How to promote your RSS feed

You have finally got an RSS feed set up and you are rightly proud of your achievement. The next step is to make sure you get as many visitors as possible to subscribe to your shiny new feed.

It's always easiest to pick the low hanging fruit first, it's human nature and it will get you the biggest rise in subscribers to your RSS feed the fastest. You need to tell your existing readers that you have an RSS feed. This is easy, however the hard part is explaining to your readers what RSS is. I have put together a small RSS subscribers FAQ your readers might find useful.

Put an RSS icon in your navigation so that it appears on every page, this should link to your XML file that contains your RSS feed. Next to your RSS link you should put a what is this link. Create a page to explain to your readers what your RSS feed is, how it will benefit your readers and how they can subscribe and read your RSS feed.

To launch your RSS feed to your readers create an article explaining why you are making an RSS feed available or if you have a blog, then blog about it. If you have a newsletter then add some information that will appear on each newsletter to tell your readers that they can get your newsletter via RSS. RSS will be a lot less maintenance for you than an email subscribers list.

Now you have covered your existing website visitors it's time to explore some new avenues to build up your RSS feed subscriber base. Your next stop is the RSS directories. I maintain an Alexa rated list of RSS feed directories. You can submit your feed to these which should keep you busy for a while.

Before you start make sure you have your feed URL and your feed title along with a short description of what your feed is about. You may find it useful to paste this information into a text editor so you can cut and paste it into the relevant forms on the RSS feed directories.

After you have completed all of this your RSS feed will start to grow. Of course there are no guarantees, there are a lot of factors that will affect your subscription rate such as the quality and popularity of your feed content. If you don't try you won't know.