The 7 Steps to Promoting Your RSS Feeds on Your Website
by Rok Hrastnik
Published on this site: May 6th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
RSS gets 100% of your content delivered, but it’s no good
if no one subscribes to your feeds.
So your first order of business after planning and creating your
feeds has to be promoting them to your visitors.
The only problem is that most internet users still don’t know
what RSS is, so you do have your work cut out for. But using the
system outlined below you shouldn’t have any problems. Actually,
after implementing this system, you should be achieving better results
than the majority of publishers out there.
- HOW RSS FEEDS ARE GENERALLY PROMOTED
RSS feeds are generally promoted using the orange XML or
RSS buttons, and often also with buttons that enable visitors
to subscribe directly to the feed with their RSS reader.
Usually, if clicking on the RSS button, the visitor only
sees a lot of confusing XML code. They in fact need to copy
& paste the link in to their RSS reader. But since most
still don’t know what RSS is, using this approach will
only waste potential subscribers.
To achieve success, you’ll need a different approach.
Create an RSS presentation page, on which you explain:
- What RSS is
- How the visitor will benefit from using RSS
- Where they can get a free RSS aggregator (recommend one
yourself!)
- How they can install it (provide step-by-step instructions)
- How they can subscribe to your RSS feeds
- Why they should subscribe to your own RSS feeds
Then, on this same page, include the links to all of your
RSS feeds.
In addition to the standard orange RSS button, also include
direct links for subscriptions via MyYahoo! get it here
http://my.yahoo.com/s/button.html
and other relevant services, such as Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com.
There are about 5 RSS readers you should cover with these
buttons.
Now promote this RSS presentation page as much as you can
using all of your available channels.
- LOCATION AND CONTENT
It’s all about location, just like with the subscription
box for your e-zine. If they don’t see it, they won’t
subscribe. And if you don’t motivate them enough to
check-it out, they’ll just ignore it.
A. Promote your RSS feeds directly below your e-zine
subscription box, and always “above the fold”.
Promote your RSS presentation page (telling your visitors
that’s where they can subscribe to your feeds) on the
most prominent locations of your site.
B. If you’re publishing more than one RSS feed,
but rather a couple of focused topic feeds, promote each
of them next to their topics. For instance, if you’re
publishing an RSS feed on E-mail Marketing, promote the
RSS feed at the top of the topic home page, and in every
E-mail Marketing article you publish. These links should
actually be direct subscriptions links to the feeds.
Use this service to cover all of the important readers using
just one simple button: http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/
C. Promote your RSS feeds in all of your e-mail messages
and e-zine issues.
D. As for the content, don’t just say “Subscribe
to receive news from my site”, but rather prepare compelling
copy to specifically show your visitors why they need to
subscribe to your content in the first place and why they
should subscribe specifically to your RSS feeds.
- ENABLE AUTO-DISCOVERY
Some internet browsers, such as Firefox, make it easy for
their users to subscribe to RSS feeds. The browser actually
asks the user if he wants to subscribe to the feeds the
browser finds on the site the user is currently on.
Yes, this is even more powerful than your e-mail subscription
form, since the browser in a way “pushes” the
user with your RSS feed subscription.
But in order for the browser to do this, you need to help
it out to find your RSS feed.
Just include the following piece of HTML code in the <head>
section of your webpages and you’ll be all set:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="RSS" href="ENTER_RSS_URL">
There are many more techniques and opportunities available
to you, from “direct subscribe” links to actually
using opt-in forms, but these 7 steps should get you started
in the shortest time possible, and help you achieve a better
visitor-to-RSS-subscriber conversion rate than the huge
majority of sites are achieving today.
Rok Hrastnik is the author of »Unleash the Marketing
& Publishing Power of RSS«, acclaimed as the best
and most comprehensive guide on marketing with RSS by top
RSS industry leaders, experts, developers and top marketers.
Find out all you need to know about RSS and how to use it
to get your content delivered, win back your customers, make
more sales and increase search engine rankings http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa6
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