When RSS hit the Internet, it was claimed that it would kill off email lists because people would switch to their RSS aggregators instead.

It never happened.

RSS, or Realy Simple Syndication, keeps track of websites without visiting them daily.

Your reader gets the latest content from the website and shows you the headline and a summary.

If you want, you can click the headline and read the post.

Once you’ve read a post, it’s removed from the list.

That last bit is why I think it never realised its potential.

People don’t want to keep all their emails, but they don’t want to delete them all either.

If there had been an RSS reader that behaved more like an email client, it might have done better. Who knows.

The other thing that might have contributed to its demise is that some marketers realised that having lots of RSS links on platforms gave them an ever-increasing number of backlinks for every site they set up.

That doesn’t work anymore because most public RSS aggregators have closed down.

That doesn’t mean that RSS is not helpful.

Most websites have an RSS feed link you can exploit.

You can use several tools to gather content from websites in your niche to help you create content for your site.

You can write content based on the central idea in the post, or you can curate that content for your site.

There are plugins for WordPress that will take an RSS feed, create a post for you, and publish it.

That’s not the best way to use them, though.

The best way is to have them create the post as a draft for you to edit.

Regards,
Brent.

P.S.  I had a training module on using RSS feeds with a list of 30 or so sites you could submit your feed links.

Before releasing my latest product, I tested the links, and most of them have gone.

The remainder wants a fee for every link you submit.

That module is no longer relevant, so it’s gone.

There are probably other things in the modules that I need to change that I haven’t found yet, but that’s the nature of the Internet, it’s a dynamic medium, and we all have to remain agile to profit from it.

This tool, https://go.wm-tips.com/riffer, helps you gather relevant RSS feeds and either riff on the blog or curate it.

Blog riffing is copying a quote from another blog and writing a blog post based on or inspired by it, usually with a link to the original post.