RSS Feeds can help you increase your blog’s traffic. They give you an opportunity to communicate with your readers and let them know that new content has been published to your site. When readers know your site has fresh content, it increases the chances that they’ll visit, so it’s a great way to get return blog visitors.

What is an RSS Feed?

An RSS Feed is a format that allows users to subscribe to your content and receive updates when you update your website. Visitors can use an RSS Reader to check their feeds, and they’ll see whenever a website is updated, instead of having to go and visit the website every day to check to see if something is new.

Why should you use RSS?

Without an RSS Feed, the only way your readers will know if you’ve updated your content is by visiting your website everyday. This can become tedious and disappointing if your site is updated less frequently and is not set to a specific schedule, and in this scenario readers might stop visiting your blog.

Imagine this scenario: a reader visits your site and loves the content they read. They book mark it, but they don’t remember it a few days later and stop coming back. Now imagine you have an RSS Feed: that reader visits your blog, loves the content, and subscribes to the feed. Now every time you update, they get a notification, so they keep coming back to your site. By using RSS, you are able to reach out to your readers and let them know when to check your site.

How do you get users to subscribe?

You need to know where to put it. Place it near the top of your blog home page, so your readers can see easily spot it. Use a large icon so that it stands out. You want it to be noticeable so that readers looking for it can find it easily. Also making it obvious helps attract readers who weren’t necessarily looking for it, but once they realize the option is there, they’ll subscribe.

You can also post a small “RSS” icon at the bottom of each post. Often after a reader finishes a post, they’re looking for something to do – like share it with a friend, comment, or subscribe so they can get more updates.

How to Use Your Feed

You need to decide how you want to display your content on the feed. You can show the whole post, part of the post, or just a link to the new post. The benefit to showing part of the post is that you are enticing readers to visit your site by offering them a little bit of content, but to read more they have to visit your site. If they’re visiting your site, that means that you’re increasing your chances that they’ll click on your ads.

If you post the whole post, the downside is that you might not see as much traffic to your site as you would otherwise. However, it’s still better to have readers following you in the RSS rather than nothing. If they’re still following you, you can still reach them and having that connection there means there is still an opportunity to get them to come to your site. If you are worried that an RSS feed will mean less people actually visiting your site, read this article explaining the benefits of using a feed and why a feed can help your blog, even if they don’t visit your site.

Feeds are a great way to get more hits and generate website traffic. You can promote your blog in a variety of ways to get those initials hits, but one of the keys to really growing your traffic is to get those loyal readers and those return visitors. An RSS Feed is the perfect way to do this.