We're proving that moving from email delivery to RSS delivery for newsletters can actually increase traffic to a publisher's website. John Botscharow, the publisher of the 3R-Marketing newsletter, told us that since converting to Quikonnex's system of publishing that he's almost quadrupled the number of visitors to his website over the last month. A. Scott Piraino, the writer of ThePopulist column, started publishing on a Xanga.com blogging site in July 2003. He started publishing his articles on Quikonnex.com about a week ago and has significantly increased his readership. The main reasons for this is that Quikonnex.com provides an automatically generated RSS feed and when articles are posted to Quikonnex.com the publisher has the option of automatically pinging Weblogs.com, something the Xanga.com site did not provide him.

Additionally, subscribers have to come first in the process. Quikonnex.com addresses the issue of subscriber conversion. Numerous blogging websites and websites that provide XML/RSS feeds assume things about their subscribers that kills their readership. Weblog sites typically expect their readers to come back day after day and check for new additions or updates... WRONG! Then they hide their XML/RSS feeds (if they even have one), do not promote XML/RSS, and for the most part the authors drone on about what they ate for breakfast and how much they hate their mothers for making them dress decently. Of course, this is a common perception about weblogs and a detractor against getting business to adopt the technology. However, many very good writers have implemented blogging software on their sites and are having some success with it. The good ones are even putting up little XML, Userland, and Radio logos on their site to indicate that they have an RSS feed. They are, however, failing to tell their readers what the hell these little icons mean!

A major consideration that we made with the Quikonnex.com website is subscribers do not know what XML/RSS is and need to be educated on the benefits of receiving information via a news aggregator versus through their email program. The majority of websites that I've looked at over the last few months, that have the XML/RSS links on them, do not. Some will tell their subscribers to go out and get an aggregator. That's great, but first don't you think you should tell your subscribers what "aggregator" means! It's not that the potential subscriber don't have the intelligence, it's just they're being overwhelmed by technology. Our philosophy is that you take them by the hand and guide them through the process. We even tell them what program to download, give them a direct link to it, and tell them which buttons to click to gain access to our publisher's RSS feeds. Our recommendation to our readers is Awasu. We're not the creators of this program, but our research has shown it to be excellent. It's a small download (no requirement to download the 20MB .Net framework) and provides a visually appealing view of the publisher's work. They may, after they been enjoying their freedom from email, decide later to search out a different program (I doubt they'll find much better). The choices available to subscribers (check out this article -  Wildgrape, Reptile, Tinderbox, The Furrygoat Experience -- WHAT???) makes it necessary to eliminate this from the decision process. The only decision a subscriber should need to make is "Do I want this information or not?"

It is just flat out wrong for any publisher to make the assumption that there's any degree of market penetration by news aggregators. Until news readers become as ubiquitous as email programs, website advocating the use of XML/RSS will need to hold the hands of their subscribers. We take our publisher's subscribers through a simple 3 step process. Of course, if the potential subscriber is XML/RSS savvy then they have the option to take a shortcut and immediately subscribe to our publisher's channel. Website's utilizing this technology need to take the same approach.