Common RSS Marketing Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

With Firefox 1.0’s Live Bookmarks and tools like FeedBurner making RSS accessible to a much wider audience this year, more marketing teams started treating feeds as an active channel rather than a technical curiosity. Many of them made the same handful of mistakes along the way, most rooted in applying email marketing instincts to a format that works differently.

Treating the feed like an email blast

Email marketing trains you to write with urgency and a hard sell, because you’re competing for attention in a crowded inbox and every send costs you something in list fatigue. RSS subscribers pulled your feed voluntarily and can unsubscribe with one click, with none of the social friction of unsubscribing from an email list. A feed that reads like a constant sales pitch gets dropped fast. The fix is to write feed entries the way you’d write a useful update to a colleague: informative first, promotional second.

Publishing everything into one undifferentiated feed

Some teams route every piece of content, product announcements, blog posts, press releases and job listings, into a single feed. A subscriber who wanted product updates and nothing else has no way to filter that out, so they either tolerate the noise or unsubscribe entirely. Splitting content into a small number of purpose-specific feeds, one for product news and one for general blog content, for instance, lets people subscribe to only what they want, which keeps the subscribers you do have more engaged.

Ignoring the analytics that are now available

For most of RSS’s history, publishers had almost no visibility into who was subscribed or what they clicked on. That changed this year with FeedBurner giving real subscriber counts and click-through data. Teams that keep publishing on instinct, without checking which entries get clicks, are leaving free information on the table. Even a monthly glance at which entries performed best is enough to start noticing patterns worth acting on.

Chasing feed directory submissions

As RSS grew more visible, directories cataloging feeds multiplied, and some marketers started submitting to every directory they could find, sometimes with keyword-stuffed titles and descriptions designed to game the directory’s search rather than describe the feed accurately. This tends to attract low-quality subscribers who unsubscribe immediately and does little for genuine reach. A feed’s description should describe what it contains, aimed at someone deciding whether it’s worth their time, not at gaming a directory’s ranking.

Assuming subscribers behave like a captive audience

Email marketing has trained a generation of marketers to assume a subscriber who hasn’t unsubscribed is still paying attention. RSS doesn’t work that way. A subscriber’s reader might be pulling your feed automatically without them ever opening it, and unlike email, there’s no bounce or open-rate signal to tell you they’ve quietly stopped reading. Treat subscriber counts as a rough upper bound on attention, not a reliable measure of an engaged audience, and weight click-through data far more heavily when judging whether a feed is working.

The pattern underneath all five

Each of these mistakes comes from the same source: applying an email marketing mental model to a channel that runs on different rules. RSS rewards restraint, specificity and genuine usefulness because the unsubscribe barrier is so low. Marketers who adjusted their instincts accordingly got real value out of the channel this year. The ones who didn’t mostly just relearned, slowly and by watching subscriber counts shrink, that a feed isn’t an inbox.