Generate More Traffic to Your Site with Aggregated RSS Feeds

Traffic is one of the most difficult things to obtain. It requires hard work, good content and most importantly consistency.

There are many ways to generate traffic for a site. Based on an investment standpoint, we can classify traffic generation into two channels – paid and unpaid. When we say unpaid, we don’t mean “free”.  We’ve all heard that saying –

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Paid traffic sources include:

• Direct advertisements – TV, radio, billboards, etc.
• Online advertisement – Ad networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, buying advertisement spots from reputed websites, etc.

Unpaid sources include:

• Organic traffic from search engines
• Direct referrals (word of mouth, etc.)
• Traffic from email newsletter subscribers
• Traffic from social media fans and followers
• Traffic from RSS subscribers
• And a lot more

When it comes to traffic, there’s one other dimension one must consider – quality. The quality of traffic is fundamentally important when it comes to measuring conversion rates.

There are many ways to gain social media followers. But, anything other than authentic subscribers is a waste of time, money and effort. There are countless services which can bring you 1,000 followers on Twitter overnight! At the right price, of course. But that isn’t real traffic – it isn’t going to improve your conversion rates. It’ll only cost you hosting bandwidth.

As a webmaster or content curator, your job is to generate quality content for your site. And getting quality content isn’t an easy task. Good copywriters charge 200-300 USD for a single article – prices which aren’t affordable for a site making 500 dollars a month. Even if you have a few good ideas in mind, you might not find the time to write them all!

Managing a site involves a variety of tasks and there must be room for unexpected events too! For example, if your web host goes down, or your site gets attacked, you need to stop everything you’re doing and fix that issue immediately.

Therefore, one must always be on the lookout for sources of genuine traffic.

Introducing WP RSS Aggregator

One of the ways to keep a fresh flow of content in your site is to syndicate content from other sources under the same or relevant category. What if you had a software that could go through the RSS feeds of a bunch of different sites and list their articles in your own site?

You’re probably thinking – “but isn’t that plagiarism?”

The answer is – no. Plagiarism is when you copy someone’s work and call it your own. That’s not what we’re doing here.

We’re merely listing the articles from the other sites in our own. Each item in the list contains the article’s title, source and permalink. The reader, if interested, would simply click on the link and be directed to the original site.

The Double Decker Benefit

This technique holds a twofold benefit. It is helpful to us as well as the original owner of the article.

How is this technique helpful to us?

We’ve talked about the subtle difficulties in generating quality content, right? Especially when it comes to keeping a steady flow of fresh content.

This technique gather articles from the RSS feeds of selected number of sites and lists them in your site. Your site’s visitors have something to read – something fresh. Admittedly, they will be redirected to a different site, but this is always better than an outdated site.

Something is better than nothing.

This technique essentially buys you time to produce quality content. Let’s face it – if your site is doing nothing but listing articles from other sites, people are going to stop visiting it.

How is it helpful to the original author?

Two words – free traffic!

Let’s place ourselves in the shoes of the receiver’s end, i.e. the site getting all the free traffic. All you have to do is, well, nothing! You’re getting free backlinks and exposure for your site, in other places. Normally, you’d have to pay to get things like these. But thanks to your consistent hard work, you can enjoy the fruits of your labour. People are linking to your site – for free!

Success Story – WPMail

WPMail is one brand that started a similar technique of aggregating content from a bunch of sites. Each week, WPMail prepared a list of the best articles from the top WordPress related sites and made a weekly newsletter out of it. People who subscribed to WPMail’s newsletter were getting handpicked articles on WordPress, delivered to their inboxes every week. Soon enough, their email list grew by the thousands, and today they are one of those sites with a large number of active email subscribers – without a single post!

Conclusion

This article highlights an authentic and plagiarism-free way in which you could legally syndicate content from another site. However, one must always remember that it is not a replacement for the content your site deserves. As I’ve mentioned earlier, this technique is a placeholder for your content. However, when you couple it with a steady influx of quality content, the benefits are rewarding.