RSS: Make your Feed Link Obvious
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
With the advent of new browsers, I was not too concerned about putting my RSS link within the content of my site. I’m starting to rethink that.
If you weren’t already aware, these new browsers can automatically detect an RSS feed as long as it’s identified within the header of the page. Clicking on the RSS symbol results in you ’subscribing to that feed’ via your browser. So when you select the feed in your browser, you’ll be met with the list of active stories available via the feed.
Within the header of my site, I have the following code:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/DouglasKarr" />
The browser automatically sees that code and provides an indicator that the feed can be subscribed to:
Prior to the release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft met with the other browser developers and they decided that the universal symbol for RSS would be 
.
For the last 6 months, I’ve relied on my internal RSS reference for folks to subscribe to my feed. However, I recently did a test where I put an RSS link in the footer of all of my pages. Guess what? Within a couple days my feed subscriptions have jumped about 20%! (I use Feedburner to track).
I realize this isn’t very scientific, but I’d recommend that readers have their RSS feed link clearly identified and available to your readers who utilize other tools that don’t automatically detect the link through your header code.
That is how I subscribed to your blog via the RSS icon at the bottom. I never pay attention to what the indicators in a browser addressbar maybe but rather when using a browser; which isn’t very often, I always look for the Icon.
another thing to remember as well is not everyone will come to your blog via a browser. Some will come via links in their non-browser RSS clients and very rarely will the builtin browsers of the client detect this way …
I live in my RSS reader and as such all my links are basically found and added that way and very few stand alone RSS client have that type of feature.
Good point Sterling, I do the same sometimes.
Do you have a reason for the placement of your RSS subscribe link in your footer?
Why not have it in your top navigation?
Your theme is really long and since you’re well educated in print media, wouldn’t the term “above the fold” apply to your RSS subscribe button?
Congrats by the way on getting more subscribers.
Good advice, I’ve got it in both now.
Doug
Good thinking!