RSS Subscription Resistance - Quit Whining Already!

Posted by Laura Bergells

December 5, 2006

Subscribing to RSS feeds is an easy, informative, low-risk way to get started with blogging — yet, I have actually heard whining when I ask clients to subscribe and read RSS feeds. Instead of being excited at the prospect of evolving their business and their competitive and marketing intelligence, many clients seem burned out at the very mention of subscribing to feeds!

Given all the critical business intelligence people can glean from RSS feeds…not to mention the time they can save…why do new blogging clients so often balk when it comes to getting a FREE feedreader, subscribing, and reading feeds?

Here are my top three objections, and what I often say when I am faced with these plaintive whines. I may sound harsh, but if you have an online business, you need to hear the cold, hard truth about subscribing to RSS:

Objection 1: “Getting a feed reader is just one more thing I have to do. One more thing to learn. One more username and password to remember. One more task in my already too-busy day.” So, what’s the alternative? Bookmarking every page of every site you frequent, and visiting them to see if they might have changed? What a waste of time! With an RSS aggregator, you can quickly scan every site you frequently visit, mentally noting which sites have updated content before you go dashing off for a visit. If you see that there is no new content, you don’t have to waste your time clicking and visiting. You will absorb much more information in much less time. So stop wasting your time, and get a blog aggregator account right now!

Bottom line: if you don’t use an RSS aggregator, you are not only wasting time, you are falling behind in online learning and evolution. You risk becoming irrelevant as well as uninformed.

Objection 2: ”In the past, I have been burned with subscriptions to different sites. I enter my name and email address, and suddenly my inbox is filled with junk.” One of the key advantages of RSS is that it gives you the ability to subscribe to content you like without giving up any personal information. In the old days before RSS, you usually had to give up your name and email address in order to subscribe to online content and get regular updates.

But RSS subscriptions are different. With a blog aggregator or feedreader, you can silently and privately scan hundreds of pages at a glance without giving out personal information to hundreds of sites. The only entity that gets your email address is the feedreader service you choose. So with a feedreader service like Bloglines, you can subscribe without fear that your email address will get passed around like a bottomless bottle of booze at a frat party. You get to quickly absorb more content, more quickly, and feel completely worry-free.

Objection 3: “I’d rather just read an email every day instead of getting a feed reader account.” OK, now this objection is the complete opposite of objection #2! Many people have grown comfortable with getting their news via email, and they aren’t going to change any time soon. That’s why many free email RSS readers are sprouting up all over the internet.

Services like FeedBlitz, Squeet, and Rmail let you receive your feeds in your inbox. You give your email address to one of these services, tell them which feeds you want to read, and how often you want an email delivered with updates. This approach gives you more protection against spam, since you are giving your name and email address to only one entity.

There. Now you don’t have any excuses! Get yourself a feedreader (AKA blog aggregator) and start subscribing and reading RSS feeds! I like Bloglines, but their are hundreds of others, including:

Great News
NetVibes
NewsGator
MyYahoo
Google Feedfetcher
Rojo
Sage

…and the list goes on and one. So stop procrastinating! And quite whining! Do it today!

(I know I was tough on you. You will thank me later, because you won’t believe how much you have been missing by NOT subscribing! You’ll be amazed and excited by the time you’ll save while significantly boosting your online intelligence!)