Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #45: Short RSS Feeds that Get Read­ers Hooked

In the pre­vi­ous Web 2.0 mar­ket­ing tip, we dis­cussed how use­ful RSS feeds can be for you, your busi­ness, and your cus­tomers. To­day, we will look at an es­sen­tial part of that plan. That is, we will look at how you can use RSS feeds to at­tract your read­ers to keep com­ing back to your site.

How to At­tract Site Vis­i­tors with RSS Feeds

A lot of peo­ple opt to sub­scribe to RSS feeds be­cause they do not want to miss out when­ever their fa­vorite web­sites are up­dated. How­ever, you must also know that they choose to get RSS feeds so they won’t need to go to in­di­vid­ual sites all to­gether and sim­ply read up­dates through their RSS read­ers. This is quite a dis­ad­van­tage if you are look­ing to get more web traf­fic for your site.

For­tu­nately, there is a way to get fol­low­ers who rely on RSS feeds to con­tin­u­ously visit your site. What is it? Short­en­ing or trun­cat­ing your RSS feeds!

Rather than sim­ply al­low them to gain all of the in­for­ma­tion from the reader with­out re-vis­it­ing your site, you should con­sider short­en­ing your RSS feed. That is to say you will set a cer­tain char­ac­ter limit for your feeds. This way, you will pre­vent peo­ple from read­ing the en­tire mes­sage through their reader. In­stead, they will get hooked by your catchy open­ing line and end up com­ing to your site to read the en­tire post. Of course, for this method to work, you have to make sure that you have very ap­peal­ing head­lines as well as open­ing sentence(s).