Should You Send Daily RSS Feeds?
Are you one of those bloggers who feels the pressure to write a post every day on your blog and send your RSS feed out with every post? Well, not so fast! You could be turning off your readers by doing this. Many behaviorial studies have been performed on internet usage and they’ve found there is a point where people turn off when they get too much e-mail information from the same source.
Advertisers who sent e-mails LESS often, had MORE of a chance of getting their e-mails opened and possibly responded to. For an advertiser the golden number was one e-mail a month, unless they had a special offer that “really wowed” the customer and enticed them to open the e-mail. In that case, 7 times out of 10 it would get read, but any more than that, and the customers would turn off to the e-mails. Advertisers who use e-mail campaigns find that if they send correspondence to the same people regularly, they quickly turn off to the mail and even find them to be a big nuisance… especially if they’re received on a consistant basis. The campaigns that sent e-mail ads every day, and sometimes more than once a day, got the worst response. These e-mails were sent to the delete box and the recipients thought of them as having little or no credibility. The more e-mails they got from the same source, the more the recipient considered them scams and of course they would not get read! This is very important information for bloggers because the same could be happening with your RSS subscribers if you overload them with e-mails on a daily basis. You could be thought of as a “pest”!
This flies in the face of conventional advertising (as opposed to online advertising) where the more a person sees the name of a product or service, the more prone they are to remember and respond to it positively. It’s true that familiarity with a name causes people to have a good association with that name, but if you are “pushing” that name or brand onto a customer and intruding on his privacy, it has the opposite effect. (E-mails are considered pushing ads onto a customer whether they agreed to give their address or not. People feel their mail is a private space.) If an advertiser pushes a brand or product with too much correspondence, the recipient perceives them to be a nuisance. The more mail they get from an advertiser, the more they think of them as not just spam, but SCAM. As a result they completely tune out, skip over it, and want absolutely nothing to do with the advertiser anymore. The brain puts them on the back burner and they always become thought of as unimportant and irritating.
How does this relate to your blog? Do your own survey and find out. How many RSS feeds do you open and read each day? Do you read RSS feeds and go to the blogs that barrage you with e-mails every single day and sometimes more than once a day? Probably not. If you’re like most people, you read them in the beginning… when you’ve first discovered the blog and liked the information they gave you, or the way they made you feel when reading the blog. After that you start to get too accustomed to seeing their name on your daily Inbox list. As each day wears on, your subconscious mind tells you to ignore that certain e-mail, along with all of the others you see daily and don’t respond to.
As bloggers, I think most of us make our rounds on the blogs according to the comments we get on our own blogs (so don’t ever underestimate how important it is to comment on other blogs if you want to up your own traffic!) I visit whoever comes to my site and makes a comment or leaves an Entrecard and of course I have my favorites that I visit weekly like ProBlogger.com, JTPratt.com and others to see where they lead me. I’ve tested myself after hearing about the studies and I know that I tend to become immune to seeing the same mail daily… I DO block it out… I’m sorry to say that I do delete a lot of RSS feeds in my mailbox because I cannot keep up with them.
If you do post daily there is a way to combat the problem of people tuning out to your RSS e-mails. Send your RSS feeds on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and give an excerpt of each day’s post just as John Chow and some of the other big bloggers do. It gives the reader a breather from seeing your name all of time and makes your name pop out and get attention. It also gives them a chance to decide which posts they find to be interesting. You’ll definitely get a better response that way then by giving your readers daily feeds of your posts and overloading them with information.
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Comments
Hi JJ- Trick or Treat!
You are right on the money with this one. It becomes Junk Mail. I do the same to some. An email a day starts adding up and I can forget about important emails. That’s why I have them sent to another email address.
I love to know when new information is added, I appreciate the bi-weekly emails. Recently, a blogger changed from the daily to bi-weekly. I visited him more often just to know why…. Happy Halloween ~ Laura
Thank you Laura…. I will send you’re candy via PayPal!! lol I haven’t seen any “little goblins” yet, but I’m waiting. (whatever candy is still here after 10:00 is ALL MINE!)
Hei, I’ve just came by to know about making money using blog on your site. Love to read your MomsCashBlog’s Free Blog Tutorial. Hope I can make it true. Wish Me luck
<em
Hi JJ, I have two-sided opinion!
1. Usually I subscribe to RSS Feed of my Favorite Blogs through Google Reader. I prefer Google Reader than Email Subscription because earlier I used to delete a lot of Email RSS feeds as you did! Sometimes it is irritating to see more than 2 or 3 posts per day of same a blog in our Inbox. Also I don’t want to lose them too, so chose Google Reader! And I think subscribing to weekly email newsletters (like Problogger) can also be preferred.
2. On the other hand, as a blogger, I think more than a post per day is good for us!
Because I had read some articles that Google likes doing this! Also I noticed that my blog’s visitors decline slightly when there is a day without a post in my blog (Don’t know whether this happens to other bloggers) 
As you said, providing weekly or bi-weekly newsletters in our blog is good too!
Thanks the interesting helpful article
Shafar
Hi Shafar, You’re right, there are two sides to it (as with anything!) As bloggers, we’re used to getting a lot of RSS feeds as we know it helps us and our blogger friends, but these studies are done on the “average internet user” so I think the info is useful for anyone trying to get and keep the non-bloggers as readers.
I will try the Google Reader. Thanks!
I should of known this just by my own habits but I guess I might of been thinking that it might of only been me.
Blogs that update less frequently (1 or 2 times a week) I read every post. Blogs that update everyday I might read 1 out of every 10 posts a lot of the time.
Plus a lot of the time as quantity goes up quality goes down, so thats something to be aware of if you’re posting like a fiend
Hi Roy, I agree… as the quantity goes up, the quality usually goes down. Marketing studies prove that when info moves too quickly people will leave and never come back. They tend to stick with sites that go at a slower pace. (But daily posting is good for PageRank so many bloggers would never slow down, no matter what studies say. lol).
Hi jj,
This is a very interesting post. I’ve been trying to show off in my readers’ inboxes as frequently as I can in order to brand myself. I usually don’t post more than once a week, but last month my posting frequency increased and I noticed a decrease in the e-mail opening rate. I was already thinking on a weekly newsletter with the latest posts among other information, but after reading your post I’ll probably go for a bi-weekly newsletter. Thanks!
Hi Anthony– Good to see you have actual proof of what I’m saying in this post. People become “desensitized” when they see e-mails from the same name every day. It’s like the old saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder!” lol
Myself, I’m having trouble with Feedburner. I bought this blog and I never got the password to it so I had to start another account. Now I have control over half of my RSS feed subscribers and no control of the other half.
Why don’t you ask everyone who is not in the new list to just subscribe again to your new feedburner account? Probably some of them won’t do it, but at least you will have control over a bigger list than what you have now.
Thanks for commenting on my site again. Glad you came back!
I think this was a great article, even for newbies like myself. This is the kind of wisdom and foresight that will help prevent us from making these types of mistakes on our own sites. I’m a firm believer in learning from your experiences, but I’m all for avoidance anywhere possible! 
Great food for thought, as many of your posts seem to be. 
Great idea Anthony! I will try that and see what happens. Thanks for the tip.
Ze… It’s good to learn from your own and others mistakes, and ALWAYS experiment. By the way, I love that name, Mominator.com. (you are lucky it wasn’t already taken!)
Congratulations to Barack Obama!
I’m soooo proud and honored to have him as our president!
yeah i definitely agree, if you’ve ever used hopurl you know they spam you all day every day and literally 100% of it goes in the trash
do anything fun for halloween??
Hey stak… I didn’t do much for Halloween.. just scared a few kids and I didn’t even have a mask on! lol
trzelg
I don’t get the whole “send out your feed” thing. Items are placed in your RSS feed automatically as soon as you publish the post. You shouldn’t have to do anything manually.
Chris… you can set it up so that you send excerpts of your daily posts and have it sent on a weekly basis. (If you get John Chow’s RSS you’d see what I mean.)
Call me stupid, but I can’t seem to find a way to send out a weekley email with a weeks worth of posts automatically. I’m currently using feedburner but they don’t seem to have this option quite yet. Do you have any ideas?
Tim
I’m not sure how RSS works on my WordPress blog. I’ve set it to just be excerpts but I don’t know how it is getting fed.
I use FireFox and LiveUpdate for my own subscriptions and I see my own blog okay. There must be some kind of feed in WordPress. I obviously need to do some more research on this one at some point. First I need to get some readers 8=) before they can get annoyed at seeing me every day.
Shalom
Well, very interesting article … thanks
Very interesting.
Thanks, very interesting
Well, very interesting article … thanks