RSS is sneaky. It’s a way for fans to pick up your website’s content without informing you. No signups are required to get RSS content. And more and more fans are going old-school and doing it this way. This means that if you’re the author of a blog or website, your fan base could be much bigger than you think because of your RSS feed!
Why? How much bigger? Hang on a second; I’ll answer those questions shortly, but let’s first talk about RSS, as not everyone knows that their site has an RSS feed and is leaking out this free info onto the web in the first place.
RSS isn’t all that difficult to access. All sites have an RSS file embedded into their collection of files and directories. You need to locate its web address and have an RSS reader like Feedly display it. In addition, you can set it up as a permanent subscription to the RSS feed and get an updated one whenever a new post or page is written on the site. There’s never a need to go to a site’s pages ever again.
Why read the RSS file anyway? Why use it instead of coming to the site and reading content from the HTML pages?
Ahh. Now, this is what it all comes down to. Read carefully.
RSS IS LAUNDERED TEXT. IT’S AD-FREE, POP-UP FREE, SUBSCRIPTION FREE and ANONYMOUS!
Yes! RSS doesn’t require subscribers to give up their email addresses and personal details. The other benefit to the reader is simplicity. The content is free of messy advertising and overblown page formatting. That means it’s detail-rich but junk-poor. This cleans up the page, making it tidy to read on a phone screen.
If you’re a content reader, this is lovely to know, but it makes it challenging for authors of content. They can’t reply on engaging formatting to connect with the reader. Also, quantifying (and qualifying) a bunch of unknown fans who are secretly subscribing to your content is nearly impossible. I bet most of your fans read your RSS feed and not your site’s posts!
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Sanitized content means many elements are stripped from the original site’s pages. Paywalls go away. Complex, color-coded tables are out as well. Background images/patterns are gone. Scrolling texts, nada. Galleries, deleted. Justified text in a hoity-toity font is reduced to simple Times New Roman, black text on a plain background. All the hard work an author puts into formatting some prettiness into their pages vanishes when viewed in RSS.
That raises brand new questions for creators of content:
- What does my site look like in RSS?
- How many people are subscribing to my RSS file?
- Monetizing? Can it happen in RSS?
CAN I FIND OUT WHO’S SUBSCRIBING TO MY RSS?
Mostly no. You can see a download number in the site’s statistics if you have a self-hosted site and access to Cpanel. However, you won’t find a list of email addresses or a country of origin. Sneaky, eh?
Monetizing RSS is hard. It will come down to your talent to sell your product or service using text-only content. Click-baiting ads are absent. Remember, fans who use RSS didn’t want to see that in the first place.
HOW DOES MY SITE LOOK IN RSS?
To see how your page looks in RSS, find your RSS address, get an app that reads it, and then look at it through that app. View it on a laptop, then on a phone, and then on a tablet to get an accurate representation of your content. You’ll be surprised by how unsophisticated the RSS file is and how important good writing is in making it read well.
Creating great content for an unspecified RSS audience has never been more challenging. It must be strong and succinct. The real conundrum is converting a band of anonymous subscribers into paying customers. If you know the answer to this question, I’m all eyeballs.
I don’t profess to know all there is to know about RSS. I’m but a humble writer of dark fiction who’s peddling a book or two through my own site, which, at times, that online work crosses over into areas like these. When I found out my RSS downloads far exceeded the number of my official subscribers, I had to research it more.
I hope my recent discovery now helps you, too.
–Michael Forman (author).
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