RSS Feeds: Why Measure Your RSS Feeds

With any type of advertising or marketing campaign, results are measured. You analyze the statistics of your website. You should also analyze the results of your RSS feed. If you don’t measure results, how do you know if what you’re doing is working or not?

There are three simple things to look for when analyzing your feed results, and if your results show people unsubscribing, how to fix it!

First, you need to know how many people are registered or subscribed to your feeds. Services like Feedburner give you these figures. if you are using Google advertising you can also find your subscriber figures there. When you make an update, how many people have asked to be informed?

With that simple figure, you can use it against previous subscriber figures. If you’re just starting out, you can use it to monitor over time. Do the numbers go up or down? The decline in subscribers over a period of time is cause for concern. That indicates there is a problem. Check that the problem is not technical. Check that you are getting your own feed correctly. If not, and you’re using Feedburner, use its tools to analyze your feed for problems. If the feed is working properly, then you should look for the likely reasons people are choosing to leave your feed notifications and take steps to prevent them from continuing. This means that your content is not engaging enough to keep your readers subscribed.

Here are nine reasons people are unsubscribing from your RSS feed and steps to stop the problem.

1. Your theme is not exactly what they want. Are you making it too broad or too focused? Has your topic changed from what it was when you signed up?

2. Is your quality still the same? If you have lost quality in your thoughts, you will stop reading. Make sure to keep the same standard or improve!

3. Try to add more suggestions on how to do things. People like step-by-step instructions on every topic imaginable.

4. Are your thoughts too impersonal? Or too personal? You want your personality to show, but not your whole life, unless that’s exactly what you blog about. If your website is a news site, consider adding a few opinion pieces for a personal touch. Include a personal note or describe how you have personally used a product to give your thoughts a personal touch. Alternatively, if your thoughts are highly personalized, perhaps you should study writing in the third person sometimes.

5. Are you posting infrequently? If you don’t produce regular thoughts for your subscribers, they are likely to leave. If your RSS feed is just to update users about a particular app, for example, that might not apply, but then you probably wouldn’t be reading a website article like this. You should post at least one article a week to keep your subscribers happy. If you’re short on time, consider hiring a ghostwriter or copy and paste from article directories (leaving the author resource box intact, of course) as guest posts. Soliciting guest bloggers is another way to get more content for your readers.

6. Are you over posting and overwhelming your subscribers? A news website will post dozens of new thoughts every day, but a general internet site shouldn’t. A couple of posts a day is more than enough for most readers. One is usually enough.

7. Are you rambling on long drawn out posts that take forever to read? If that’s the style of your blog, then fine, but make sure you have your RSS feed set to summaries, not full posts. Why don’t you try shortening your thoughts or dividing them into multiple posts?

8. Are you posting very short updates of 150 words or less? Short posts should be submitted to your feed in full format. Be sure to add some longer regular posts to add quality content for your readers to appreciate. Your blog posts shouldn’t read like Twitter tweets! Your blog posts definitely shouldn’t be Twitter tweets. Leave them on Twitter.

9. Are you sharing yesterday’s news? Is what you are delivering to your subscribers up to date and relevant? Make sure you stay up to date with trends. Outdated content loses subscribers.

There are other reasons people unsubscribe, but the nine suggestions above are all things you can examine about your feed and make incremental changes. Try just one thing at a time and look at the stats over a short period of time to see if it makes a difference.

The second metric you want to know is who is reading the feed.

If your subscribers aren’t reading your feed, then your efforts are wasted. Are you using catchy headlines in your thoughts to attract them? What about your first paragraph? Are you summarizing the article in the most interesting way possible?

Finally, it’s good to know the click-through rate of your feed.

Are your subscribers clicking the ‘read more’ button or your ads? If they aren’t reading more, then you’re missing out. Subscribers get the headlines and first few lines of the article from your website and judge the rest from that.

If you don’t have time to use statistics, you have no idea if your efforts are working. You have no idea if you are being productive or wasting your time!