Feeeeeed me: A Primer on the why and how of RSS
At MoPR, we’re veracious readers of the news. We read the trades relevant to our clients and look for opportunities; we read daily newspapers and monthly magazines to stay informed on trends and issues related to the industry; we read magazines and newsletters about public relations, marketing and branding. We read – a lot.
Back in the day [way back in 2003] reading all this news usually involved multiple subscriptions to newspapers, magazines and journals, some that tended to pile up in the corner office. Stacks and stacks of dusty magazines were the norm and so was slogging through websites marked as favorites in our bookmarks.
Nowadays, MoPR HQ still subscribes to the important magazines and gets them – gasp – delivered through the postal service.
But instead of hundreds of subscriptions we have dozens, confining our reading to a few key magazines.
And like the rest of the world, much of our information and reading comes from online sources, most notably the trades we read.
Most newspapers and magazines have a good grasp of how to utilize the web to make money by adding content online, offering original content and making the content searchable. [What did we do before the now nearly ubiquitous search box?!]
Where many traditional publications fail though is with the delivery of the content. And that’s where Really Simple Syndication (RSS) comes in.
By subscribing to RSS feeds we can quickly scan more than 100 publications every morning looking for news that interests us or MoPR clients. In other words, RSS lets us “subscribe” to blogs and websites – and even drill down to receive only our favorite sections of a publication or a specific reporter’s articles.
We don’t have to scroll through hundreds of websites; we merely read the headlines and decide whether we want to click it and read it. It takes about 10-30 minutes to do this, depending of course on how many sources you are wading through. Ten-30 minutes is nothing when you consider that opening and reading each web site would take all day.
For our daily reading we only read blogs and publications that have an RSS feed, period.
In order to read RSS feeds, you need a feed reader. There are many feed readers on the market (more than 2,000 according to Google) but we prefer the NewsGator FeedDemon client.
To use FeedDemon, we merely cut and paste the RSS URL into the FeedDemon “browser” and click subscribe, which adds the RSS feed to our list. FeedDemon is also available as an iPhone application and browser-based client – which all sync up.
Google Reader is another good RSS reader. It’s web-based and lets users read their feeds easily on any browser. In fact, most new versions of browsers have RSS reading functionality built right in.
With the ease of gathering and reading feeds from online newspapers and magazines it’s surprising that many of the old-guard newspapers and magazines don’t offer RSS feeds to their readers. And they wonder why they’re losing money and are shutting doors? Being an active blogger without an RSS feed is unforgivable (and not very savvy).
If you don’t offer an RSS feed you are limiting the number of regular readers you will get, period. You can’t just expect readers to find and read your posts daily on their own. Bookmarks you say? Bookmarking is only as effective as the person willing to scroll through them without the guarantee of new content. People today don’t have that kind of time.
If you are a blogger or someone who wants to disperse information and attract more readers, you need to employ RSS feeds on your site.
Adding RSS to your site
So, is adding an RSS feed to your blog easy? These days it certainly is. No worries about understanding XML or complex coding.
There are numerous programs on the market that will generate the code needed, provide you with that code, which you can then add to your HTML, ultimately letting readers use it to subscribe to your feeds.
Most blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger automatically include RSS functionality with their software- so users don’t need to do a thing. Readers can merely click on the button provided in the template and subscribe.
I’ve used FeedBurner (owned by Google) and can verify it’s very easy to use. Bloggers simply add the URL to the appropriate box and it automatically spits out a feed URL for you. Once you have the feed URL and the code you simply add it to the HTML code, or in Blogger’s case (also owned by Google) it automatically gets added via a couple of clicks.
Here is a screenshot that illustrates the ease of adding an RSS feed using FeedBurner:
FeedBurner also lets users add the universally accepted orange subscribe button to the site.
Still not convinced that your readers want RSS or will use it if you add it? FeedBurner provides stats on how many people subscribe to your feed and what feeds they read.
Here is a short very basic video with a simplified overview of RSS for you if you’re still unsure of RSS:
RSS dos and don’ts
Don’t hide the link or RSS widget and make readers search for it. Add it to the right-hand top corner.
Do offer readers RSS feeds for the whole site as well as different sections of the site. This is also a great way to see what parts of the site get read more than others.
Do offer the comments on posts as RSS feeds – people love to follow the conversation.
Do use the universally known orange button.
