RSS Website Marketing Resources
2. RSS Promotion - RSS Marketing
OK so now you have your RSS feed ready, all you need to do now is to begin promoting it. Simple. Well, not entirely.
Creating your RSS feed was the easy part, but it is in effect no different from any other page you create for your website - it's no good if you don't start to promote it effectively.
We will look at submitting your feed to RSS directories in later tutorials - this tutorial will look what more you can do with the feed.
What are you putting in your RSS feed?
The content you add to your feed directly impacts how you will go about promoting it. Is it something one of your regular users is likely to use on a regular basis? Ie, is it a news feed item that you will be updating regularly?
If this is the case then you should look at promoting the use of popular RSS readers and aggregators. You won't be targeting other website owners looking to add content to their site (although you may pique the interest of them as well) - you are targeting individuals, and as such you should carefully think about the content you add to the feed and the best way to go about it.
For example, if your website is very broad, you may want to consider creating multiple feeds for each niche area, rather than (or as well as) a single general or main feed. This will allow users to pick and choose the type of content they will be reading.
The BBC for example offer various news feeds based on their different areas of coverage (sport, technology, science) - personally, I only ever use the technology one because that's the one that interests me the most. If the BBC only offered a single feed they would come across several issues when trying to promote it:
- It is too generic, and as such they will lose a lot of niche interest.
- The news items on the RSS feed will update a lot faster than the rate at which people will read them.
Keeping this in mind, it is important for you to consider who will be using the feed, how often they will be reading it and could they potentially benefit from a more select, niche feed rather than a broad one?
Internally promoting your RSS feed
One of the first things you can do is let your visitors know that the feed is available - there are several issues to consider here:
- The RSS feed should be linked to directly from your homepage, sitemap and if possible, your main navigation. These are the places people look for RSS feeds and you should take full advantage of these promotional channels.
- Ideally, the link to your RSS feed should not go to the .rss file itself - this won't display in a browser (users will just see the code). Instead, create an RSS page with details on how to use the RSS link.
- Be sure the RSS page to describe the feed - what will it contain, how often will it update - in this respect, you should be treating your RSS feed like you treat your email newsletter.
Promoting your RSS feed on other websites
We will cover specialist RSS directories and search engines that are available to promote your feed in the next tutorial, but for the time being it is worth briefly covering other ways to externally market your RSS feed.
With the increase in blogging, it would be useful for you to make contact with bloggers related to your field - a lot of software packages used for blogging allows users to add RSS feeds to their blog. This usually displays as a list of links (your titles) and sometimes descriptions on their site, depending on how they decide to configure the software.
Remember when we said that RSS feeds can help with search engine optimisation and marketing? Well these links back from the blog will all help boost your page's rankings in the search engines. The titles of the RSS entries (and therefore the link text used to link back to you) should be keyword rich and similar to the keywords you are targeting on that page (although they don't have to be identical). Assuming your content type is such that you don't update the feed too regularly, this can be a good semi permanent source of links.
RSS feeds are just another marketing communication channel and you should treat them as such.
>> 3. What are RSS Directories?
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