On many of my websites (which I almost always power with WordPress) I like to give people incentives to signup for my RSS feeds. This let’s me keep in touch with them and helps keep people connected to my website but it also offers me a great advantage in that I know that my audience is building.

One of the things that I do is offer content for those users in the form of a contest or promotion which only appears in my RSS feeds or often appears in my RSS feed days (or weeks) before it appears on the main site. This allow allows me to test content, get feedback from regulars etc. before it’s live.

Now there are a few plugins and tutorials on how to do this (Creating Posts That Appear Only In RSS) but I prefer to do it in a much easier way.

1. I create a category in WordPress where I’ll post items for the RSS feed.
2. I’ll exclude that category from results pages

That’s it .. very simple really.

For example, on my archives.php page I simply add the code ‘exclude=X’ (where X is my category ID) from the results, which ensures that any article found exclusively in my RSS feed is not published anywhere else.

The only problem is … this method forces me to add and remove items from the list in a method similar to how we used to have to place sticky posts in WordPress.

What do you guys think? Is there an easier way for me to do it?