I put this one last because I know I’m going to get the biggest fight about it. RSS readership is measurable, though perhaps not in the ways you might think.

When you send out an email, there are many ways to determine whether it gets read. Some methods show respect for the recipient’s privacy and civil liberties, others less so. In any case, marketers have loved email because they see it as more measurable.

For this reason, RSS is often unfairly rejected. Since people are hitting a feed’s URL several times a day, marketers will ask whether they’ll be able to track individual users and so on.

Here are two ways to put measurability back into the process. First, use advanced RSS tools. I started using Feedburner when I was experimenting with podcasts, but later grew to value it for its statistical capabilities. While it doesn’t necessarily give me name-level granularity, it's useful for getting the big picture on who is reading what.

Second, you as a marketer should consider segmenting your feeds. For example, if you were the online marketing manager for Acme Widgets Inc., you could offer a master feed that rolled up all of the content, and then other feeds for more specific interests (development, support, business news, et cetera). Over time, it will be easy to see what kinds of news get the most attention.

Next: Conclusion