What Is RSS? | Everything You Need To Know
What is an RSS feed?
Should you even care about it?
If you have been paying close attention to my sidebar, you may have noticed that I don’t have a link asking you to subscribe to my RSS feed.
In this article, I’ll talk about:
- What RSS is
- The benefits of RSS
- How to subscribe to someone’s RSS feed
- RSS feeds for WordPress
- What I think about the future of RSS
What is RSS?
RSS: RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed automatically syndicates updated information from your website to whoever wants it.
Why bother with RSS feeds?
It saves you time as you can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds and don’t have to manually visit each site individually for updates!
Subscribing to someone’s RSS feed allows you to be automatically notified whenever that person updates his/her website.
How to subscribe to someone’s RSS feed
You need an RSS feed reader or feed aggregator. An RSS feed reader I used to use is Feed Reader.
There are also great web-based RSS feed readers like Feedly, which I highly recommend.
After that, you can subscribe to some feeds you love via a button on their site, or via your feed reader itself.
So for example, if you are using Feed Reader and want to subscribe to my RSS feed, you click on “Add a new feed” and then type in the URL for my RSS feed (https://raelyntan.com/feed) there.
RSS feed for WordPress
How do you set up your RSS feed? Well, the good news is that if you’re on WordPress, your RSS feed will likely be automatically generated for you.
For most WordPress sites, their RSS feed URL is automatically generated at: http://domain.com/feed/.
Not using self-hosted WordPress? Check out this post I wrote about the best blogging platform to use. If you have not started your blog yet, check out my guide and learn how to start a blog in 20 minutes.
Just starting out as a new entrepreneur and want to start your blog right? In my free Blog Starter series, you’ll learn how to launch a website (tech worries begone!), get your website visitor-ready, make money blogging, and much more. Read here:
What I think about RSS feeds
They are dying a slow death. Also, from a webmaster’s point of view, an RSS feed is “useless” as it doesn’t give you much ROI.[Tweet “What is RSS? How do you use RSS feeds for WordPress?”]
Say if you want to sell something…
You can’t really reach your RSS feed subscribers as easily as your email list. List building is so much more important, and that precious real estate at your sidebar should be dedicated to that.
In conclusion, I don’t think RSS feeds are a big deal – and as a blogger you don’t really have to bother much about them.
Want to learn more about list building? Check out these posts:
- List Building 101: How to Build An Email List That Makes Money (Cheatsheet Included)
- Why Building an Email List is a MUST for Your Blog & Business
- Why I Switched to Using Convertkit As My Email Service Provider
- Newsletter Content Ideas To Send & Engage Your Subscribers
- 10 Game-Changing Strategies I Used To Create an Irresistible Lead Magnet/ Freebie That Got Me 711 Downloads in 3 Months
- Get More Subscribers: 6 Hotspots To Place Your Email Opt-in Boxes
- The Hello Bar Alternative: How I Got 196 New Subscribers With Just 15 Minutes of Work
- 31 Content Upgrade Ideas For Your Blog (With real examples!)
xx Raelyn
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