How RSS will usher in a new era of quality content

Ever try to unsubscribe from an email newsletter?

It's not always the easiest thing to do.

First, you have to find the mechanism for unsubscribing (this may be a link or a form, which is not always easily found)
You may have to enter a password to complete the unsubscribe process
The unsubscribe process may not work due to technical difficulties
Unsubscribing from a newsletter doesn't guarantee the emails will stop

Let me quickly share a awful personal experience with you about unsubscribing from a newsletter I no longer wanted to receive because I was receiving 3 or 4 messages a day from them (way too much).

Amazingly, I was able to fairly easily find the unsubscribe form. After finding it, I took the steps to unsubscribe. My unsubscription was confirmed.

The next day, I checked my inbox, and there were 4 messages from them. The next, same thing.

So, I went back and unsubscribed again. The next day, 3-4 more messages from them.

I decided to contact support to share with them my unsubscribe challenge and my intense desire for them to take care of it manually if necessary. I never heard from them.

I wrote them again, really angry at this point, demanding that they address my concern. Once again, I never heard from them.

So, in a flash of brilliance, I decided to set up Outlook to automatically forward all the emails I received from them, right back to their customer support email address.

Within 24 hours, the madness was over, but talk about a major hassle.

If I wasn't such a stubborn guy, I probably would have let them win (allowed them to continue to send 3-4 messages to my inbox a day).

This whole 'way to much work' process of unsubscribing has created some fairly arrogant email publishers who regularly provide little value in their newsletters to you (they're nothing more than product pitch-fest's), because they know that most of us are lazy, and will just continue to glance at their content on occasion because we don't want to hassle with unsubscribing.

In the RSS era, the approach of providing more selling and less (or no) value will soon be the quick road to failure.

Why?

Because unsubscribing to RSS content is simply a matter of clicking an RSS feed's name, and pressing the Delete button! No hassles, technical difficulties, or problems!

If you don't provide quality value, peoples' interest in your newsletter/RSS feed will wane, and you'll be sent packing with the click of a button.

This can't happen too soon either, because I've really grown tired of newsletters that promise the world for subscribing, only to turn into nothing more than an email-based infomercial.

Yes, marketing within the newsletter is fine, but not when that's all you do, know what I mean?

Anyway, with the ease of unsubscribing to an RSS feed, there's a much greater accountability for producing something useful. Being a stickler for quality, I'm really happy about this.