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If there’s one thing wrong with Google+ it’s a lack of a real non-browser interface. There are workarounds and widgets, but there’s never been a real way to pull your G+ feed into a more comfortable format. While many would complain that RSS isn’t even close to a comfortable format, it’s bettern’ nuffin’.

That said, a new free service called GPlusRSS allows you to create a public RSS feed of your G+ account. You can potentially share this feed with others (here’s mine) or you can keep it for yourself. The feed consists only of public pronouncements so private messages won’t show up.

The service is also useful for propagating your G+ info to other services using systems like dlvr.it or something like WPRSSPoster to bring your G+ content to WordPress.

It may not be much but it’s definitely a way to get your goods out of Google’s walled G+ garden. Maybe (just maybe?) I’ll start using G+ a bit more because of this?

I promise, for at least 18 months, to not bring this topic up again. But I do feel the need to report to all you RSS lovin’ freaks out there that the combined interactions on my two posts – 680 and still counting –  have exceeded the reach of my RSS feed (which clocked in at a miserable 664 the day I posted the first missive).

And as I said in my original post:

If I get more comments and tweets on this post than I have “reach” by Google Feedburner status, well, that’s enough for me to pronounce RSS Alive and Well (by my own metric of nodding along, of course). If it’s less than 664, I’m sorry, RSS is Well And Truly Dead. And it’s all your fault.

For those of you who don’t know what on earth I’m talking about, but care enough to click, here are the two posts:

Once Again, RSS Is Dead. But ONLY YOU Can Save It!

RSS Update: Not Dead, But On The Watch List

OK, now move along. Nothing to see here. No web standards have died. Happy Happy! Joy Joy!

About 14 months ago, I responded to myriad “RSS is Dead” stories by asking you, my RSS readers, if you were really reading. At that point, Google’s Feedburner service was telling me I had more than 200,000 subscribers, but it didn’t feel like the lights were on – I mean, that’s a lot of people, but my pageviews were low, and with RSS, it’s really hard to know if folks are reading you, because the engagement happens on the reader, not here on the site. (That’s always been the problem publishers have had with RSS – it’s impossible to monetize. I mean, think about it. Dick Costolo went to Twitter after he sold Feedburner to Google. Twitter! And this was *before* it had a business model. Apparently that was far easier to monetize than RSS).

Now, I made the decision long ago to let my “full feed” go into RSS, and hence, I don’t get to sell high-value ads to those of you who are RSS readers. (I figure the tradeoff is worth it – my main goal is to get you hooked on my addiction to parentheses, among other things.)

Anyway, to test my theory that my RSS feed was Potemkin in nature, I wrote a December, 2010 post asking RSS readers to click through and post a comment if they were, in fact, reading me via RSS. Overwhelmingly they responded “YES!” That post still ranks in the top ten of any post, ever, in terms of number of comments plus tweets – nearly 200.

Now, put another way this result was kind of pathetic – less than one in 1000 of my subscribers answered the call. Perhaps I should have concluded that you guys are either really lazy, secretly hate me, or in fact, really aren’t reading. Instead, I decided to conclude that for every one of you that took the time to comment or Tweet, hundreds of you were nodding along in agreement. See how writers convince themselves of their value?

Which is a long way to say, it’s time for our nearly-yearly checkup. And this time, I’m going to give you more data to work with, and a fresh challenge. (Or a pathetic entreaty, depending on your point of view.)

Ok, so here’s what has happened in 14 months: My RSS feed has almost doubled – it now sports nearly 400,000 subscribers, which is g*dd*am impressive, no? I mean, who has FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND people who’ve raised their hands and asked to join your club? I’ve WON, no? Time for gold-plated teeth or somesh*t, right?

Well, no.

While it’s true that nearly 400,000 of you have elected to follow my RSS feed, the grim truth is more aptly told by what Google’s Feedburner service calls my “Reach.” By their definition, reach means “the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.”

And that number, as you can see, is pathetic. I mean, “click,” I can understand. Why click when you can read the full article in your reader? But “view”?! Wait, lemme do some math here….OK, one in 594 of you RSS readers are even reading my stuff. That’s better than the one in 1000 who answered the call last time, but wow, it’s way worse than I thought. Just *reading* doesn’t require you click through, or tweet something, or leave a comment.

Either RSS is pretty moribund, or, I must say, I am deeply offended.

What I really want to know is this: Am I normal? Is it normal for sites like mine to have .0017 percent of its RSS readers actually, well, be readers?

Or is the latest in a very long series of posts (a decade now, trust me) really right this time  - RSS is well and truly dead?

Here’s my test for you. If I get more comments and tweets on this post than I have “reach” by Google Feedburner status, well, that’s enough for me to pronounce RSS Alive and Well (by my own metric of nodding along, of course). If it’s less than 664, I’m sorry, RSS is Well And Truly Dead. And it’s all your fault.

(PS, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop using it. Ever. Insert Old Man Joke Here.)

This guest post is by Gab Goldenberg, of The Beginner’s Guide To Usability Testing.

Want to find out how to boost RSS subscriber conversion? I did, but I hardly found any information about it online!

Besides having an obvious call to action above the fold and getting to [social news site]‘s front page, the blogosphere doesn’t much discuss how to convert more readers to subscribers.

I’d been meaning to test my RSS subscription page for a while, and finally got around to it. Here’s what the old page looked like:

The newsletter top

The newsletter bottom

The RSS subscription page was way too busy!

Notice the loads of links on the page? There’s the sidebar navigation, the breadcrumbs, the main navigation…

Additionally, the benefits copy is above the calls to action, which pushes them below the fold.

The conversion rate theory and the execution

My hypothesis was that by eliminating the distractions I would increase conversions. In other words, I’d eliminate the links on the page and move the benefits below the calls-to-action.

The reasoning for moving the benefits copy was that if someone clicked to view the subscriptions page, they were probably already pretty convinced and should be shown the conversion form and button immediately.

People who were still hesitant once they got to the page would be able to scroll down and read the benefits copy. That’s also why I moved the reassurance text (“You can unsubscribe with a single click, anytime”) below the form.

Finally, I did one more thing, which wasn’t originally in the plan, but which my limited HTML/CSS/Photoshop skills forced: I added testimonials into the left-hand sidebar. I’d initially planned to get rid of the sidebar, but that broke the page’s alignment and looked bad.

(Since my site is powered by WordPress, I used this Google Website Optimizer-Wordpress workaround to be able to use GWO. That’s because I never had a successful experience using GWO with WordPress, partly because GWO isn’t designed for sites that use a content management system, because I have a custom theme, and because many of the plugins are bad quality.)

Here’s what the page looked like after I edited it:

The new signup page

And here are the results:

That’s right, the variation outperformed the original by 56.3%—I added nine points of conversion to my overall conversion rate!

Methodology

I want to mention how conversions were measured. The limits of Google Website Optimizer (GWO) forced me to only measure one goal, so I chose the email subscription instead of a click on the orange button.

What that means is that I don’t know the difference these changes made on conversions for people clicking on the RSS button. Or should I say, this test didn’t reveal the difference these changes made…

Initially, my goal was to measure results comprehensively. After a fair bit of struggling, I followed the instructions on GWO’s help site and altered their code and mine so that both email subscriptions and RSS button clicks would be counted.

I launched the test and was happy until I discovered that something was causing the pages to load very slowly. I’m talking about 30 seconds for a page with the main functionality and 60+ seconds for full load.

Despite that, it seems some people did wait (or didn’t have this problem?) and early results of the test looked like this:

Notice the 11/11 conversion rate for the variation? That’s right, a 100% conversion rate for the variation! And why not? If visitors clicked my sidebar link to go to the subscriptions page (i.e. this was highly motivated traffic), and they saw a simple page without distractions, and with a very easy conversion process, doesn’t it make sense that they’d then convert?

Sure, it’s probably just a lucky streak and with more traffic we would have likely seen the conversion rate drop to 90% or such, but the point is that the no-distractions page still kicks butt—and takes names.

Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t solve the load time problem, though. So I started a new test, only measuring a single goal: email subs. And that’s where the data above comes from.

Another very interesting finding is that, contrary to the common situation of email subs being more numerous than RSS subs, it seems my techie audience prefers RSS. If about 30% are converting by email, and the no-distractions page gets say 90-100% conversion rate, then potentially 60-70% of my visitors prefer RSS subscriptions.

Of course, I’ll need to test some more to find out!

Want to help other bloggers and email marketers increase RSS conversions? Share your own experiences with RSS conversions below!

This guest post is by Gab Goldenberg, author of the advanced SEO book and The Beginner’s Guide To Usability Testing.
If you liked this post, get Gab’s posts by email or RSS -free- plus enjoy the subscriber only downloads!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I Bumped My RSS Conversion Rate from 16% To 25%

Now that the season has changed to fall, most thoughts turn to leaves changing color and falling off of their trees. However, thanks to the UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) vehicle and its return to Earth, for the next little …

This guest post is by Aman Basanti of Ageofmarketing.com.

When it comes to turning casual visitors into regular readers there are two main options—FeedBurner and Aweber.

FeedBurner uses Feed-based technology (RSS and Atom) to send updates to your blog subscribers. Owned by Google (Google bought it in 2007 for $100 million), FeedBurner is one of the biggest feed syndicators on the Internet.

It works like this: a site visitor subscribes to your feed and every time you add a new post, a message is sent to them alerting them of the addition. The subscriber needs special software (a feed reader) to access the feed.

For more information on feeds, see Darren’s post, What is RSS?

Aweber is email-based technology that allows you to send automated email messages to your subscribers. It works similarly to a feed but does not require special feed-reading software, only an email address to subscribe to a blog.

Aweber is the most popular autoresponder software system on the Internet. Other popular brands include Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and GetResponse.

Advantages of FeedBurner

• FeedBurner is free, Aweber costs money: The key advantage of using FeedBurner instead of Aweber (or other auto-responders) on your blog is that FeedBurner does not cost anything. Aweber, on the other hand, can cost $20-$100 a month depending on the number of subscribers you have.
• FeedBurner take less effort: Most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad etc.) publish feeds automatically. There is nothing more to do on top of publishing a post. With auto-responders, however, you have to manually setup the messages and sequence them (but you can now set up a blog broadcast in Aweber, which creates an automatic email newsletter).
• FeedBurner supports both feed readers and email subscribers: The key advantage of auto-responders like Aweber used to be that you did not need special software to subscribe, only an email address. As millions of people still do not have feed readers or prefer email, this meant that you still needed an aut-responder to capture those readers. But FeedBurner changed all that by allowing people to subscribe to a feed using an email address. This means that while an autoresponder only supports email, FeedBurner supports both feed readers and email.

Given that FeedBurner is free, easy to set up, effortless to use, and supports both feed readers and email, why would you want to pay for an auto responder?

The fatal flaw in feeds

The key thing that you cannot do with a feed is sequence messages: you cannot create a series of messages to be sent to your subscribers. This means that your subscribers only get alerts for posts that are added after they subscribe.

For example, say you post four articles over four weeks, and a visitor subscribes to your blog after week three. This means they will only get alerted about the fourth post, and will not receive posts one to three, as shown in the image below.

In FeedBurner, you cannot send alerts for older posts

Now, if you post time-sensitive information (news or latest developments) on your blog, this doesn’t matter. But if you publish evergreen content, or you want to take your blog readers through a specific set of messages, the ability to sequence is crucial.

Autoresponders allow you to do just that. You can create a sequence of messages, set how long the wait is between each message, and the autoresponder will execute that for you for each subscriber, regardless of when they join, as shown below.

Aweber allows you to create a sequence of messages

Then there are the other benefits of auto-responders like Aweber—customization of look and feel of emails, personalization (“Hi John”), controlling the wait period between messages, solid delivery rates, split-test multiple lead capture forms, and so on.

The audience factor

A third factor in deciding which system to use is your audience. If you have tech-phobic audience, then an email-based system like Aweber is likely better for you.

For tech-savvy audiences, on the other hand, FeedBurner may be better. Technically inclined people are more likely to use and prefer to get their blog updates through feeds. Feeds also have the added benefit of allowing another blogger to include your feed on their blog, creating free exposure and traffic for your blog.

The best way to find out what your audience wants is to have both options on your site for a month and see what your readers prefer. You may even find that it is useful to have both.

The bottom line

If you have a small budget, publish time-sensitive information, and/or cater to a tech-savvy audience, FeedBurner will be sufficient for your blog.

If, on the other hand, you want to take your subscribers through a sequence of messages and control the wait periods between the messages, then Aweber is better suited to your blog.

What are you using: Aweber, FeedBurner … or something else? Tell us how you do it in the comments.

Aman Basanti writes about the psychology of buying and teaches you how you can use the principles of consumer psychology to boost your sales. Visit www.Ageofmarketing.com/free-ebook to get his new ebook—Marketing to the Pre-Historic Mind: How the Hot New Science of Behavioural Economics Can Help You Boost Your Sales—for FREE.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

FeedBurner vs. Aweber: Do You Really Need an Autoresponder for Your Blog?

Here’s why I’m glad I was wrong about RSS being dead. The latest evidence of that comes from Jesse Stay who reported a week or so ago that both Facebook and Twitter had discontinued RSS streams or something like that. I really didn’t bother to read up on the details since it’s now years since I gave up on the stuff. These days I obsess about Lady GaGa and whether Brian Wilson’s version of Good Vibrations is better than the one with Mike Love and when Ustream is finally going to stream live to the iPad and why some apps only stream audio over AirPlay and turn the AirPlay icon blue instead of white.

And then Jesse Stay apparently convinced his friends at Facebook to reconsider and reinstate RSS. In so doing, Facebook instantly removed any further conversation about RSS. This includes no further references to the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch, the Franco is still dead SNL running gag, various tech dead memes (Office, Notes, Windows, links, FriendFeed, Sun, FlipCam, PointCast, the ASP model, laptops, podcasting, TV, email), and all synonyms, most importantly Toast.

Also, cough, dead are the arguments about whether things are dead: how can something that isn’t or wasn’t ever alive be dead, how can ______ be dead when there are 35 billion copies out there, you’re a moron, and the time honored [Blocked]. That last one as in, I haven’t been following that since Dave blocked me a few years ago. You see, Dave not only invented RSS — he invented all the arguments about it. Shutting down comments — Dave. Opening up comments and then blocking those who disagree — Dave.

But luckily Dave also created a fantastic way of identifying viral social media startups. It’s a variation on the rationale for following someone you disagree vehemently with as a good indicator of how to do the opposite. With Dave, that signal is the classification of a company as proprietary. I’d argue with the impossibility of finding a company that by definition wasn’t proprietary; if not, then what is it, an idea, a random assemblage, a line for the bathroom at a sporting event?

But arguing that is no longer possible given the Death of Dead memes and their corollary arguments. Nonetheless, if Dave argues that Twitter or Facebook or Google or Apple or (used to be) Microsoft is locking us in the trunk of corporate control and forcing us to rent our data back, there is a remarkable correlation with stock price, acquisition likelihood, Hollywood movie interest, and general hockey stick velocity up and to the right. Another powerful indicator is failed attempts by Dave to build on said platform followed by disillusionment.

But why have I suddenly several paragraphs ago declared I was wrong about RSS being dead? Am I just looking for a cheap laugh at Dave’s expense? Certainly not, because having noticed the decline has caused me no end of grief, not the least of which is incurring the permanent wrath of someone I’ve admired and appreciated for all of the incredible things he’s contributed to making our lives better. These things, once broken are pretty much impossible to repair.

But since I have no hope of changing Dave’s mind, or the minds of the 50 percent who disagree with the notion that Twitter and URL shortening have pushed RSS back in the stack, why quit now? Simple. I’ve come to the conclusion that saying RSS is dead is dead. If saying something so obvious can be so divisive, then it’s time to move on. Besides it means M.G. Siegler has one less instant post to pull out of his hat on a monthly basis.

What will a world look like without RSS being dead? No more innovation crushing. We’ll see RSS Track in short order, river of news auto-filtering harvesting the RSS social graph, RSS open location services, RSSflix, the RSStore. RSSmail. The RSS Push Notification Open Server. RSSmic and RSSDeck will merge and acquire UbeRSS. bit.ly will be renamed simp.ly.

Other benefits are less obvious. With no Facebook/Google war for social, PR agencies will have no clients asking them to do sleazy Nixonian dirty tricks. No Suggested Friends Lists means no conflicts of interest. Media content will immediately glisten in the glow of transparency and lack of ethical conflicts. Lawyers will bid for work on Groupon. President Sheen will win on a platform of Let’s Just See What Happens. Lady Gaga will headline RSSrupt with her latest hit Reborn This Way.

I know you’re sick of this RSS is dead thing too, but at the time I first wrote about it, the world was in need of a disruptive meme. Now, with FaceTime erasing the miles between family, friends, and getting work done, with media churning into a new reality we don’t quite understand, with being social not just an adventure but a job, it’s time to let the old go and the new in. So I won’t be talking about RSS being dead anymore. I was wrong. It has never been more alive, if it were possible for ideas to be alive and bits to be viral. As Paul Simon sings, So Beautiful and So What.

Late yesterday evening, the Google Places blog announced an update to their location-based service that aims to give you “better access to your content.”

The first tweak is the ability to get your Google Place reviews and ratings as an Atom feed. Just go to your Places profile (click on your pic at the top left) and on the left you will see the option to “get your reviews as a feed.”

Not only does Google now want you to have access to your Google Places data as a feed, but it is also now allowing you to import your Foursquare check-in data into Google Places for rating and reviewing purposes. From the Places blog:

In addition to taking your Google Places ratings and reviews with you, we also thought it’d be useful if you could more easily rate and review on Google the places you’ve found elsewhere in your travels or on the web.

To do that, just find the URL of a public GeoRSS/Atom feed that contains place information you care about. This could be anything from a feed of your Foursquare check-ins to a My Map you may have created years ago. Paste the URL into the search box on Google Places. We’ll show you place cards that line up, as best as we’re able to determine, with the places in the public geo feed. Then, you can rate to your heart’s content.

The only problem with this, obviously, is that I have to do all this just to import a few Foursquare places. Let me explain.

The process is easy enough. All you have to do is sign into the Foursquare website and then go to foursquare.com/feeds. Once there, copy the rss feed link. Then head on over to places.google.com/rate and paste the link into the search box in Google Places.

When I tried this, Google Places did indeed import my Foursquare data – but only 4 check-ins. I’m not the only one to get these results as MC Siegler over at Tech Crunch had the same issue:

Trying it out, the results seem to sync up well. But I can’t get it to go beyond my ten most recent Foursquare check-ins. So much for my entire Foursquare history.

So the copy and pasting really isn’t worth it just to load a few check-ins from your history. But the ability to import location data from other sources into Google Places is a good idea is theory – if it works out this obvious problem.

Ever wondered how webmasters create feed mashups? If you don’t know what I mean by ‘feed mashup’, take a look the homepage of this blog where it says “Ros’ Other Blog Posts“. You’ll see another example on my personal blog under “Recent on Ros’ Other Blogs“. What you’ll notice is that the most recent posts [...]

While I personally am a big fan of RSS, I stand by my position that RSS is not being adopted by the mainstream population (see the big fat RSS lie) and is therefore a dying technology.

There have been numerous articles about RSS being dead or not. Feel free to engage in the debate if you want. I’m looking at two things: 1. search volume for the term RSS

RSS Search Volume

and 2. where that RSS search volume is concentrated in big, technology-centric metros.

RSS Search Concentration

If your audience is a bunch of  web 2.0 techno weenies who think that getting on the front page of Techmeme is important, then keep following your RSS dream. If that isn’t your audience, then it’s time to start looking at alternatives. Click here to read more.. »