If you are running a WordPress website, RSS feeds are a great way for you to reach out to your audience. Sure, most people follow news and updates from their favorite websites and blogs via social media or by directly accessing the site, but there are also plenty of those which use services like Feedly in order to receive web feeds. The great thing about WordPress is that it’s so complementary with other platforms, be it social media or cloud storage services, and RSS is no exception.
In fact, every WordPress site publishes RSS feeds automatically, which means your target audience can easily receive all of the latest updates, news, and comments coming from you. However, RSS feeds can be used in WordPress in many different ways. Here are five ways how you can leverage the power of RSS feeds.
Publish RSS Feeds for Social Media Followers
If you are a FeedBurner user, you can use it to provide RSS feeds on your social media accounts. All you have to do is access the Publish tab and use the Socialize feature. Once there, select social media websites for which you want to generate RSS feeds. That way, you will be able to generate some of that social media traffic and get more people to your website.
Display Only Article Summary In RSS Feed
While RSS feeds are good for generating some of the traffic and sending it your way, they might also cost you some of it. How so? Well, the whole point of getting people to your website is to get them to convert, or at least to boost signals such as pageviews, which can contribute to higher ranking.
This is something that might not happen if you choose to display full articles in your RSS because some followers will simply read the articles there and never visit the actual website at all. To show only a summary of the article, go to Settings→ Reading inside your WordPress Dashboard and find the for each article in a feed, show option. Simply select Summary and save changes, and that’s pretty much it.
Use RSS Feeds for Email Marketing
If you rely on email marketing (which you should), RSS feeds can help you obtain more information about your subscribers and manage them better. This applies not just to those users which stay up to date with all of your latest news, but also those which have checked out your offers, as well as those which are already your customers.
Add Content Before/After RSS Feeds
If you have a WordPress website, you are probably already using the Yoast SEO plugin. Apart from helping you optimize your content, it can also help you customize your RSS feeds. To add custom content before and/or after, go to SEO–> Advanced and open the RSS tab. You will be able to add content inside the two text boxes. On top of that, Yoast SEO will also add a line which lets Google knows that your website is the original source of content.
Get Content from News Aggregator Websites
This is probably the most obvious benefit of using RSS feeds. In order to supply your readers with even more relevant news, you can even find WordPress plugins which enable you to create WordPress posts out of RSS feeds.
Summary
We hope that these tips will help you make the most out of WordPress RSS feeds and get more of your followers to visit your website and purchase your services or products. Good luck!
Silvia Woolard
Silvia Woolard is a professional writer at Superior Papers and novice entrepreneur from Phoenix. In a free time she writes and works in a field of popular psychology and marketing. Read Silvia at her Twitter.
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