Earlier this week I stumbled on an awesome premium plugin that can really help you power up your RSS Feed. Readers From RSS 2 Blog is an awesome tool from WP Smart Apps that really makes your RSS feed come alive and attract your subscribers back to your blog.
Readers From RSS 2 Blog is a premium plugin designed to maximize the marketing power of your RSS feed. Here are several of the features of this plugin that will really benefit any blogger:
- Adds a display of additional posts that may interest your readers to bring them back to your blog.
- Displays social share icons to encourage your readers to share your content
- Displays latest post comments to encourage increased interaction on your blog
- Allows you to create a targeted campaign to specific posts and pages
- Displays a copyright notice on every RSS post.
This is really an awesome list of features that can really encourage your subscribers to interact with your blog and share your blog posts more with others.
If you are already a subscriber to my rss feed, you may have noticed the changes after I installed this plugin earlier this week. If you are not subscribed to my rss feed, you can visit my feed to see this plugin in action. (and while you’re there, take a moment to subscribe to get regular updates to this blog)
As I stated earlier, this is a premium plugin, but I think it’s well worth a premium if you are getting more interactions and increased traffic back to your website in the bargain. Readers from RSS 2 Blog costs $37 for a single license, and if you have multiple web properties, then you can get the unlimited license for $97.
When I installed this plugin, I saw the potential power of this plugin right away. Just take a look at what my feed looks like now:
Beyond the benefits of increased interaction and traffic, this plugin also introduces a copyright notice to the footer of each feed post:
As a blogger, there is a concern of potential rss scrapers stealing content and passing it off as their own.
When I first started this blog, I discovered a post that had been copied directly off my blog. I was lucky in that one of the tags in that particular post had the name of the blog, riches corner. So when that person copied my post, the tag also went along intact, which was how I discovered the infringement.
I quickly emailed a take down notice, which received no reply. In fact, the person tried to IP ban me from their site so I couldn’t track their further infringements. Of course, that was easily bypassed. After weeks of polite emails, then threatening emails, I was finally able to get them to remove the copied material. But it was a headache. And frankly, I was a bit hurt and angrier than I thought I would be about that situation.
A copyright notice is just the type of official warning that my RSS feed needed at the time that might have helped me avoid all of that. Frankly, I would have gladly paid a flat $37 to avoid that whole headache, but I didn’t know about this plugin back then and suffered for it.
Of course, I’m glad to say that Readers from RSS to Blog does much more than include a simple copyright notice. All of the sharing, interaction, and targeted campaigning features really makes this a powerful tool.
If you get a chance, check out my RSS Feed and if you like the look, then head over and pick up Readers from RSS to Blog. You won’t regret it.
Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
Hi Richard, I was wondering if it worked with Feedburner but I see that’s what you are using too. $37 is pretty steep but I’ll definitely give it some thought.
@HotBlogTips I would say give it some thought. Though $37 does seem like a lot, I’ve already noticed increased visits to older posts and I figure since it’s a lifetime license, spreading the cost out over time makes it much more worth it.
That’s pretty cool but the only downfall I see to that is why would they then want to stop by your blog if you are giving them everything they need in the feed itself?
I know that some people feel social proof is enough for them which means all the shares and likes but I would much prefer having them stop by my blog then bypassing it altogether. Just a personal preference I suppose.
The copyright notice is an added bonus. I just check my blog every so often for copyright issues so for now that’s enough for me.
I can see why a lot of people would like this plug-in though so thanks for sharing this. Glad you like it and that’s what matters right!~Adrienne
@AdrienneSmith I think of it a little differently. I wouldn’t say that the feed gives them everything they need. However, the additional features gives them reasons to come back to the blog as well as sharing your post directly from the feed itself.
So, for instance, the related post list gives the subscribers a short list of posts that may interest them. So they may come back to your blog to read those other posts. Also if they share your post from the feed, the links go back to your blog, so they are bringing new visitors to your blog as well.
Take the flip side. If you are posting a complete post to your feed, then the subscriber reads that entire post right from the feed and doesn’t have much reason to go back to your blog. Some people deal with this by only posting summaries to their feeds. I don’t like this option because then it seems too forceful a method to make people come back to the blog. It may have the opposite effect of turning them off and causing them to unsubscribe.
So, a healthy balance is what this plugin provides. You can publish a full post to your rss feed, but at the same time have a list of random, related post suggestions for them to read and share buttons to share.
Of course, the listing of recent comments may also encourage them to go back and comment on the post itself. They can’t comment from the feed, but if they see an interesting comment and want to post a reply, they’d have to go back to your blog to do so.