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Gold is in your mailing list.
How many times have you heard this statement before? Undoubtedly, these words have been used so many times that they have become one of the verified clichés in Internet marketing.
Well, it has become a cliché because it's true. Much wealth can indeed be derived from your mailing list. With a mailing list, you won't have to lose visitors who do not decide to make a purchase on their first visit to your website. You'd be able to capture their contact details so that you could offer them new packages in the future. Many times, in fact, and this would give you a rich, perpetual pool of possible customers.
A follow-up system is generally executed by email marketing. With the contact details captured, all you have to do is to send email messages to your subscribers to warm them up for future sales. It goes without saying, though, that your subscribers should have opted to subscribe to your mailing list first. This would eliminate the danger of spam complaints which can lead to the loss of large groups of mailing list members. This is also the reason why a mailing list or a follow-up system is often called an opt-in list.
But this conventional method of utilizing your opt-in list has developed quite a number of disadvantageous consequences in recent years. Let's take a look at some of them.
1: Some people forget that they subscribed to your mailing service, hence, they would report your emails as spam complaints. This would compel the email hosting service to ban your mail server in their network. Imagine failing to send messages to people using Yahoo mail, or Gmail, or Hotmail.
2: Your messages are not guaranteed to reach the recipient's inbox. Spam filters are sometimes unforgiving. A single usage of a marketing-related word can place your email in the spam box.
3: Even if your recipient receives your email, there is no guarantee that he would get to read it. A lot of generic messages get neglected as Internet users, in general, have become used to receiving marketing messages from various commercial ventures.
4: Not all your subscribers would give out their real email address.
5: And those subscribers who would give real email addresses might use one which they seldom check. People, at the average, have more than one email accounts.
These concerns have prompted Internet marketers to look for alternative methods that would work the same way. Permissive marketing through emails is fraught with so many perils that a search for better options was necessitated.
Enter Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. RSS is slowly becoming the industry standard for message conveyance. It is predicted that by 2010, 87% of Internet users would be using RSS for their message delivery needs.
RSS is not that hard to understand. It's a technology that allows you to send and receive messages in real time. Messages will be delivered straight to the recipient's desktop, completely eliminating the danger of being filtered out as spam. The fact that RSS feeds would be delivered in real time only means that recipients would immediately be able to read the messages that will be sent.
For the Internet marketer who has been searching for a solution to the problems of email marketing, RSS has become a very lucrative option. RSS 2.0 technology, for example, has found various uses in the advertising game.
RSS 2.0 allows the RSS marketer to send highly compressed audio and video files, which will not alienate users with slower connections. Blogs or web logs, which have been potent weapons for online businessmen, have found new life with RSS. Blog entries can easily be generated as RSS feeds, further streamlining message delivery.
RSS is likewise easy to set up. All you would need is an RSS feed generator, which can be downloaded from the World Wide Web. Your recipients would need an RSS feed reader, but if they don't have one, they'll be prompted to download the program for free.
In an industry that is predominated by a race for the next big thing, it is important to stay ahead of the pack. With RSS, it is safe to say that the next big thing has arrived. So hop aboard the bandwagon and arm yourself with the tool that would help you conquer tomorrow.



About the Author
Sean Felker is the publisher of the very successful and popular Work at Home and Making Money on the Internet blog: Visit him here: http://making-money-online.blogspot.com