Fear of RSS
“If you build it, they will come.” That was definitely the mantra of the online world for the first few years. Then, people became obsessed with building traffic to their sites. Which makes sense if you're revenue model depends on advertising, but for many of the sites I used to work on if we succeeded in changing a key behaviour pattern (e.g. a doctor starting to prescribe or prescribing more of a medicine) our job was done. This is an excellent article, I highly suggest this as a read for RSS (read webfeed) sceptics, or those trying to convince sceptics.
This week one of my favorite sites, Coudal, went through a redesign. Part of the thought process that went behind the redesign was whether they should include a RSS feed for their Fresh Signals section. Jim Coudal feared that if he included a RSS feed then people would either stop visiting his site or the content wouldn't have the same feeling since it would viewed out of context. Both legitimate concerns.
However, whether or not to use RSS on your site should no longer be an option. I believe it has become a necessity if you wish to compete with others in your industry.
The paragraph above sums it all up for me. Bottom line: If you want to be a “thought leader”, you've got to have some sort of webfeed. Blogs, I think, are the easiest way to achieve this, but there are other ways. If you want your ideas to get some traction and spread online, heck maybe even get quoted. Blog and have a webfeed.
In the worst case scenario when using RSS a reader will never again visit your site. Since I am unable to track usage patterns for all RSS readers I don't know how often this happens, but I can tell you from the statistics from my sites (including this one) the number of visitors goes up monthly even with full content RSS feeds. And even if they do not visit your site again, at least they are still reading your content. This increases the odds that they will link to you from their site or spread the word about your site.
Exactly. How bad is it really if people read your ideas and link to them. Granted if you are a consultant like me, what you really want is someone to say “Hey that Tris guy is pretty sharp. Let's hire him to help us set up our business blog.” But these things come with time.
With the plethora of sites around fighting for the mindshare of your readers becomes essential. Why lessen your chances by not including a RSS feed? That opens the gates for everyone else to increase their readership. RSS feeds create more opportunities and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
