traffic. In essence you need to build an audience. This means you need to build a relationship to people who value your input, and who are willing to listen, if you send them a message.

If you have already an audience in the offline world, you can draw them into your internet world. This is the case if you have already a brick-and-mortar business. You can draw your existing customers and prospects into your internet activities by providing through the web enhanced service, like support videos, 24 hour ordering etc.

To get additional people into your audience, you can use many methods. Some of the more popular are:

• paid advertisements
• article marketing
• social networks
• teleseminars or webinars

About each of this methods there is a lot of material and training courses available. And it is important to master the ones you use. So, the best approach would be in the beginning to study one or two in depth.
I one of the next posts I will discuss some characteristics of each method. This will help to decide which is the best to start.