Why Publish an RSS Feed?

The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?

Potential investor in radio to David Sarnoff, radio mogul

A syndicated feed is a message that is broadcast to nobody in particular, so why go to the trouble of making one?

Benefits to You

RSS feeds are of great use to websites that update frequently: news, announcements, journal entries, blog posts, upcoming events, and more. News of your updated posts can be delivered to your feed subscribers everytime you update your feed.

It’s been said that, webmasters who seldom update their websites do not need RSS!. I’m going to say that’s not true. If you seldom update your website that makes a syndicated feed even more valuable. With access to a syndicated feed visitors don’t have to randomly check to see if your website has been updated. If they’re using a feed reader they can get the message that your site is updated just as soon as you update your feed!

You can have multiple syndicated feeds for your website with each feed pointing to content for a different purpose: podcast, video channel, or even your site pages and/or post comments.

A syndicated feed can help with your search engine rankings, to some degree. A syndicated feed is very machine readable and more easily parsed by search engine agents that visit your site.

Giving your visitors another way to discover and share your site will increase awareness of your website, encourage more visitors, and help build your net community.

Benefits to Your Visitors

From your visitors’ point of view, a syndicated feed that they can subscribe to is like creating a bookmark and signing up for an email announcement list. It’s a gentle reminder that your website exists and helps them to remember to return for a visit.

Your visitors can remain anonymous. Many people are reluctant to sign up for an e-mail announcement list, because they’re afraid of who the address might be sold to or shared with. With a syndicated feed, your visitors can get a reminder to visit your site when there is new content, without handing over their e-mail address.

A syndicated feed can give your visitors another channel to view your content. It gives them the freedom to choose how and how often to see content from your website.

Depending on the types of syndicated feeds that you provide, it can help your visitors explore parts of your site that they otherwise might not have found.

Types and Uses for Syndicated Feeds

You can use a syndicated feed for any content that you want people to follow.

  1. A blog feed, so that people get access to your posts as they’re published.
  2. A news feed, to keep visitors up to date with personal announcements.
  3. A topic feed, so that people can chose to follow just one category of posts out of many.
  4. A comment feed, for visitors who are interested in following a single comment thread on a single post.
  5. A sitemap feed, so people can see when pages are added or updated.
  6. A site update or changelog feed, so that people can see the latest changes to your site as soon as you make them.
  7. A feedcast that syndicates your latest stream of audio, video, or images.
  8. A combined feed, that contains entries from multiple feeds (a potpourri or medley) to get all of your feeds in a single channel.

You don’t need to limit yourself to having only one feed. You can have as many feeds as you have the time to create. Having a selection could benefit everyone.