How To Use An RSS Feed To Increase Site Traffic

It wasn't all that long ago you could say the term "RSS" and get blank stares from just about anyone. Okay, so there are still hoards of people who wouldn't know an RSS if it bit them in the face, but with the proliferation of blogs and other sites offering an RSS feed the term is becoming more and more common. But what's the point? Will an RSS feed really do anything to improve your web site traffic, or is it just a fancy feature nobody really cares about? This chapter will bring you up to speed about RSS and help you decide if it might be a good addition to your traffic building strategy.

Although it sounds as intimidating as any techno babble out there, RSS is just an acronym for "Really Simple Syndication". As the name implies, it is a method for syndicating the content of a web site. An RSS file is really just another version of your web page, written in a code meant to be read by a program called a "parser". You could write an RSS file by hand, just like you could write an HTML page, but since the purpose of an RSS file is to provide quick and up-to-date information from your site, most RSS files are built by a website's content management system.

So what are we supposed to do with an RSS file? Read it in an RSS reader, of course. The real beauty publishing an RSS file for your web site is in this; it allows your visitors to read your site in an RSS reader. Don't worry; it is often possible to include your Adsense ads in your RSS feed, so you don't have to give up that revenue source. But the true benefit is that some site visitors are more likely to regularly read your posts if they can read them in an RSS reader. Most of these people will read the feeds from several sites every day, and isn't that the kind of site visitor you want to cultivate?

But while you're at it, there are a few other useful things you can do with your RSS feed. First, you can offer blog updates by email if a person subscribes to your feed through a service like FeedBlitz  or FeedBurner . Second, you can send broadcast emails to your mailing list by attaching an RSS feed to your autoresponder. Using this method you can actually publish a newsletter based solely on your blog posts, scheduling a broadcast each time you have a certain number of new entries.

But above all, the key benefit of RSS feeds is convenience. If you make it easy for your site visitors to keep reading your content, and the content is good, you're more likely to keep them around. We all know it is cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one, and an RSS feed provides an easy way to keep those visitors reading your site.