We Need to Promote RSS

February 22nd, 2007 | Traffic Generation

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Nate from Moller Marketing writes in a comment…

What’s the best and easiest way to teach new bloggers to come back to your blog?

ShoeMoney is the only blog I go to directly on a regular basis. For everyone else, it’s “out of site, out of mind.” That’s why I make sure to subscribe to any blog that I find interesting, so that I’ll remember to go back.

Because of that, I think the best way to keep them coming back is to get them to subscribe to your RSS feed. And I think there are two components to that.

First, you have to make your subscribe link very prominent. The more visible it is, the more likely that people will use it.

Second, I think we, as bloggers, have to do a better job of extolling the virtues of RSS. RSS is one of those technologies that has been about to take off for three years or more now. In fact, I registered RSS Job Feeds.com back then anticipating RSS really taking off, but it’s perpetually just around the corner.

I think we may finally be getting traction, though. IE 7 is bringing RSS to the forefront, and there are more and more good feed readers out there that are easy for anyone to use.

The more we can publicize how great RSS is, the more all of us will benefit.

Let us hear from you. If you don’t subscribe to blogs, why not? Is there still a technical hurdle, or is there something else?

Comments

  • Awesome Mom
    Awesome Mom

    February 23, 2007 at
    2:14 am

    I didn’t subscribe to blogs at first because I didn’t know I could. Now that the new version of blogger has made it a lot easier I do subscribe to ones that I regularly read but do not update very often. I still like to actually visit my favorites regularly which is made easier by the fact that I can open a whole bunch of them in tabs using the Firefox web browser. To me it is just as easy to tab through the pages as it is to read them through subscription.


     
  • Nate Moller
    Nate Moller

    February 23, 2007 at
    3:38 am

    Thanks for the advice. I definitely agree that making the RSS icon more visible can be helpful. Then educating new bloggers to the pros of RSSing: it’s easy, it’s useful to remind us of the good stuff that’s out there, and it’s not just for the computer programmer, computer science or IT gurus. Thanks again for the good feedback Shane.


     

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