RSS helps drive traffic

Rafat Ali points to a press release showing the impact of RSS on the traffic at NYTimes.com.  I'm not sure, though, if they are counting traffic coming directly to them as a result of feeds being read in RSS readers or if they are counting any traffic coming from a link that ran in one of their feeds.  If someone picks up a link in your feed and posts that link in a blog post or on Slashdot or something, then your logs may show traffic that appears to come from your RSS feeds even if it comes from somewhere else.  

We're definitely seeing an increase in traffic coming from the InfoWorld RSS feed links.  There were over 46,000 "responses" from our Top News RSS feed in March which roughly translates into visits, about half of which are repeat visits, the other half new visits.  However, you can see from a spike at the end of the month that either our RSS feed subscriptions went through the roof or somebody posted a link from one of our feeds on a site that then drove a ton of clicks to InfoWorld.com.  Upon further investigation, we found that Slashdot, Fark and Google News were all pointing to InfoWorld.com using URLs found only in our RSS feeds.



Regardless, I think this discovery helps make the case that RSS is a great way to syndicate your content and get more exposure for your URLs out there on the web.

Trackbacks: