I think I might be flying in the face of conventional marketing wisdom, but I think you should have an RSS feed, and you should make it easy to find and subscribe to.

Sadly, looking at some ’top’ marketing blogs. Not everyone does this.

I found a list of ‘Five Top Marketing Blogs You Should Follow".

Five is a number I can handle, so I duly clicked on the links, found their content valuable, and resolved to follow:

• I did not want to receive their ‘10 tips to …’ or ‘best swipe file for…’
• I did not want to subscribe to their email list
• I did want to subscribe to their blog

They did not want me to subscribe to their blog. They wanted my email address.

What is an RSS Feed?

An RSS Feed is a standard based XML formatted file containing links to, or actual content, from the blog posts that you create.

Here is a link to my RSS feed and you can see the link in the top right hand corner of this site, using the Standard RSS icon.

There are many tools that monitor the URL and when the content changes, tell people of your new content. People subscribe to your content via the feed, using the tools, and therefore you gain subscribers who consume your content. e.g. NewsBlur, Feedly, many of the content curation tools will also consume RSS Feeds.

RSS has has been around for a long time and is simply the easiest way to allow people to regularly consume your content.

If you use WordPress or a blogging platform you get RSS for free, as the file will automatically be generated.

Why should you not use an RSS Feed?

I think the argument for not using an RSS Feed goes as follows.

“I want to build my email list. If I allow people to subscribe without giving me their email then I can’t upsell.”

I think this is flawed:

• RSS is a standard way of allowing people to subscribe
• RSS comes for free with most of your tools
• If people are reading your content regularly then it builds trust
• You are ‘giving’ before ‘asking’
• You have to write content that converts rather than ‘asking’ on first contact
• You are building, growing and earning a relationship rather than pushing a relationship
• You have more than one opportunity to ask for an email
• etc.

An ongoing relationship where someone consumes your content by choice seems like a better starting sales channel than a page popup demanding an email.

And in this world of content overload, having someone actively subscribe to your content seems of more value than a hard sell email sign up.

Poor practices

Impressively, the three sites that I wanted to subscribe to their content actively tried to prevent me using their RSS Feed.

I had to fight with them to read their content on a consistent basis.

Obfuscation

One of the blog sites I visited, when I look in the head of their HTML had:

• numerous tracking scripts
• mouse monitoring scripts
• social meta data
• everything except an RSS feed
• actively removed the RSS feed from the head

But, they were using a standard WordPress setup and were uploading their image content into the wp-content folder so I could see it was a WordPress based site.

Every WordPress site has an RSS feed (unless you configure it differently).

So I was able to access and subscribe to their content at /feed:

• site.com/blog/feed

Subscribe Now via JavaScript

One of the sites had a big ‘Subscribe Now’ button in the top corner, which seemed to issue a bunch of AJAX HTTP requests, which I think were supposed to show a popup modal dialog, but it actually generated a bunch of JavaScript errors.

This site did not have an RSS feed link on the page.

It did have an RSS link in the head but was for the subcategory of the blog, so when I did subscribe, I was subscribing to a category, rather than their full blog feed.

Again, because it was a WordPress site, I was able to just add /feed to their blog URL and subscribe that way.

Comments Feed

One of the sites had the comments feed in the head.

Trust me, no-one wants to subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments on your blog.

If possible, configure your WordPress install to remove this.

Take it to the Next Level

If you really want to, you can use your RSS feed, in conjunction with FeedBurner to create a ‘free’ mailing list.

People who subscribe via FeedBurner Email will be sent an email when you create new content.

This can be useful if your readership are non-technical and don’t know what RSS is, but don’t want to subscribe to your main ‘sales’ email.

Lessons

RSS is an old technology, but it is standard.

If you want to support people in their content curation strategies and have them promote your content, then making it easy to consume an RSS feed can help you grow your blog.

You probably already have an RSS feed generated by your blogging platform. Use it.

• Add an RSS icon which links to your main feed
• Remove the Comments Feed from the HTML head
• Always link to your main feed, not a subcategory feed
• Add an RSS Autodiscovery tag to your HTML head

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
  title="RSS Feed for this site" 
  href="/feed" />

Here is a link to my RSS feed and you can see the link in the top right hand corner of this site, using the Standard RSS icon.

As a personal benefit to myself, I noticed, during the writing of this post that my site template did not activate the RSS feed icon on individual posts. I fixed that when I reviewed this post. Because RSS feeds are important.