RSS is something that most people either love or hate. For those that love blogs, the RSS feed allows people to keep up-to-date very easily but is it for everyone? When RSS came into fruition, my outlook on RSS was an "alternative" to email updates; to give your users another option if they didn't like emails. This would hopefully maximise your user expereince by giving them multiple entry points to your website. RSS would give the opportunity to allow your users to be very reactive with your goods and services as a basic communication tool. 

I've never been an RSS addict but I did get hooked to a few commercial RSS feeds which allowed me to keep up with limited offers from retailers. My RSS activity apart from that is very spontaneous and a recent report from Forrester has suggested that I am not alone. Only 9% of Adult internet users are using RSS readers on a monthly basis (research undertaken in the US), 2% lower than 2008.

So is it worthwhile using RSS?
In my opinion, absolutely. 9% may sound low, but it is still a substantial amount of people. There are also added SEO benefits with RSS with the number of inbound links that can be achieved. Further Search Marketing outlines some effective ways to make RSS stretch online with directories and making it work effectively.

For the small amount of work, it seems very worthwhile due to the potential gains.

Related links:

• Forrester research with E-Consultancy 
• Using RSS for SEO (Further Search Marketing)