If your computer is anything like mine your bookmarks (favourites) list will be at least as long as your screen, crammed full of interesting (and not so interesting) links you visited way back when. Take a minute to look at a few of them, and re-visit some of these sites.

I did this exercise the other day and found 3 or 4 sites that had so much new content, yet there was no way of me knowing about it without going back to see.

How often would people re-visit your site just to see if there is new content?

There lies the crux of the matter. You can update your content as often as you like, but nobody will see it unless they come back to see.

There are two tools you have to assist you, both very different from each other.

1) The mailing list

This is a difficult one to manage. You get people to add their email address to your list in order to receive updates from you. The problem being how often is it acceptable to “update” the user, vevery post, every week, every month?

People also have a mistrust of this mechanism in terms, worried about ther email address ending up on a spam list.

2) The RSS feed

This is a better option, although requires the user to be a bit more “techno-savvy”.

Basically they use a client like Outlook or Thunderbird to subscribe to your content. They will then receive an update in their mailbox when you update your site.

This works well as it is less intrusive and they can choose to read the update as and when they like. They can even download the last few weeks and read about it on the airplane when they are flying to a meeting.

The only probem with RSS is an awful lot of people still don’t know about it, understand it, or use it. I have half a dozen RSS feeds in my Outlook and would not be without it now.

The good news

The good news is every ThinkSynergy site as of 2008 has RSS built in and is ready to go straight away. If you would like to see how RSS works just click the Orange icon on the right column and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Stumble it!