I’ve recently install Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer plugin on my WordPress blog.  The plugin allows you to place content (such as text or HTML code) at the beginning or the end of each post in your RSS feed, as well as add a link to the original post.  Here are three simple ways this can help your blog and your readers.

Promote your own content

An RSS footer is a great way to attract subscribers by offering them free, high quality content when they sign up to your RSS feed.  Chris Garrett uses an RSS footer to promote his “Killer Flagship Content” ebook as a free offer for his subscribers.

Fight scrapers and sploggers

If you have an RSS feed chances are at some point you will find your feed is being used by spammers or sploggers to steal your content and place it on their own website.  Although you can’t prevent this from happening you can at least try to expose them to any visitors who might think their website is original material and not stolen by placing a copyright notice along with a link to your own website in your RSS footer.

BloggingTips.com uses a copyright notice in their RSS footer to alert readers of spam sites to the stolen content and provide a link to the original material.

Help your readers share your post with others

I read several web design blogs and also some other photo-heavy blogs that contain very long posts filled with images.  Sometimes I get all the way to the end and want to get the real URL to share it via Twitter and have to scroll all the way back up to the start to find it.

Placing a direct link to the post using the RSS Footer plugin helps you readers quickly jump to the real URL for the post if they want to share it with friends.

Download the RSS Footer plugin for WordPress.

Tagged as: Plugins, RSS, WordPress