RSS Feeds: Why Measure Your RSS Feeds

With any type of advertising or marketing campaign, you measure the results. You analyze your web statistics. 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 that people are unsubscribing, how to fix it!

First of all, 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 numbers. When you do 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. Are the numbers going up or down? The decrease 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 are using Feedburner, use its tools to analyze your feed for problems. If the feed is working properly, then you need to analyze the possible reasons why people choose to leave their feed notifications and take steps to prevent it from continuing. It means that your content is not attractive enough to keep your readers subscribed.

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

1. Your topic is not exactly what they want. Are you making it too wide 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 leave readers. Make sure to keep to the same standard or upgrade!

3. Try adding more tips 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 some opinion pieces for a personal touch. Include a personal note or describe how you have personally used a product to give your thoughts an individual touch. Alternatively, if your thoughts are highly personalized, perhaps you should study writing in the third person sometimes.

5. Do you post infrequently? If you are not generating regular thoughts for your subscribers, they are likely to leave. If your RSS feed is just to update users on a particular app, for example, it may not apply, but you probably wouldn’t be reading an article from a website like this. You need to publish at least one article a week to keep your subscribers happy. If you don’t have the time, consider hiring a ghostwriter or go copy and paste from article directories (leaving the authors resource box intact, of course) as guest posts. Soliciting guest bloggers is another way to get more content for your readers.

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

7. Are you rambling on, in long, lengthy 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 up for summaries, not full posts. Why not try to abbreviate your thoughts or divide them into several posts?

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

9. Do you share yesterday’s news? Is what you are delivering to your subscribers up to date and relevant? Make sure to keep up with the trends. Outdated content loses subscribers.

There are other reasons people unsubscribe, but the nine tips above are all things you can examine about your feed and make gradual changes. Try only one thing at a time and look at the statistics for a short period of time to see if there are any differences.

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

If your subscribers are not reading your feed, then your efforts are in vain. Are you using catchy headlines in your thoughts to attract them? And your first paragraph? Are you summarizing the article in the most interesting way possible?

Lastly, it’s good to know your feed’s click-through rate.

Are your subscribers clicking on the “read more” button or on your ads? If you are not reading more, you are missing it. Subscribers get the headlines and first lines of the article from your website and judge the rest from there. If they are not interested in the lines, they will not click.

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!