"Using RSS Help Increase Web Site Traffic? Watch Out!"

Copyright 2004 - Jeff Smith

Millions of dollars are spent each day to increase web site traffic. It's the modern day internet marketing obsession. Wherever demand has reached the level of obsession, you get far more harmful or useless techniques than tips that actually do work.

I have to admit, as a constant tester, I have tried many ways to increase web site traffic. After listening in on calls with some very influential internet marketers, it was time to try RSS to increase web site traffic.

Did it work?

In a word, definitely not - IN FACT, placing external RSS feeds did far more harm than good for my trial sites. I'll get to why in just a minute.

What are RSS feeds and Why Might it Increase Web Site Traffic?

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication - and simply put, it is a standard format for sharing content real time with other website owners. By offering you a very small snippet of code to integrate within your website, I could give you access to post all of my newsletters, articles, blog entries, etc...

While this is great for sites that focus on heavy content models often combined with advertising, it can be extremely harmful to sites that depend on selling your own products, Google Adsense or marketing affiliate programs as the main source of revenue.

The story goes - RSS will increase web site traffic due to the positive improvements in rankings search engines will give you for having constant, changing, related content to "feed" the search engines.

My Experiement To Increase Website Traffic using RSS feeds

On two of my niche sites - both in the health and wellness area, I decided to try RSS for 4 weeks and monitor the results.

In a word - YIKES! I couldn't get it off there soon enough as I saw my revenue from these sites drop to less than half.

Here's why.

First thing I noticed, there was no visible change in search engine placement (in one case, the site hasn't been picked up yet - RSS did not help and may have hurt as the site was scanned many times within that 4 week period but was never picked up)

Second, no sign of increased web site traffic. In fact, traffic to various pages on both sites dropped by approximately 25% during the period. I will not blame that on RSS, but curious just the same.

Third - and MOST IMPORTANT is that my clickthru conversion on each page with RSS went WAY down - more than 1/2 of what it was just the day before I added the RSS feeds.

Want to know why?

The RSS feeds were so interesting to my visitors they were clicking off my page to visit the local news stories - and then on to god knows where - but NOT clicking my revenue generating links.

Think that's bad for business?

Don't get me wrong - I believe the power of you publishing and syndicating information with RSS (so you get your newsletter, articles, ads, or blog entries on other people's sites) is very powerful.

However - use extreme caution when adding RSS feeds to your website in hopes that the Search Engines will instantly rank you higher and send you tons of traffic and sales.

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