There is hidden power in using a blog for your business.

Many top internet marketers will tell you the secret to success is building an email list.

While that used to be true and may still be true now for people who have put together a large email list, I think it will be less and less true now. Spam is such a huge problem and many internet service providers are blocking emails. For my Send Out Cards marketing site I give to my team members to help them market their business I experienced a lot of problems trying to send emails to my team members. The system was setup to send them an email every time they get a lead. The problem was many internet service providers were viewing those emails as spam. My team members weren’t getting their leads!

One of the really cool things about Blogs is they incorporate RSS feeds. I’ve already written an RSS Tutorial with some cool links in it.

An RSS feed is basically just a list of headlines from your blog, with a link to your articles, and a short description of each article.

The cool thing about RSS is that people actually “subscribe” to your blog! They JOIN your blog by subscribing to it. Scroll down this web site a little bit and look at the right hand column. See those buttons that say My Yahoo, My MSN, Newsgator, etc? What that will do is add this web sites headlines to your My Yahoo or My MSN page. You can also subscribe to this site using Mozilla’s web browser or email programs like Thunderbird and Outlook. They’ll keep you updated on new blog entries and you’ll get the headlines automatically.

Now, whats really cool about this is, it is NOT blocked by internet service providers! Even if you have AOL they won’t block it! You can use any newsreader to read my blogs RSS headlines!

This is better than those old email lists because those are being blocked as spam by ISPs.

Because RSS is different, because you actually have to physicially subscribe to my rss feed, it is NOT blocked. It is what email lists used to be!

I say this is the hidden power of blogs! This is one reason why you need to create a blog, or at the very least use my RSS Tutorial to help you find some software that can generate RSS feeds from your traditional web sites.

I’ve even seen people (and I am in the process of doing this myself) who setup their email lists to simply send their blog headlines once a week just like an rss feed. They basically use their email list for the same purpose as an RSS, to send headlines. They recognize not everyone understands RSS or understands what a newsreader is. By converting your email list to use your RSS feed you can teach those that aren’t as technically savy about news feeds and rss.

I think one of my next articles will cover how to make an email list out of your rss feed. Would you guys like that?

Leave me a comment and let me know!

- Ben Fitts

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