The Power Of RSS Subscriptions
Posted on July 12th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Promotion
If you're tired of refreshing this page every day like a d-bag, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed.
As Nickycakes.com nears its first 1000 rss feed subscriptions, it’s probably a good time to talk about how powerful rss subscriptions can be for a website, commercial or non.
First the crap that you probably alread know. RSS feeds are great for building loyalty and keeping people on your site. Obvious. They take the headache out of making the user manually return to your site to check for new content. Obvious. They do a good job at preventing the user from forgetting about your site. Obvious.
Alright, so a while ago, Nickycakes read a post on problogger where he had asked all his readers to post reasons that they unsubscribe from blog rss feeds. The idiots all came up with elaborate answers as to why they generally unsubscribe from feeds, and these were the top 5:
- Too Many Posts
Lol…seriously, this is the best they could come up with? - Infrequent Posting
Eh, isn’t this the REASON people subscribe…so they don’t have to refresh endlessly waiting for the new posts to come? - Partial Excepts Feeds
Other than wanting this for some gay mobile device feed reader, why the hell would this matter.. - Blog Changes Focus (off topic)
This one makes a little sense… - Repeat/Duplicate Content
So does this one…
Well guess what…none of those reasons are valid. Why? Cause nobody unsubscribes from RSS feeds. Nobody. Once you have a reader subscribed to your feed they’re there for a damn good while. You wonder why retards like john chow have astronomical RSS feed numbers? Cause no matter how bad their content, it’s not offensive enough to convince the user to actually go through the process of unsubscribing. And even if they grow to hate the blog, they will still check out the new posts. Hell, even Nickycakes was still checkin out shoemoney’s new posts up until like last month even though they have sucked for over a year.
For non-commercial sites like this one (ok it’s semi-commercial i guess since there are a few cheap ads and some referral revenue involved) RSS feeds are a no-brainer. There may or may not be some actual useful information here, and so people are inclined to subscribe because they want to know more…obvious. For commercial sites, however, things can be a little more tricky. Assuming we’re talking about commercial sites as described in cakes’ earlier post on affiliate product blogs, you may have a difficult time to get your readers to subscribe to a feed, depending on the type of site it is. The biggest hangup will be new content. Depending on how you’re doing things, you may only have 10-20 posts of content, and not plan on updating frequently, making an rss feed a little useless. For these types of sites, you’ll probably want to go the route of an email list, which the Cakes will try to do a write-up on at a later date.
Ok, so how do you get more RSS subscribers? If your blog readers are generally smart people, like this one, they’ll probably know how to subscribe to a feed, and frankly if the reader can’t figure that out on their own, then Nickycakes would recommend they kindly f-off back to digital point or ubercamp or wherever. But if your site’s readers are the general internet public (retards) then you will likely need a page explaining what an RSS feed is and how to subscribe. Feel free to find any such page on some other blog and copy it to yours, as wasting time writing up that crappy page is not part of a good gameplan, but it’s important that it be there on your site. Also, make sure that the option to subscribe via email as well as with a feed reader are advertised prominently on your site.
If you’re using wordpress, you will want to install a couple plugins. If you’re using feedburner (which you should be, to track subscriber counts if nothing else) then you need to install the feedsmith plugin. This plugin will take every possible feed url that wordpress has and forward it to feedburner which won’t actually increase your subscriber count, but your subscriber numbers will go up in feedburner because, by default, it doesn’t count all the subscribers that don’t use the feedburner subscription url to subscribe.
Another good plugin that Nickycakes just started using on this site is called What Would Seth Godin Do? Seth Godin is some marketing guy or something. The wordpress plugin basically puts a message at the top of each post asking the reader to subscriber, but only for the first few times the user visits. Good for bulding up readers. Thanks Gab for the suggestion.
Ok, finally the Cakes wants to talk about Full Post vs. Excerpt RSS feed styles. Just about every week, someone complains to Nickycakes about his feed only having Excerpts from his articles instead of the Full Post because they can’t read the full article on their iphone’s rss reader or whatever without going to the site to read the whole thing. First off…who cares. Go to the site and read it if you like the first paragraph. If not, scurry back to your macworld articles where you belong. Second…Nickycakes uses rss feeds all day long to scrape content, and he’s gonna be damned if he’ll let some dickweed do the same to him, so just drop it. Not happening. Besides, if it were your site, would you want your readers reading just your content from an rss feed reader? No..you’d want them to come to your site so they can dance around your minefield of adsense ads in hopes that you can score a few $.10 clicks to help you buy a new goat for your village, m i rite?
Update:
So Nickycakes’ buddy ricdes pointed out a pretty cool RSS feed tip. Basically, wordpress lets you make a feed for each category on your blog which you can then burn into feedburner to offer feeds to people who only want to read about certain stuff on your blog. For example, people only wanting to read about coding categorized posts on this site could use this feed url. Neato.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I could use a new goat…
July 12th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
i once unsubscribed to shoemoney’s blog.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I unsub all the damn time. When fuckers post too much about their spiderman costumes or their family like I give a shit it takes me less then 5 seconds to unsub.
I get PISSED if I see there’s a couple unread items in Reader and I check it only to find something like jeremy shoemaker’s sticker in his pool or zac johnson new fuckin doll. They basically combine 1, 4, and 5. Too many off-topic, duplicate content posts.
There’s only 5 of my 20 subscriptions that I’ve never unsubscribed from at one point. SEOBook, SEOmoz, Future Now, Anywired, and PPC Hero.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Ugh, you seriously managed to stay subscribed to seomoz?
July 12th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
“Besides, if it were your site, would you want your readers reading just your content from an rss feed reader?”
Of course, but that type of thinking has gotten the music industry in a world of hurt. Forcing users to eat content in the way you want is a losing game in the long run. I guarantee you are losing readers cause of excerpts, but you say you don’t care so i guess it doesn’t matter
July 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
like i said, if people are gonna stop reading cause of something retarded like that, i’d rather they unsubscribe. the music industry analogy, however, makes no sense in this situation, sorry.
July 12th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I can say that I have yet to unsubscribe from a single blog.
July 12th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I unsub from feeds on a regular basis. If I’m constantly skipping posts from the same site, I’ll eventually kill it. Just unsubbed the National Geographic RSS feed. I’ll take my NG in paper form please.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
this is why I stay subscribed to nickycakes.com
July 12th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Hell ya I stay subscribed to SEOmoz. I’m a pretty big fan been a premium member for well over a year. It’s actually how I got started with internet marketing. Been making websites for a decade now, but just found all this cool shit.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Yup, I’m too lazy to unsub. I have some blogs in my Reader that are pegged at 100 unread. Part of those have attachments.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:04 am
Well, I was going to do it. I was going to unsub somebody, so I chose Jason Calacanis sitting there with 90 unread, but he beat me too it. The last feed said that he wasn’t going to blog anymore, ever again, never. Jerk.
July 13th, 2008 at 2:10 am
“Ugh, you seriously managed to stay subscribed to seomoz?”
Ah, SEOmoz…a community of pretentious idiots.
July 13th, 2008 at 5:29 am
Aah nickycakes, your post shows just how little you know about blogging. Advice: focus on affiliate marketing, don’t write about blogging.
July 13th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Ahh adam, your post shows just how little you know about anything. It takes about 10 minutes of research to know everything there is to know about blogging, so it’s safe to say anyone with an internet connection is allowed to be an expert at blogging. It’s a pretty simple concept. Advice: Focus on whatever work it is you do and I’ll focus on writing whatever i want on my website.
July 13th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Ok time to try the half-post thing your talking about, even though I can’t make .10 on my site because I have no ads, it’ll probably leave more comments either-way.
congrats on the 1,000! now to 10,000!
July 13th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Oops, I totally just left my email as my post name, this is how not to leave comments.
July 13th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
You make a good point.
Why would i let you read the full post from a feed when i want you on my blog clickind some ads and earning me some commision?
“Seth Godin is some marketing guy or something”
*LMAO*
July 13th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
hey, i have a quick question-
why do you always come across as the biggest bag of douche on the internet?
why would you say that most people online are retards? Most people I know that use the internet KNOW how to use it, so wtf are you talking about?
why would you do a post about RSS feeds…here’s a clue, nobody fucking cares; blog about affiliate marketing, fucktard. goddamn.
July 13th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Because most people are retards? And i’ll blog about whatever the fuck i want to. Dont like it then go back to digital point and read e-books. bye.
July 14th, 2008 at 3:19 am
Unsubscribed from your feed today..
..
..
nah, didnt do it, im to lazy
July 14th, 2008 at 8:04 am
I love this blog and am not planning to ever unsubscribe here
July 14th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Your posts are getting funnier Cakes. Keep rockin’ Great content/great advice too.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
These Uber bloggers and the retard bloggers that read them make me laugh…most of the dribble that comes out of problogger and others in that class just shows that the majority of the online world are just about as stupid as those in the offline world.
I mean, why even bother wasting your time with a list on why people fucking bother to unsuscribe/subscribe to a friggin’ feed? I have seen posts like “what is the best color for your blog”….I mean…are they really serious?
July 14th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
“Aah nickycakes, your post shows just how little you know about blogging. Advice: focus on affiliate marketing, don’t write about blogging.”
Actually, I would tend to think he does know a thing or 2 about blogging. 900 plus subscribers. Writes content that naturally creates backlinks because of how linkable it is. (I saw that Aaron Wall linked to this blog the other day). Entices people like you to comment out of anger. Seems to have all characteristics of someone who knows about blogging.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:36 am
“Actually, I would tend to think he does know a thing or 2 about blogging. 900 plus subscribers. Writes content that naturally creates backlinks because of how linkable it is. (I saw that Aaron Wall linked to this blog the other day). Entices people like you to comment out of anger. Seems to have all characteristics of someone who knows about blogging.”
That’s BULLSHIT.
900 subscribers isn’t jack shit. I love how he talks so much shit about John Chow, but look at John’s subscribers compared to nickycakes. More people have been inspired/motivated by Chow than negative nickycakes. nickycakes is and always will be the plague of this industry. Look at how shitty his newbie guide is, or any post is. It’s usually newbie/basic stuff that he posts, or he’s bashing some other bloggers/forum. No real substance there.
Nickycakes is like the Andrew Dice Clay of the affiliate marketing world. Sure, Clay had his followers…but they were just as nasty as he was and not to mention shortlived. Clay wasn’t funny at all. Some people will vow on how successful Clay was…but at the end of the day, it’s a moral issue. Yeah he had his run, but eventually the crappy people run out and who’s left? Nobody. You eventually realize how shitty you are.
People will realize how negative, vile and nasty nickycakes is.
Karma’s a bitch and trust me, it will come back to haunt him.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:41 am
^–lol
This entire site is built to help people, so if it’s not helping you, or you’re not entertained, then just leave, seriously. I won’t lose sleep over it, I promise.