In response to our last minute on making virtual friends, someone asked me to turn our marketing newsletters into an RSS feed. Huh? I had seen the RSS button on lots of websites, but was a bit hazy on the details. Nor was I so keen on the idea of adding yet more weight to the information overload all of us experience. Now that I’ve done the research and tried it out, I’m sold on the idea and ready to convert others. So brace yourself!
I’ve said it once in my newsletter…
Like many workaholics I get sooooooo much email that I respond mainly to the urgent ones. Contrary to Stephen Covey’s advice and my own desire, I tend to ignore the important things like news and personal emails. And yet, I write a newsletter using www.streamsend.com. More surprising – thousands of people subscribe and some even read it. And a handful of friends love me for the poor correspondent that I am.
…I say it again on my website…
We archive all our newsletters on nFold’s website www.nfold.com for posterity. Sometimes people interested in our impartial advice or niche software will browse the site and can catch up on all the fun over some coffee. Or journalists wanting to quote someone not so rich and not so famous but mad about software, will check out the results of our crystal-ball-gazing and cheeky comments about the state of the software world.
…and I say it again in a BLOG…
This BLOG business has taken the world by storm. Everyone and his dog can write whatever they want whenever they feel like it and share it with the world. The infrastructure is free, courtesy of www.blogger.com. But anyone interested in reading your thoughts will need to know your BLOG exists or find the proverbial needle in a haystack. And when you add another thought?
… now I can say it again on RSS…
I was gratified to discover, at the END of my RSS research – thanks Murphy! – that we already have an RSS feed. If you browse to our BLOG address http://softwareminute.blogspot.com your browser’s “Feed” button should magically light up. When you click it, it takes you to a specially formatted page http://softwareminute.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.
But it ain’t over until the fat lady sings. Now that you have the address of our feed, you need to add it to a feed reader like the one you can download for free from www.feedreader.com. It hovers in your computer’s task bar and pops up a window every time one of your “feeds” is updated with new content. Hey presto! News that you’re interested in reading arrives on your desktop.
…and the final word can be mine.
Our next step in the new technology adoption lifecycle is to follow in the footsteps of one of our software suppliers. Tom Sant is rated one of the world’s top 10 sales trainers and writes an award winning newsletter called “Messages that Matter”. No really! There IS an award for newsletters in the US where everything is bigger and better – as we all should know. He “podcasts” his messages so that you can listen to him have the last word on http://www.santcorp.com/best_practices/podcasts.htm. Now that’s what I call spreading the word!
