Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are a great way of sharing your latest postings with readers. There are different ways of ’subscribing’ to these feeds to make sure that you are following the latest information, depending on what your personal preferences are.
But, why are they useful for promoting your website?
Keep people abreast of recent posts
Well, the main aspect is that you are making sure that people are regularly reading your latest posts. Those people that subscribe and follow your feed will be (hopefully) reading all of your newest posts. The trick is, how do you use this to the best?
Getting people following you
Well the first part is to make sure that your readers want to sign and can. This means convincing them that what you are writing is interesting and useful for them. You do not do this by writing heavily search engine optimised text, you do this by writing for your audience.
Then make sure that your readers can easily sign up. Give them a link to follow your RSS feed on every page and add a page on your blog that explains what a feed does and how to sign up to it. You do not need full details of how to use the feed, just link to somewhere else for those that need more details.
Keep your readers interested
Next, once your readers are signed up you need to make sure that readers are using them. This means making sure they read the posts and do not stop following them. To make sure that the posts are interesting remember that a lot of the time readers will see only the title of the post, not the content. The title has to be interesting and tempt them into reading more. A boring title will do no favours.
Also, if you are adding a lot of not so interesting posts (for example, off topic posts from paid to post systems) then you might like to look at not including these in your feed. If it is full of off topic posts that are irrelevant, readers will get fed up wading through the off topic posts to find what actually interests them. WordPress plugins such as Automatic Category Excluder can be used well here.
And, in summary
So the trick with RSS feeds is to make sure that your current content is good enough to tempt people to follow your feed and to provide high quality content from the feed. Once you do this you will then have a regular stream of readers following your writings and hopefully some of these will also spread the word of your site.
If you want to know more about finding website visitors, call over to our website - http://www.realwebtraffic.co.uk. There you will find load more ideas, and you can get yourself a free copy of our real web traffic ebook.
Written by Keith Lunt
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Keith_Lunt