One of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, WordPress has made serialized publication accessible without requiring extensive technical training or an expensive distribution system. Personal blogs form the great majority of WordPress content, but the platform is perfect for corporate use as well, flexible and approachable by employees with minimal training. The syndication feed (RSS feed) WordPress provides is one of the most versatile tools in the box. Here are five ways you can make your feed work harder.
Category Feeds
The ultimate in targeted content delivery, WordPress generates a separate RSS feed for every category you establish on the dashboard. Your readers have the choice of subscribing to any number or combination of categories to include only their chosen content and exclude the rest. This allows you to establish themed distributions that serve different audiences without annoying those audiences with unwanted content.
Hidden Feeds
The WordPress feed can also be used for private distribution of unsecured content simply by removing category links from the front of the site. The content remains searchable and visible on the site map so that it does not hurt your SEO, but unless you provide viewers with a direct link, it is not readily accessible. You can then provide selected consumers with the feed link to limit the number of people seeing your content.
Reverse Feeds
WordPress acts as a full-featured content management system that is able to establish hierarchies of parent and child pages, but it lacks native page linking. By publishing your content as a “post” instead of a “page”, you create native links between posts organized by date. By changing the publication dates, you control the order in which that content is presented, creating a linked and organized reading experience.
Nested Feeds
The hierarchy of parent and child posts allows you to display posts and post counts in a variety of ways. By establishing clear relationships between parent and child posts, your archive pages will automatically display content of related interest. Readers still retain the option to expand or narrow their range of content by controlling which parent-child relationships they view.
Subscription Feeds
The end goal for many bloggers is the monetization of their site. One option is to establish a secure feed that is only available to subscribers. WordPress offers the ability to make posts private, only visible to viewers that are signed in to their site account. These private posts do not hurt your SEO and remain visible in the site map.
