It seems like everyone is talking about RSS Feeds. They’ve been around for years but buzz is up about them as technology continues to go mainstream. Some people are reportedly abandoning their browsers and viewing web through their readers - but they hardly represent general public yet.
So does your site need one?
This question is somewhat like asking if your site needs a newsletter. Sure, sky won’t fall tomorrow if you don’t get one today, but once you realize benefits of having a news feed for your site, and try it for yourself, you may become an addict like rest of us.
Reason #1: More free traffic to your site
I’m not exaggerating when I say that a frequently updated feed can bring you massive amounts of traffic in a short time period. This won’t be true forever.
Here’s a snapshot in PDF format, of just feed-originating traffic to a new page of my site for first 24 hours it opened.
http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/2-rss-marketing/screenshot.pdf
Not exactly a stampede, but here’s good part.
On fourth day, feed traffic doubled, and all other traffic continued to rise at same rate.
That's my fifth active feed of twenty I have spread out over four sites, and I get similar results each time. In thirty days, that would be at least 5,000 new targeted visitors - again, this is not counting my present traffic, or those who try my feed and stay subscribed, nor does it factor in what happens when traffic doubles again..
I can’t promise you exact same results, no one can. But you should know that my feed is targeted towards a crowed market - if you know how to set up your feed properly and correctly apply your keyword research, you could have better results..
Those visitors, from first hour of traffic to today, resulted just from submitting my feed to list of directories I compiled from many sources and studied. Some bring great free traffic to new feeds, some are better for once your feed has matured.
You can often get better placement in feed directories and in Yahoo’s RSS Directory than you could from your results in a regular search engine, and sometimes, inclusion is instant.
Reason #2: It’s a hands-off way to update your audience
What if you could run your newsletter without hassles of maintaining your list, removing bounced addresses, finding new subscribers, formatting content you find, altering your content to keep from being blacklisted, and after all that, wondering if all various blockers mistakenly kept your message from getting through?
If that sounds like heaven, you can be one of angels as soon as an hour from now.
When you supplement your current newsletter with more frequent updates via feed, you will be able to push out updates to subscribers to your news channel or feed more frequently and more efficiently.