Content Marketing

Your RSS feed is the marketing tool you already own

Damon Nelson
An orange retro radio and a lime green watering can on a sky blue shelf next to a laptop

If you run WordPress, you have had a free distribution engine since the day you installed it. Most people never touch it. It updates itself every time you hit Publish, then waits for someone to put it to work.

It is called your RSS feed, and four steps are all it takes to make it earn its keep.

The page you never knew you had

An RSS feed is a page that lists your newest posts in a format other software can read. People read your blog. Programs read your feed.

You did not have to build it. Google's guide to building and submitting a sitemap says most content management systems create RSS and Atom feeds automatically. On WordPress, yours usually lives at yoursite.com/feed/.

Picture the usual routine. You publish a post, then paste the same link into five different tools by hand. It feels like washing the dishes for a dinner you already ate. Meanwhile the feed has been sitting there the whole time, ready to carry that news for you.

Google already knows how to read it

This is the part most people miss. Google accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds as sitemaps. A sitemap is simply a list that tells Google which pages your site has.

Google even says RSS and Atom sitemaps are often the easiest kind to provide, because your content system makes them for you. So the same feed that lists your posts can also point Google to each new one.

Four steps to put your feed to work

  1. Find your feed. On WordPress, type yoursite.com/feed/ into your browser. Most other platforms make one too, so check their help pages.
  2. Check what is inside. Open the feed and make sure each post shows a title, a link and a description. Then make sure your posts have a featured image set, since many tools pull that picture when they share your work.
  3. Hand it to Google. In Google Search Console, submit your feed as a sitemap.
  4. Connect it to your sharing tools. Plug the feed into the tools that share your posts, so publishing once triggers the rest.

That last step is where BoosterPages fits. Add your feed once, and each new post is picked up and turned into a pin with its title, featured image and a short description. Each pin carries an image link and a static text link on a niche booster site.

If you already use RSSMasher posting schedules, you can include BoosterPages in those too. Either way, there is nothing new to copy and paste.

The work moves off your plate and onto the feed. You write, you hit Publish, and the sharing you used to do by hand starts happening on its own.