Rss And/or Email Subscription?

Hi! I am building a WP site for my internet blog/business and I am considering only having an email subscription, instead of both RSS and email. For the following reasons:

1. I never look at my RSS feed. Do you? Does anyone besides content curaters actually look at their RSS feed?
2. I'm not sure that my target market of 27 to 45 year old women uses RSS feeds anyways.
3. Isn't getting an email address far superior to having an RSS subscription? Why not only give people the option to subscribe via email? It seems that this way, I will end up with more email addresses.

Does this make sense? Am I missing something?

 

Hi,
I agree with points 2 & 3, collecting email subscribers is worth so much more than rss subscribers.
RSS does have the advantage of bringing robot traffic to your site and can help your site get indexed in the search engines.

 

I know people still use RSS feeds. They are popular at work, you can plug them into Outlook and people still pull up Google reader. I see where you are going with points 2 & 3 as well, but I think you are missing something. Let me give you an example with the usual dog training niche:

I have a dog training website with tons of great content. Visitors come to my site and want to stay up to date so they want to subscribe. I have both RSS and Email. First of all, some people use RSS and dont like getting the blog posts in email. Others dont know what RSS is so they sign up for email. Right of the bat you're appealing to 2 different types.

The more important factor is that they work completely differently. RSS will only syndicate your blog posts to the subscribers. The email list will allow you to send anything you want to the people on the list. So I write a blog post about how to potty train new puppies. Everyone on the RSS feed gets the blog post. The people on the email list may or may not depending how you set it up. You can then email the people on the email list the next day telling them about the latest and greatest potty training kit for dogs and get affiliate commissions on it. Two days later you might send them another email about a great new electric fence that just hit the market (more affiliate commissions). So while you might only do a blog post/article once or twice a week you can send to your email list 3 or 4 times a week if you wanted. Your blog posts need to be meaty and full of great content, it's what your website survives on. Your emails can be precise and straight to the point.

One last advantage of the email lists are that you can segment them. So if someone clicks on your link in the email they go on the list. If someone buys something they go to a buyers list. If someone downloads a guide from your site they go on a special list since they have shown interest in that type of item.

As you can see email lists provide A LOT more flexibility, but I still think RSS feeds can be useful. If you're leaning towards only having one, its a no-brainer that it has to be an email subscription.

 

The short answer should be, use all channels to capture your visitos. Email, rss, facebook, twitter, etc. Send them to your youtube channel and make them subscribe; set a private forum; write a column at a local newspaper.
The idea is to have the most possible options available and let each visitor decide what they like best.

 

I agree with Winagain - use every channel you can. I certainly use RSS to keep up to speed with around 50 websites - I'd never get around to visiting them individually.

Someone says they "still" use RSS: still? RSS is coming - not going! Try Mr Reader on the iPad - it's better than anything I've yet found on PC.

Yes, email subscribers are worth more than RSS subscribers in terms of how much you earn out of them. But is it up to you to decide? The trend these days is to offer people contact via the channel they prefer - not to impose on them what YOU think. That's so 2011!! LOL

Anyway, being a user of RSS, if I can't see the RSS feed on a site I just put "/RSS" in front of the URL and that very often gives me the feed anyway. So you can't fool us ;-)

BTW, RSS is a real time saver. It means I can sit on the bus or train with my iPad filter and out good articles I want to read later - by sending them right from Mr Reader to Readability. Then I read the full articles at my leisure (on another bus LOL) and if they are worth storing for later reference I then email them from Mr Reader to my Evernote account. Bingo! Next time I am "maintaining" Evernote (a daily task for me) I tag that entry appropriately and put in into my "Filing" notebook.

So, yes - I say do offer RSS options to your followers/readers.

Best wishes

Malc

 

Thanks! I will add a RSS subscribe button, but as a smaller icon. I like the way they do it on Copyblogger. It's there, but with less significance.

Now the question is which RSS service to use. I found an article suggesting that Feedblitz is superior to Feedburner. It does cost a couple of dollars a month though. It includes the ability to brand the feed, have no ads (which Feedburner adds apparently), has greater metrics, and integration with other social networks. And Copyblogger uses Feedblitz. What do you guys think/recommend?

Thanks for the tip about Mr. Reader for the iPad. Maybe I'll actually read my RSS feed.

 

Since you're building a new site, I'd recommend that you keep your costs low until the site has shown some growth. Feedburner is not a bad service and it'll work well in the early stages. Once your site shows some growth, you can transfer to Feedblitz. They make it easy to migrate your subscribers, so no worries there.

And yes, I still keep up with 45 of my favorite sites through RSS..