What Is RSS? Avoid These RSS Feed Syndication Mistakes

Many blog publishers have put up RSS feeds to gain more readers. The importance of readers is that they are returning users of a blog. They read content, social-bookmark it, link to it, and tell their friends about it. They create the wagon for your blog to progress smoothly. But making mistakes with RSS feed delivery can alienate your readers. Here a few of them.

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What Is RSS?

Thanks to my reader, Renee Lemley, who put in great effort to create the following presentation describing all aspects of RSS syndication. You can view her comment as the first below. Here is the presentation:

RSS SOS | A How To Guide

View more presentations from Renee Lemley.

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Here are the mistakes of RSS publishers:

1. Not Providing Full Feeds

Readers hate to read a summary and click on the link to reach your ad-rich slow-loading blog to read the full article. So, first step in alienating more than half of your readerbase is providing summary feeds.

2. No Email Subscription

Many readers don't know of RSS. They may find that reading the updates in email is convenient. Don't provide an email form and subscription button, if you wish not to tend to these readers.

3. Not Knowing Your Feed's Condition

If you yourself don't track your feed's availability and health, then who else will? Subscribe to your feed both in a reader and in email. In FeedBurner (FB), you can track the feed's health from FeedMedic in Troubleshootize tab in dashboard.

4. No Frequent Updates

Don't update daily or at least thrice a week, if you wish to get rid of your readers. A pretty good option for the bloggers who don't like reviews and criticisms.

5. Don't Describe RSS

Many readers know of 'subscribing', but they don't know of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). So, don't give a description of what RSS is, and you will successfully keep half of your blog's users at sea.

6. Create a Really Tiny RSS Feed Icon On the Bottom of the Blog

Create tiny RSS icons and email subscription forms, with little or no description, at the most insignificant part of your blog. Don't provide large RSS subscription banner in every post. Don't even tell them that if they subscribe to the feed, they will get updates daily automatically.

Conclusion

If you can share any such mistakes that can really drive your users away, please share them.

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