Search Engine Journal

Commercially altering holidays is a very old school marketing tactic which has been implemented by the greeting card, flowers, beer and department store industries for years.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a creation of the Montgomery Wards department store and the modern Santa Claus character was put through a makeover by Macy’s in the early 1900’s. Guinness even went the route of launching a public relations and advertising campaign this year to make St. Patty’s an official American holiday. This would never happen of course, but the brand association of the American restructured holiday of St. Patty’s Day has now changed from other beers to Guinness.

Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips has gone to the next level, actually creating a holiday to spread awareness of RSS syndication : RSS Awareness Day!

The goal of RSS Awareness Day is to get many bloggers and publishers to talk about RSS and its benefits on May 1st.

Bloggers and blog readers are pretty of the RSS format, but if enough bloggers talk about RSS, perhaps the mainstream media will cover it as well, and the general public will get more exposed to it.

“If people start reading about RSS and how it can help them everywhere, I am sure that some will get curious at least to try it out,” writes Scocco. “Over the time the usage of the format should pick up, and all the Internet users (including content publishers) gain from it.”

How can readers spread the word?

• Blog about it: on May 1st write a post or article on your website about RSS. You can just mention that it is the RSS Awareness Day and link to some RSS resources, or you can explain what RSS is and teach your readers how they can make the most out of RSS. You can even write a poem about RSS, there are no limitations here.
• Use a badge or banner: Daily Blog Tips will be hiring a company (if you wanna help with the badges let us know) to produce several badges and banners that you can use on your site. You can use them throughout April or just on May 1st.

See that? Daniel has not only invented a holiday, but is motivating his readership and ALL BLOGGERS to write about the holiday, link back to his site (from bloggers who love to link), and use a badge commemorating RSS Awareness Day.

This is smart link building and should attract not only links but also RSS subscribers to Daniel’s Daily Blog Tips. Furthermore, since RSS Awareness Day will happen every year, the end result will be a resurgence in links and coverage of the holiday, all attributing Daniel as the founder.

PS . Daniel’s Looking for Sponsors as he is incentiving coverage of the holiday. Now’s a good time to get in :)