Tutorial: Use An RSS Aggregator For Traffic Generation

RSS is an older technology that nevertheless remains useful for certain segments of the internet population. The rise of social media took wind out of its sails, and more recently, AI-powered content discovery tools have changed how people take in content online. That said, RSS can still be a fairly helpful means of traffic generation if you know how to use it. First let’s cover the basics.

What is RSS?

RSS is a technology created in 1995, in the early days of the web - it stands for Rich Site Summary, though most think of it and refer to it as Really Simple Syndication. Before RSS existed, staying up to date with great websites meant either memorizing URLs, maintaining a growing list of bookmarks, or checking sites manually on a schedule. That put a giant burden on the reader. RSS was designed to solve that problem.

The idea is to make it easy for a user to see when new updates come in without having to visit each site individually.

RSS feed readers are apps that allow users to subscribe to as many feeds as they like and see them in one area. Popular modern readers include Feedly, Inoreader and NewsBlur. When a user checks their reader they see the most recent posts across all their subscribed feeds, without ever needing to load a site that hasn’t been updated.

With AI-powered content tools now generating and distributing giant volumes of content, RSS has quietly regained some relevance with readers who want curated, source-controlled content instead of algorithmically selected feeds - it’s a niche but loyal audience worth tapping into. If you’re new to feeds, it helps to first locate your feed URL on WordPress before promoting it to potential subscribers.

What is an RSS Aggregator?

An RSS feed is a stream of content from one single source, provided so a reader or browser can pull that information. A feed reader is an app that lets a user subscribe to as many feeds as they like and view them all together. An aggregator is like a reader with an output.

The RSS aggregator we’ll be referencing in this post is the WP RSS Aggregator. Since 2013, it has helped over 50,000 websites bring content together from multiple sources. You plug in your feeds and it outputs one single RSS feed containing the content from each source - it remains one of the most robust and well-supported options available for WordPress users.

How to Find Your RSS Feeds

Most websites have RSS feeds built in. They come standard on WordPress and other CMS platforms. Generally, all you need to do is go to the home URL for a blog and add /feed to the end of it. For example, on this blog, going to the home URL and appending /feed will surface the RSS feed.

You aren’t making an aggregated content stream out of just one blog. So for this step, you’ll have to find each RSS feed relevant to your presence as a brand and as an author.

Start with each site you own. Find the RSS feed for each blog and note it down. Next, find sites you’ve written for and find your author page. If that site runs on WordPress, adding /feed to the end of your author page URL will usually produce a feed of just your posts on that site.

Some sites will redirect narrow RSS feeds like that to their main site-wide feed. If that happens, a workaround is to use Zapier to create a workflow that takes the primary RSS feed, filters it for posts with your author name, and outputs a custom RSS feed - this works and integrates cleanly with most modern publishing setups.

Find feeds for every place you publish content. Each time you pick up a new publication, launch a new site, or are accepted as a contributor elsewhere, find their RSS feed and add it to your aggregator.

Combining Feeds with RSS Aggregators

Using the WP RSS Aggregator plugin, all you need to do is click to add a new feed source and fill in the details: the name of the source and the feed URL. Once your sources are added, go into the main plugin settings and set your custom feed URL and title. The default is /wprss, but changing it to something more human-readable is recommended.

If you don’t use WordPress, web-hosted alternatives like RSS Mix or Zapier’s RSS tools can accomplish the same goal. The trade-off is relying on a third-party server to pull and aggregate your combined feed, which introduces some dependency and less control.

There is a branding ingredient worth mentioning here. Make sure your aggregated feed is identifiable as yours. For users who follow a large number of sources in a feed reader, unbranded content can get lost in the noise.

Taking Advantage of RSS for Traffic

So what can you actually do with a core aggregated RSS feed? Here are the most helpful options in 2026.

Automate social media promotion. Tools like Zapier and Make (formerly Integromat) can monitor your aggregated RSS feed and automatically push new posts to your social profiles. Remember that IFTTT has scaled back its free tier over the years, so Zapier or Make are usually the better options now for anything past basic automation. Set the trigger to your aggregated feed URL and the action to whatever social platform you want to post to. Use fields to make the output look natural instead of robotic.

Where can you post? With automation in place, each time a post is published to one of your sources, it flows into your aggregated RSS feed and gets pushed out automatically. You can send it to Buffer, LinkedIn, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, or trigger a new post on another WordPress blog. Remember that Twitter/X’s API access has become more restricted and expensive since 2023, so factor that in when planning your automation stack.

Another idea is to publish a digest of new content via email. You can create a mailing list for readers most interested in your new content and set up RSS-to-Email in your email marketing platform. Mailchimp, Kit (formerly ConvertKit), GetResponse and most other platforms support this as a standard feature. The main danger here is frequency - if you publish multiple posts in a single day, subscribers may receive a few emails in a short window, which can spike unsubscribe rates. Think about setting a daily or weekly digest schedule instead of triggering emails on every post.

Syndication is another strong use case for RSS. You can use your feed to syndicate content to blogs and publications that accept duplicate or syndicated submissions. Business2Community and niche industry publications accept syndicated content. Check within your niche, as most industries have at least a few publications open to syndicated contributions.

A few things to keep in mind when syndicating:

• Some sites only want content from your main blog, not an aggregated feed from multiple sources.
• Some sites have blacklisted competing domains, so check before submitting a feed that pulls from multiple publications.
• Some sites require a full-text RSS feed rather than just a summary or excerpt. Make sure this is enabled in your settings if needed.
• Some sites require an approved author account before they’ll accept a feed submission.

Also make sure that you don’t add syndication destinations back into your aggregated feed. A post triggering the feed which triggers a syndicated post which triggers the feed again is a loop that can get your account flagged or removed very quickly.

Alltop remains a blog directory worth submitting to - it shows the most recent five posts from submitted blogs, organized by industry category - and it’s free to create an account. Once submitted, an editor reviews your recent content and, if it meets their standards, approves your feed. From that point, your RSS feed keeps their listing updated automatically.

You can also investigate communities where RSS usage is higher than average. Inoreader and Feedly have discovery and community features that let you surface your feed to new readers who are already in the habit of following RSS feeds. These audiences are smaller but tend to be very engaged and loyal.

Blog comments on sites using CommentLuv give you another minor but RSS-adjacent traffic opportunity. By linking your RSS feed to a CommentLuv account, your recent posts can be surfaced alongside your comments on other blogs, with followed links that carry more SEO weight than a common comment link.

These are just a handful of examples of how you can use your RSS feed as a traffic asset. In an era where AI is generating and distributing content at unprecedented scale, having a clean, structured, human-authored RSS feed is actually a differentiator. Readers who seek out RSS as a way to follow authors and sources are doing so because they want to bypass the algorithm - and your aggregated feed gives them that.