Do you ever wonder if you re speaking a different language than your prospects? You may have recently launched a business, designed an innovative process or purchased state of the art equipment that leaves the competition in the dust, but no matter what you say or do, you aren’t attracting as many prospects as you need.

Lauren called me from Michigan with just such a concern. She and another friend had opened a fitness salon about a year ago. After a careful analysis of the local chain’s facilities, they had invested in next-generation equipment that provided many added features. Yet, a year after opening, and doing every marketing activity they could think of, they still weren’t attracting enough clients to pay the rent.

The problem wasn’t lack of effort. The problem was that prospects didn’t understand the benefits or higher value of Lauren’s fitness facility.

Remember the best selling book “Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus”? A key point of the book is that men and women see many things differently, and express themselves differently.

If you have children, you know that the same is true of parents and teenagers. What’s important to you is often unimportant to your seventeen-year-old, and vice-a versa. Sometimes you wonder if the two of you are speaking the same language. You’ve probably learned to get your child’s attention by talking about their needs and interests. These may include sports, movies and access to the family car.

Prospects and business owners have different perspectives as well. You may be focused on the costly and state-of-the-art equipment that enables your enterprise to function. Your prospects primary concern, on the other hand, is that you solve their problem or get the job done, and your equipment and processes are of secondary interest.

Lauren’s marketing focused to a high degree on the higher quality equipment her salon provided. She was talking hydraulics and variable resistance. This approach wasn’t pulling in new clients.

Due to shoulder surgery, my exercising has been recently relegated to a local fitness salon. My objective is to stay as fit possible so when my shoulder heals I ll be able to get back to the sports activities I enjoy.

Do I relish exercising on a recumbent bike or treadmill? Of course not. When I mentioned this to Lauren she replied, “Everyone hates the machines.”

People work out regularly because they want to achieve a particular goal. They want to get fit or lose those extra pounds. People go to a fitness center like Lauren’s because they want to look and feel better. If you own a fitness salon, don’t talk equipment, talk about what it does. Talk about calories burned, weight lost, muscle tone, strength, feeling healthy, improving at tennis or on the ski slope, looks and self-image.

If you want to attract more clients to your business, whether it’s a fitness salon or your accounting practice, make sure you’re speaking the same language as your prospects. Your concerns in getting the work done may be different than your prospects’ and clients’. They are concerned with the problem you solve for them.

Whether it’s in your ads, your marketing brochure, your web site or in your sales conversations, speak in your prospects’ language. Speak in terms of their concerns, problems and goals. When you communicate to prospects in terms of their priorities, you’ll get their attention and their business.

Email marketing once proved to be immensely effective, but the greedy and idiotic polluted the well by spamming the planet with everything from weight-loss products to sexual enhancement drugs and beyond. Because of the stench, filters and laws have been created to attempt to fix the problem, but still the Internet is polluted with more and more junk each day. So obviously, filters and legislation are not the solution, for consumers, publishers, or marketers.

Everyone has been left scratching their heads and asking… What do I do to avoid this crap and make the Internet mine again? How do I build my business and promote it without having to deal with email? After all, what’s the point in spending money on email advertising campaigns when there is no guarantee that the emails will even reach their destination?

Enter… RSS.
RSS is the perfect communication tool. It’s applications far outreach those of email for marketing, publishing and personal communications. RSS is the answer to our communication woes.

Using RSS to create blogs for communicating with customers, affiliates, partners and family is far and away more effective and reliable than email ever was. As a marketing tool, it really packs a punch that email never could. The reason being is that blogs are targets for search engine spiders. They are themselves, a web presence, whereas email never was and never will be.

Just like a web page, search engine spiders hit blog pages and rank them. The difference between the static web page and the RSS feed is that web pages seldom update their content, RSS feeds, by design, are created to be dynamic and provide regularly updated content, in theory, depending on the blog owner of course. This prompts the search engine spiders to revisit and rerank them more often.

For writers, publishers and and anyone else with something to say, RSS has been a godsend. It has provided the answer to the question of what to do now. Blogging has replaced email for those who have become frustrated with dealing with the problems of email publishing and marketing. Publishers can now get their message out to their subscribers without the headaches associated with sending email, or posting static pages to the web. Even publishing an ezine to the Internet as a web page required the sending of email to make readers aware of the newest issue.

As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and blog publishing is no exception. Now that RSS has become the rage for marketing purposes, several people have taken it upon themselves, in the name of the almighty dollar, to pollute this well too. The newest rash of ‘RSS tools’ have created some issues of ethics and and credibility. With perhaps the honest intention of being search engine optimization tools, or an automated system for fetching content, this batch of stuff has too much potential for misuse. The result of misuse of these types of programs can be devastating. Already some of these programs have been banned from places like Google and Blogharbour because of this potential.

Programs such as these in the hands of the inexperienced, will cause future problems for bloggers down the road. More and more pages generated using these programs will be banned, and getting banned, right out of the gate, for a newbie, would be a sad thing indeed.

The right way to use blogging to increase your search engine presence is to publish good content. Period. Provide useful information to those who are looking for it. Become someone’s trusted information provider, and you have a customer for life. Publish keyword rich articles that give the searcher what they are looking for… solutions for problems.

Publish your information regularly. Weekly is good, daily is better. Sending pings and things too often will get you blacklisted too.

And here is where networking comes in… Find content for your blog from article banks, where authors submit their work for reprint. List yourself in databases as one who accepts article submissions. Get to know other authors and publishers and share content with them. Syndicate your blogs in exchange with other bloggers. Watch your world explode with new opportunities.

Automation in business is a good thing, but it has its place. Nothing beats human communication when dealing with people and creating partnerships. Do you want to talk to an autoresponder? No, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Some of the new programs designed for the automation of article collection have legal issues to consider. The biggest being copyright infringement. Not every author wants their work reprinted, or they require control over where their work is displayed. (Which is as it should be.) Without manually seeking your content, you could very well find yourself being served papers for publishing someone else’s work without permission.

Plagiarism is another issue. If you don’t follow certain rules for reprinting contributory work, you stand to be hounded for plagiarism. Yet another sticky issue.

Some of the new programs mock safelists, or resemble FFA sites. Before long, those types of blog pages will become banned as well. Search engines will figure out a way to block non-informational blog pages, those that carry nothing but links or classifieds. (Is your head sore from hitting that brick wall yet?)

Still, there are other programs designed to post spam to blogs using the comments feature. This is referred to as comment spam. The only solution thus far, to battle comment spam, is to disallow your readers the option of leaving comments. This is a bad thing, because allowing your readers to interact with you is supposed to be one of the benefits of using this form of communication.

The makers of these programs may have had good intentions to start with, but have ultimately created Frankenstein’s Monster. Many are stating that their programs are not spam, because they do not involve email. That is a cop out if I ever heard one. Spam is the transmission of unwanted stuff, whether it is sent to your inbox, or your blog, or even the search engines themselves. Search engines want relevant content, not pages of of keywords, or links. So feeding them page after page of nonsense is spam.

Everyone hates spam, except the spammers, so why be a part of something loathed by so many and embraced by a few? Bad business if you ask me.

The only real way to combat these issues is to simply not use the programs themselves. Do your due diligence and create a reputation as a trusted information provider, not a blog bomber, and your business will prosper. Using these programs will ultimately diminish your reputation and your livelihood.

Your customers are looking for information, a solution to a problem. Give that to them, not just endless pages of links. You will achieve your rightful spot in the ranks, and you stand a far better chance for longevity. There are good RSS tools available, you just need to look beneath the sales copy to find them. And if you are new to RSS and blogging, do some research. Find someone who knows, really knows what RSS is and how to use it, and ask some questions. Don’t go out and spend buckets of money on something you’re not sure how to use, because you could be doing yourself more harm than good.

A few good books to read some solid information on RSS and blogs…
RSS, Blogs and Syndication
http://www.ads-on-q.com/RSS.html
Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS
http://hop.clickbank.net/hop.cgi?trii65/mrktstudy
RSS Advertising Secrets
http://www.ebookadvertising.biz/products/rssad/
Taming The eBeastie
http://www.feedyourhungrymind.com/Taming-the-eBeastie.html

Copyright 2005
The Trii-Zine Ezine
www.ezines1.com

About the Author

Trina L.C. Schiller is a professional network marketer, the publisher of the Internet marketing ezine, “Trii-Zine” and President of http://www.AdsOnQ.com.
She has also authored these ebooks:
“Your Beginner’s Guide To Syndication” http://www.ads-on-q.com/booksales.html
RSS, Blogs and Syndication… The Facts vs The guruese” http://www.ads-on-q.com/RSS.html