The most common mistakes bands make with RSS

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
by Mark Carras

What the hell is RSS? It is a way for you to get your band news out to more people. It will make your band’s website ten times more powerful. Trust me on this. There are some major label bands that have RSS feeds but are making some horrid mistakes.

Many people are starting to use RSS readers to put all of their online content on one page they can check in the morning. No one has time to check a few hundred websites before they go to that job they hate so much. RSS readers solve that problem by routing all the content into one place. Do you really care if they visit your site? Or is it more important that you get the information out? Make sure to use an RSS feed so people can get information about your band with as little hassle as possible. Now RSS is something that most bands do not understand at all. They always make one of three mistakes.

The first mistake is not giving up all the content in the RSS feed. Remember that it is more important for a band to get out the info than it is to get a website visit. Whatever software you use to run your site should have a section in the admin panel for RSS that will ask you if you want to give the RSS feed the entire article or just a sample. Give the entire article if you are a band that wants to get their information out to as many as possible.

The second mistake is not giving each article it’s own unique website address in the RSS feed. When going down the RSS feed, people will open up a tab of the articles they want to read later. If it just opens up to the main “News” section then people will not be able to find the information they want and will get frustrated. What if someone wants to email the article to a friend? Link to it on another website? Does your RSS feed give them a direct website address to the specific article? It really needs to!

The third mistake is that the RSS is not formated the same as the actual article. This will take a good content management system. The easiest one to work with is Word Press. It is the most common and so you will be able to get help with it pretty easy.

Now of course the most common mistake is to not have any RSS feed at all, but I won’t count that because any band smart enough to be reading this article  would not be making that mistake.  Of course if all you have is a MySpace page none of my articles will help you. So I’ll assume you didn’t make that mistake either. Some signed bands are even making that mistake. So very sad. Get a real site and get a good RSS feed.