RSS Feed
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 6: RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which doesn't immediately tell you any more than the acronym.
Basically, RSS is like a streamlined channel--called a feed--for website updates. RSS produces a stream of the latest content of your website, which is often posts from a blog, but could be news or other updating content. With zillions of websites and blogs out there for people to read, an RSS feed evolved as an excellent way to make it easier to quickly and easily consume this deluge of information. With RSS, a person can use an RSS fead reader or "aggregator" tool to consolidate a bunch of RSS feeds. This way, that person can quickly scan the titles from your recent blog entries or articles along with other feeds of interest.
RSS has a variety of other potential application which I won't go into. For website traffic purposes, RSS is a valuable technology for several reasons. This was part of my motivation for introducing a blog into the mix on Day 5, because a blog provides an easy, standard way to introduce a feed to a website. The advantages of RSS include:
1. RSS works like a subscription. If someone is interested in what they see on your site, they can "subscribe" to your RSS feeds. A subscription is a good thing. Just like a magazine subscription, if someones subscribes to your feed, that means they will potentially be coming back and reading your stuff regularly. Even if they don't always bring readers to your page, RSS creates regular readership which translates into traffic. Even though your feed might appear in a feed reader/aggregator (away from your site), the reader must often click through to your site to read more than the summary provided in the aggregator.
2. A reader is more likely to come back to a feed than a bookmark. It is quite common to come across a website you like and bookmark it, only to forget to go back to it later. If your feed is sitting in a reader's aggregator list, even if they are browsing other feeds, your feed will also be right there in front of them thereby increasing the odds that they will browse your content at some point.
3. RSS provides an easy way to get links to your site, and more links to your site means better chances for traffic. There are various feed directories to which you can submit your site--without the hassle of exchanging or begging for a link on someone else's website. Here are links to some directories:
feedburner
syndic8
feedboy
If you have a blog, here are some specific directories for that:
mybloglog
bloglines
blogcatalog
bloghub
Rather than typing any more out for you, here is a nice page at BloggingTips which lists 75 blog directories.
4. RSS feeds are very standard, and surfers are "trained" to look for the RSS button on your page. By making it as easy as possible to sign up for your content, you are more likely to get busy, impulse-driven readers to subscribe. If they have to fill out a form or give their email address, they might think twice and just move on. With Bloglines--the feed aggregator I use--I can easily capture an RSS feed I might like with little effort. Then I can figure out later if I want to keep reading that feed. Ultimately, good, interesting and relevant content is what keeps a reader's attention (and traffic). RSS helps get them in the door (or rather "window" :) ).
5. A feed forces you to have regular content. Regular, or at least semiregular content is needed to keep traffic to your site. If you have a blog it is a must, but it's just as important to websites with other kinds of content. If you use a blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress, they will have an easy way of automatically creating a feed from your blog posts. If your blog platform doesn't provide an RSS mechanism, switch to another blog platform. Seriously. If you have a website with different content, you can still have a feed, but it might take a bit of programming or scripting. If you are using a Content Management platform such as Nuke, Joomla, Drupal, Django, Ruby on Rails or one of the many others, there is probably a plugin to help you do this or help in a forum on how to do it.
I happen to use the python-based platform Django for my blog and picobuzz.com site. I found a lot of excellent blog posts on how to set up things like an RSS feed for a blog. If you are not a programmer, I would recommend trying Wordpress. It will help keep the programming or scripting to a minimum, and PHP is probably easier to get started with.
For picobuzz, which is not a blog, I have decided that I will create a feed which periodically reports on the latest buzz. It wasn't too hard to come up with that idea for a non-blog feed, and you can probably easily do the same. There are other possibilities for feed content:
- the latest news (applicable to almost any website)
- deals or specials (e-commerce sites)
- photo feed
Once you actually have a feed, you should place a link on your pages using a nice RSS icon, for example from this RSS button page. It is becoming fairly standard to use the orange button with the little signal arcs:
That's all for this post. I am going to go "feed" myself lunch (ooh--lame joke).
