Here’s a one-time job that can increase traffic to your blog longer term and help with organic content marketing, namely....
Submitting your blog's RSS feed to suitable RSS submission sites.
Depending on the rules of the site in question, you can potentially do the same with RSS feeds for other types of content too, such Medium or your YouTube channel.
The sites listed here are as a result of trawling through literally dozens of such submission sites, and discounting all those that:
- Are outdated
- Have functionality problems
- Have credibility issues
- Don’t do anything after submission or otherwise ‘break’
- Just look like a ‘bad neighborhood’ type of website.
The remaining websites, as you’ll see below, are likely to both:
- Deliver clear benefits—in terms of traffic and online visibility—and…
- Be around for some time to come.
I’ve already submitted this blog’s feed to most of the RSS submission sites listed here—and invite you to do the same.
Download this list of RSS submission sites so you have it to refer back to:
Before we get to the list though...
What Exactly Is an RSS Feed?
Your RSS feed (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication) is a type of XML. That's simply a format for displaying information that can be read by machines and automated processes.
Your blog already likely has such a feed. Each time you publish a new post, it will be automatically updated to reflect the new content.
So websites subscribed to that feed can tell when you've published something new, and take an action of some kind, such as automatically displaying a link to your latest post.
Where Can You Find Your Feed?
RSS feeds are already built into Wordpress.
You’ll find it at /feed. For example, https://www.yourblog.com/feed.
Other blogs—and other content platforms —will differ. To find out the link for the feed, if it’s not otherwise obvious, look at the source code for the web page in question.
The feed's link should show in the header of your source code, and look something like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="https://www.everywheremarketer.com/posts.rss" title="EverywhereMarketer">
The application/rss+xml bit might say application/atom+xml instead—but it will still be an RSS feed (the 'atom' bit just refers to a different format, helping other sites to know how to read it).
Search the source code—use Ctrl & F, or cmd & F for Macs—for rss+xml or atom+xml to find the link.
For content platforms other than Wordpress:
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[CHANNEL ID]
- Medium: click here for information on supported feeds.
- SlideShare: https://www.slideshare.net/rss/user/[USERNAME]
- Quora: unfortunately no longer provided.
- Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/[USERNAME]/videos/rss
- Tumblr: https://[BLOG NAME].tumblr.com/rss
Even if RSS feeds aren’t directly supported by the site in question, you may still be able to generate one using Fetch RSS.
Got your feed?
Here are the list of sites you can submit it to...
RSS Submission Sites
Some of those listed here are of course more valuable than others.
The top 5 are likely to have the most impact in terms of organic marketing. For the list in general, some are specifically focused on blogs rather than feeds for other types of content (such as videos).
For each site, I've shown whether registration is required before submitting your feed.
Most have a review process of some kind. Acceptance is never guaranteed, but if your feed is technically sound, and the content good quality, there probably won't be a problem.
It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to submit your feed to each one.
1. Flipboard
- Registration required? Yes
- For blogs only? No
Once you’ve submitted your feed to Flipboard—and presuming you’re publishing regularly—the site will start sending you traffic.
It’s a very popular website, with over 100 million monthly active users, and according to Alexa is ranked as one of the top 5,000 sites in the world.
In essence, it helps publishers to “distribute to and connect with people who are passionate about your content”.
It’s a good idea to check their RSS guidelines before submitting your feed, as it will be reviewed prior to making your content public.
For example, I had to make a couple of changes for this blog before then submitting to Flipboard:
- Update the descriptions for the posts to make sure they're at least 300 characters long
- Add an enclosure tag to the RSS feed to provide a link to the header image
After submission, the initial validation was fairly instant, but there’s also a manual review process.
Unfortunately, a few days later I received an email informing me that for whatever reason the feed for this blog had not been accepted just yet:
So I'll double check everything and in due course try again. I suspect it's simply because the blog is still relatively new.
Note that, presuming you're accepted, Flipboard is most effective when you’re publishing content regularly and consistently. The site may remove feeds completely that haven’t been updated for six months or more.
Click here to submit your RSS feed to Flipboard.
2. Twingly
- Registration required? No
- For blogs only? Yes
Twingly indexes a million blog posts every day, using it to provide data, a programmatically-searchable engine, and widgets on partner sites that link to your blog.
According to their website, “thousands of organizations and companies around the world rely on Twingly to keep track of what is said about them and trends they follow”.
To be included, just add your blog’s URL—they’ll automatically find and index your RSS feed.
After submission, you get a suitable confirmation message (which was personally very reassuring after testing out so many other RSS submission sites not included here that just didn’t work!):
Click here to submit your feed to Twingly.
3. OnTopList
- Registration required? Yes
- For blogs only? Yes
This site is a regularly updated blog directory that also accepts your RSS feed URL when you submit.
It’s currently ranked around the 40,000 mark on Alexa, so gets reasonable traffic levels.
RSS feeds are apparently “checked for new entries every 24 hours”—though it’s unclear what happens as a result of that.
To have your blog actually listed requires either the addition of a linked badge to your site like this one:
Alternatively, you can choose to make a payment of an annual or one-time fee for guaranteed inclusion.
Click here to submit your feed to OnTopList.
Download this list of RSS submission sites so you have it to refer back to:
4. Blogarama
- Registration required? Yes
- For blogs only? Yes
Claims to be the oldest blog directory, with 150,000+ “active and moderated blog listings”.
It’s active too, currently ranking in the top 25,000 websites on Alexa.
New posts are listed on the website, with Premium and Business packages available for additional exposure.
To submit, you’ll first need to register, and then add a listing.
After submission, once approved, the site will start to automatically index posts via your blog’s RSS feed.
Up to 50 posts are indexed free, with payment options available for unlimited posts and additional features.
Click here to submit your feed to Blogarama.
5. Follow.it
- Registration required? Yes
- For blogs only? No
Follow.it is essentially a service that allows people to ‘follow you’ and get updates by email or other means of communication when you publish something new.
To do this, the service regularly checks your RSS feed.
Followers can select to be notified about new content in a number of different ways, from getting a daily email ‘Newspaper’ to receiving push notifications on their mobile phone.
They can also choose to filter exactly what they want to receive by using keywords, tags or authors.
If someone follows you via the link on your website, you also get access to their email addresses.
While you probably wouldn’t want to add these to a mailing list as they haven’t opted in, you could potentially:
- Connect with them individually as a lead.
- Use the email addresses for retargeted advertising.
To get started, click here and click the Sign Up link on the top menu.
Once registered and logged in, click to add a feed from the side menu.
Enter the URL of your RSS feed (or your blog), and click Next.
You’re then encouraged to add a customizable form to your website that might look something like this:
However, this isn’t compulsory to be able to take advantage of follow.it.
For example, many business owners and marketers—myself included—will want to prioritize an optin form for a list they can mail directly to.
Instead, you can add an icon to your site, linked to the special URL they provide.
On clicking the link, visitors see a page like this:
Even better, if they’re already a follow.it user and logged in, they’ll just see a Follow button.
That means they can follow you with a single click, giving you potentially higher conversions.
If you want to see how it works for yourself, click here for the follow.it link for this blog.
That doesn’t mean you have to actually follow, but you can see the page in action as an example.
As you might notice, I’ve also added a follow.it icon to the sidebar of this blog, and may add elsewhere in time too.
Use of follow.it is free, regardless of how many followers you might have.
You can however access premium features for a few dollars a month, depending on the number of followers you have.
Such features include the ability to:
- Define a redirect page for subscribers after they follow you
- Get alerts via email for subscribes/unsubscribes (along with unsubscribe reasons)
- Be defined as the ‘sender’ for the emails that followers receive
- And more
The premium features are actually quite appealing, and I’ll likely upgrade as my followers increase.
Either way, it will be interesting to see what results I get over time.
Overall, follow.it seems an exciting concept, with a ‘follow’ here potentially more valuable than one on say Twitter or Facebook.
With well over a hundred thousand websites already using follow.it, and over two million active followers, I suspect this service will grow and grow.
To give it a go yourself and submit your own feed, just click here.
Download this list of RSS submission sites so you have it to refer back to:
6. Pine.blog
- Registration required? Yes
- For blogs only? No
Admittedly I am less sure about these final two sites on the list than the top five sites above.
However, I have included them anyway as they may still have potential benefits.
Pine.blog is still relatively new and, while I’m not familiar with it yet, appears to be a type of social network.
People can follow people along with websites they’re interested in, whether blogs, YouTube Channels, news sites or other types of site.
They see content in a timeline—like you get on other social media sites—and can chat, comment, like and so on.
By adding your feed to their site, you potentially attract followers to your content and thereby increase your visibility.
The site also has an API available, which means that other apps can extract data from the site programmatically and potentially give your content additional exposure.
To add your feed, you need to register and login first.
Once done, click here to submit your feed to their feed directory.
Once submitted, it takes a few days for the feed to be approved and appear in their directory.
Indeed, after several days, I did then receive an email confirming inclusion of this blog within the directory:
7. Wingee
- Registration required? Yes
- For blogs only? No
Wingee claims to be “the world’s leading RSS directory” with only “human moderated high quality RSS feeds”.
It appears to simply list and link to RSS feeds in a number of different categories.
While it’s not clear how effective or useful this site actually is in practice, there’s probably no harm in submitting your feed.
One submitted, to get the feed reviewed and listed, you need to:
- Pay $2 as a one-time fee for a standard listing
- Get a featured listing for $5/month
- Add one of the links to Wingee they provide somewhere on your website.
As I’m writing about them for this blog post anyway, I opted for the latter, link as follows.
Submit your feed to Wingee: Submit Url.
To Conclude
I was unsure what I would find when I started looking for places to submit RSS feeds to, and how it would benefit the amplification of my content.
But after sifting through dozens of RSS submission sites, and whittling them down to the short list provided here, I was actually pretty surprised.
There are a number of useful sites here designed to amplify content, generate website traffic and build your online visibility.
Time will tell how effective they actually are in practice. For now at least it’s likely worth taking advantage by running through them and submitting your own feed.
As well as your blog’s feed, don’t forget the RSS feeds you have for other content platforms too (see the section Where Can You Find Your Feed? above for a list).
Submitting each feed is a one-time activity, so once done, that’s it!
Finally, take two secs to grab your free copy of this list of RSS submission sites so you have it to refer back to:
Download this list of RSS submission sites so you have it to refer back to:
