I have recently experimented with a new technique that allows you to post content in your FEED only. That’s right…it won’t show up anywhere on your site but will be available in your feed. If you use this properly this could be a great tool to increase your RSS subscribers.

To create a Feed Only post you need to use the Advanced Category Excluder plugin. This plugin will allow you to hide posts that you save in certain categories. You can select the categories that you want hidden pretty easily and we will discuss.

To get the plugin it is the normal unzip and upload process. Once you have it activated you will see an ACE Dashboard under the plugin menu. This is what it will look like:

You can see the dashboard has a lot of information on it. All of your categories will be listed in each of 5 different columns… Archives, Home, RSS, RSS Comments and Search. These are the 5 different areas you can choose to hide posts from if you choose.

As you can see I have created a “Feed Only” category and I have check marked 3 of the columns. Essentially any post I make that I save to this category will not show up in any of these 3 areas.

Note that on the Feed Only Posts you DO NOT check the RSS section and the Comments section. If you do check these then your posts won’t even show up in your feed.

Here’s a bonus tip from the article as well…do you like entering contests but hate junking up your blog with contest entries? Well voila….here’s a solution. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

What Next?

A few issues remain to be taken care of and that is the Feed Only category will still show up in your sidebar. So an astute reader might still find it. If you want to do this 100% then you need to get into the template files a little bit. It’s not that hard but make sure you save keep a backup of your sidebar file.

The process may vary depending on your template so you may have to experiment a little bit. If your category file is hardcoded it should look something like this little snippet of code. You will find it in your sidebar file:

<?php wp_list_categories(); ?>

You will want to change it to something like this:

<?php wp_list_categories(’exclude=12?); ?>

You will need to change the 12 to whatever your category number is for your Feed Only category. You can find this if you go to Manage Categories on your Wordpress Dashboard. The Category number is to the far left of the category.

Category Widget

If you are using Categories as a Widget then the process is a bit more complex, still easy if you follow the directions though.

browse to wp-includes directory and find the widgets.php file. Open it in a text editor and Find the following code

$cat_args = “&orderby=name&show_count={$c}&hierarchical={$h}”;

and enter the exclude like so

$cat_args = “exclude=12&orderby=name&show_count={$c}&hierarchical={$h}”;

This only takes a few minutes and I would recommend that you should exclude in both the widget and the sidebar in case you decide to monkey with your template at a later date. Again note that you will need to put the correct category number in your exclude.

Practical Use:

Let me mention a few notes…even though the post won’t show up on your blog, it still very much exists. It will have a permalink like any other post and you can link to it or from it to other sites. If you’re going to use it to enter contests then you can still link to the post.

You will still see the hidden categories so you can go back and reference a hidden post if you need to as well.

Now how do you increase your RSS subscriptions using this tool? It should be kind of obvious but in case it isn’t…I will be publishing a Feed Only Post to discuss it in detail.

You can grab my feed and read it for yourself.