SmallBusinessNewz

I have written in the past about different ways that RSS feeds can benefit your business.

The Benefits of RSS

One way was from the perspective of the subscriber. You can boost your productivity by having all of your favorite blogs and news sources coming right to you in one place. This can be a tremendous time saver, particularly for those who do a lot of reading and research.

Another business benefit I talked about was from the perspective of the publisher. I wrote:

By not offering feeds, you are missing out on an opportunity to keep customers informed of what your business is up to. You're missing out on a fantastic promotional tool. When you get subscribers, you don't have to worry so much about them coming to you, because you'll be going to them.

It Helps If People Subscribe

This only works, however if people subscribe to your feeds, and chances are you won't gain a very large subscriber base without promoting them.

SmallBusinessNewz has a fair number of feed subscribers, but it's nothing compared to the number of our newsletter subscribers. Of course our newsletter has been around much longer, but we would like to see the number of feed subscribers climb as well.

You may have noticed a little more emphasis on feeds from us lately, and that is precisely why. I'll admit that this article itself was inspired by the need to promote our feeds. Self serving? Perhaps, but I think it's an issue that applies to any business web site or blog that has feeds as well. So I don't feel too guilty about it.

Feed Promotion Methods

There are a number of RSS Directories that will list your feed for free such as 2RSS.com, RSSMad.com, and RSSbuffet.com.

You could offer a contest that requires a reader to subscribe to your feed to enter, and then promote that contest.

Market your feeds like they are a product, because in a way they are. Your marketing options will increase of course if you are willing to put money into them.

A few other things I have done is add a link to our feeds page in my author bio, wrote this article, and included a call to action in some of our more popular articles and in our newsletter in the form of this:

Keeping Track

Setting your feeds up through FeedBurner is a good way to keep up with the number of subscribers you have. This is especially true if you have more than one feed like us. There is an interesting article at Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz that looks at how subscribers are counted by different readers that may also be of interest.

What methods have you utilized to gain more RSS subscribers? Were those methods successful?

By the way, subscribe to one of our feeds!