RSS Feeds Must Be on Candidate Sites

In class this evening, we had a few representatives from Campaign Solutions come speak. Though, I think they do well on their sites, I must say, I think they are completely missing the ball on RSS feeds for campaign sites, due to the simple fact they do not understand their value.

It does not matter how small your campaign is or how rare the news portion is updated, YOU NEED TO HAVE RSS FEED ABILITY ON YOUR CAMPIAGN SITE!

• Speaker: We don’t put RSS feeds on our clients’ sites because most of our clients don’t update their news content often enough.

RSS feeds are essential for sites that do not update often. If you are not updating your site information daily I highly doubt you have people coming to your site on a regular basis. If you don’t have people coming to your site on a regular basis, many are missing your message when you finally do update your site. With an RSS feed you nullify this problem. As Aaron said:

Conventional web-publishing wisdom says that the way to grow and maintain your audience is to publish often. This is in part because people actually have to remember to visit your site... If all your readers are subscribed to your RSS feed, they don't have to remember to check your site.

Why make it hard on the user? Again, it is ALL about your user!

• Speaker: Another reason we don’t do RSS feeds is because we want to bring people to our site instead.

You can set up your RSS feed to only show the title and the first sentence followed by an ellipsis. Interested readers are then required to click on the article, which takes them to your site, to continue reading.