In the past year I have become an RSS advocate. I think every site should have an RSS feed if not a few to push new content out to customers or potential customers who are interested in them.

I have come to the conclusion that RSS will eventually replace some emails and will be a great way to limit the amount of email overload we are all experiencing. This is how I see it working with a few scenario’s…

Potential Customer
I am interested in a product but wish to buy it later. I want to keep up to date on what is new and any potential deals on that product. Instead of joining their newsletter getting overloaded with deals on the products I don’t want or visit the site daily I want to subscribe to a feed for just that product. If anything changes with the product or a deal comes up I will be notified in my RSS reader.

Current Customer
I have a financial planner who talks to me once a year but I am really interested in what is new. I know that my financial planner can not post public because of legal issues and I don’t really want another email in my inbox. What I want is a customer based RSS feed that pushes out specific information that I choose.

Company Information
If you work for a large company how many times does your CEO push out emails that get skimmed and then filed. Most of the time those emails are not effective. Imagine an RSS for each division or department where the CEO can push out specific content to the appropriate places.

These are just a few examples that I can see work among many others.

What do you think? Can you think of any other scenario’s?

Today we received our first sale from a person who randomly found us on Facebook. BlueFur has been on Facebook for less then a month now. This customer contacted me in regards to using WordPress even though they were not a customer yet. I tried my best to help them but it turns out their host was not able to fit their needs. They signed up with us and should have WordPress already installed now thanks to Fantastico.

If you own a business then I suggest you create a group similar to our BlueFur Fans group. Then push out an invite to your friends and customers. The viral nature of Facebook should work for you too. Another tip is to keep your group updated with new pictures, posts and news. This will bring your group above the fold and draw new people into your group.

If you are apprehensive about being on Facebook add yourself as your company instead of using your name. Joining Facebook could result in increased sales or traffic to your site so join up today.

The above cartoon by J.D. Frazer really depicts the life cycle of most blogs. People get really psyched up to get involved in the blogging community only to find out that they only had 2-3 posts to write. Then they post maybe once a week or worse yet they post once a month.

Thinking about that as a problem with new bloggers I have come up with a possible solution.

Imagine if you could find someone else with the same interests as yourself who had the same problem with posting once a day. You both would be running sites with little traffic and most likely both give up shortly. A person that was the yin to your blogging yang.

Now what if you were to both post on the same blog?

I know that you would have at minimum double the content and traffic you would have had if you were only blogging yourself. Although if you were to increase your posts to a daily post I assure you traffic will more then double.

I can see an eHarmony style site where bloggers are matched up and then discuss a partnership to blog together.

Do you see this working? If not why?

Today I noticed a registrar is selling a seal for $3 a year that shows your domain is certified. The seal you get is to the right (I have blurred out the registrar as I do not wish to advertise for them).

 The seal doesn’t do anything but tell you that you are on the domain you typed in or clicked to and the date and time. If you click on it those same details come up again on a separate site.

The registrar is touting this as being a way to instill trust in your site visitors.

I think this is a scam and a way for you to pay the registrar to advertise for them.

Can you think of any reason to have it? What do you think of this seal idea?

An interesting topic was posted over at the domain tools blog about how the post office could route mail based on a domain name. Right now if you were to send a letter addressed to the Prime Minister (without an address) then it would make it to our Prime Minister. If that is possible then one would think it would be possible to route mail if you were to put a domain as the address. It’s not possible today but with some technology it could work.

Imagine if you were to be given a first.lastname.mail domain and then anyone who wanted to send you a snail mail letter could address your mail with just your domain and it was delivered to you based on your whois.

If you moved it would not matter because you would only need to update your whois and the mail would then begin to route to your new location.

I can see something like this working. What do you think?

I have noticed more and more blogs starting to hold group writing projects. I first noticed this at Problogger and have started to notice it happen more and more on other sites.

One reason you may want to start a group writing project is most people link to that project as part of the post creating one way links to that post. Another reason is to help you grow your community and develop how people interact with your community. If you have a group of 50 or more regulars that visit your blog then I would suggest giving a group writing project a try.

If you are wondering why you should participate in a group writing project the main reason is you will gain some traffic back from the main site linking back to your own.

Have you run a group writing project on your own site? Do you think a group writing project work on this site?