Almost all content-generating sites such as blogs and news websites are savvy enough to utilize and promote RSS feeds on their own websites. RSS feeds are a great way to stay in touch with website visitors that have subscribed to your content feeds. What a lot of bloggers out there don’t know is that promoting your blog on your own website may not be enough.

If your website or business is striving to attract a larger audience and increase website traffic, promoting your RSS feed on your website is probably not enough. In most cases, blogs are developed to expand the content of a website and make it more relevant to a broader audience. If this is the case for your business, you may want to consider promoting your blog outside of your own site.

There are various ways to promote RSS feeds. We’ve included several key promotional tactics below.

Validate your RSS feed.
Ensuring that your feed is written in the correct syntax and is error-free is important for crawling and indexing purposes. It’s also important if you want your content to be an authoritative voice in your industry. Checking your feed for errors is quick and easy and can be done through the W3C Feed Validation Service.

Implement RSS auto-discovery tags.
RSS auto-discovery tags allow web browsers and other software to automatically detect that your website has an RSS feed. If a browser detects that a website has an RSS feed associated with it, popular web browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer will indicate the feed through an RSS icon in the address bar. When users click through to the icon, they will be taken directly to the feed. Implementing the auto-discovery tags is as simple as adding a header element. More detailed instructions can be found through the RSS Advisory Board website.

Submit your feed to directories and search engines.
RSS feed directories generally work just like search engine directories. Submitting to feed directories is a manual and time consuming process. Going through this process may be beneficial if your feed is new and is having trouble getting crawled. Submitting your feed to external sources has the capability to create links to your content elsewhere on the web, which should help search engine crawlers and users find your content. Start with submitting your feed to sites specifically for RSS feeds. Several of these sites can be found on the RSS Specifications website.

Promote your RSS feed and blog through free and niche press releases.
If your company distributes corporate press releases, you’re probably familiar with several news sources and websites that are eager to distribute your content. The addition of a blog or RSS feed is a perfectly legitimate reason to distribute a press release to let industry followers or shareholders know about your growing web presence. Be sure to link to the blog or RSS feed within the press release so it’s easy for people to subscribe once they’ve heard the news.

Update content regularly.
Creating fresh and interesting content on a regular basis is the most important aspect of blog promotion. As you gain blog visitors and RSS subscribers, the key to keeping them around and generating new followers is content. If you are continuously creating relevant content and giving your visitors a forum to participate in the discussion, you can expect to gain a plethora of inbound links that will result in additional visitors and RSS subscribers.

By following these steps and appealing to your target audience through compelling content, you can expect to gain increased visibility, increased visitors and even increased website conversions as a result of increased traffic.

If you have additional promotional tactics that have worked to promote your RSS feed, feel free to share in the comments section below!