Creating Posts That Appear Only In RSS
December 6th, 2007 by CourtOk guys I found this trick earlier this week and realized that people could use it to increase their RSS subscribers if they used it properly. Only those of you that read my site in RSS are able to get this lesson. 
To create a post that appears in your RSS feed, but doesn’t appear on the homepage or category pages of your site, you can use the Advanced Category Plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you an interface where you can hide a post from certain areas of your site. Here’s what the interface look like:
I created a special category called ‘RSS Only’ for the posts that I intend to send only to my RSS readers. As you can see in the interface above, I checked the boxes next to Archive, Home, RSS Comments, and Search - this excludes the post from appearing in those areas. I, of course, left the the RSS posts section without a check mark because I want the post to appear there.
Easy Installation of Advanced Category Excluder
- Download the plugin. You can find a download link here: Advanced Category Excluder
- Extract the plugin. Right click on the plugin with your mouse and select ‘Extract All’, ‘Extract’, or ‘Extract Here’. Click ‘next’ a few times to finish the extraction.
- Upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder of your blog. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do this, visit this lesson that will teach you how to do it: How To FTP Using Filezilla.
- Login to your WordPress admin and go to ‘Plugins’. Find the Advanced Category Excluder and click the ‘Activate’ link next to it.
- On your plugins page you will now find a link to ‘ACE Dashboard’ which is where you can exclude a category from showing up in certain places.
That’s it, you’ve done it! Now when you want to give a post only to your RSS subscribers, all you have to do is add it to that category. If you can come up with a good piece of advice to use as bait, you should be able to use this trick to get an increase in RSS subscribers.
Now you’re going to have one more little issue that you’re going to need to fix. Now that you have a new category that you’re going to use to exclude posts, it will be shown in your sidebar. You don’t want this category to show there, so you’re going to want to exclude it. You’re going to want to edit your theme and find the piece of code in your sidebar.php file that looks like this:
<?php wp_list_categories(); ?>
That is the code that makes your categories appear in your sidebar. In order to exclude a category, you can change it to this:
<?php wp_list_categories(’exclude=8′); ?>
You’re going to want to replace the 8 with the category number of the category you want to exclude. Note: You will probably have to type this code out since WordPress has a way of messing it up. The two little quotes around the exclude command will probably turn into curly quotes. If you just backspace each and retype that code will work!
If you have any questions, you should be able to click to the post to comment. Even though it’s hidden from everyone, it still exists on my site. People simply can’t find it without getting it from RSS. 
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December 6th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Brilliant, simply brilliant! (slaps self on forehead)
December 6th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Why thank you Donna!
December 6th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Exactly my thoughts. I have the perfect blog to use this on!
December 6th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Very nice. Obviously it creates a URL for the post. Is the page visible to anyone who goes directly to the URL? For example, if this page is submitted to StumbleUpon, when visitors come here from SU will it be any different from any other page?
December 6th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Hey Steven, yeah it could still be submitted to Stumble. Anyone can access it if they know how to find it.
It’s the same as any other page except it can’t be found by clicking on the site.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Simple htaccess mod can make the page hidden as well, and same for SE’s
Art
December 6th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Also, what about the related posts? Will this post show up as a link in another similar post?
December 6th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Yeah it still could be found on a related post. I don’t think that would affect the benefit too much though. It would still be much easier for a person to subscribe through RSS.
There are quite a few ways people could find it actually. It would still appear in Technorati and Google Blog Search (and Google for that matter).
December 6th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
That’s what I figured. I agree, no harm in showing up somewhere.
December 6th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
I think that marking the post as private in the post status box also has the same effect; it shows in the RSS feed but not on the blog itself, and is much simpler.
December 6th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I didn’t want to do that because then it isn’t a real post. No comments, no crawl, no rankings, no traffic.
December 6th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[…] to my full text RSS feed. This message will only appear once. Thanks for visiting!Thanks to this post by Courtney Tuttle, I now have a way of sending posts directly to the RSS feed of the blog which will not appear on […]
December 6th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I’ve always wanted to do this. Thanks for the tip! Now it’s time to do my magic…
December 6th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Wow, I feel totally like an ‘insider’ because ain’t nobody else can see this but me! (and a few hundred others)
LOL
great tip, thanks!
AL
December 6th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Awesome! Thanks Court. I’ll have to stumble this to all my friends!
December 6th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Very cool plug-in.
Court-
I am surprised that you don’t use this plug-in installer. I find it saves tons of time as you don’t FTP anything or even unzipping. You just find the zip file and click install. Enjoy.
http://henning.imaginemore.de/pluginstaller
December 6th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Very cool installer Scott!
December 7th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Nice trick. Of course, the post will lack some inbound links, if published in this fashion, so they might not do so well in search engines.
December 7th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Very true! The work-around is to build link to it yourself with some articles.
December 7th, 2007 at 7:09 am
I think you may be onto something here. For years, we’ve been hearing half hatched schemes to entice more subscribers. This one actually makes sense.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Very nice little tricky!
Sphunn: http://sphinn.com/story/17577
December 7th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[…] while writing this post I select Private as the Post Status. You can use different method to Create Posts That Only Appear In RSS Feeds which uses a Plugin to select which post categories should be excluded from the Blogs archives, […]
December 8th, 2007 at 12:48 am
Very cool Court, and completely new to me, thanks very much!!
December 9th, 2007 at 9:42 am
[…] Creating Posts That Appear Only In RSS from CourtneyTuttle […]
December 11th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
[…] RSS-Only Articles. This involves the production of content only viewable by users who subscribe to your web feed. This is useful if you want to encourage subscriptions and I do think it can be combined with the mullet for extra promotional strength. Here’s a tip on how to create RSS-only articles. […]
December 11th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Thanks for the heads-up on this plug-in. Very useful indeed.
Stumbled.
-Hendry
December 16th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Nice plugin, not sure how I plan to use it, but going to install it anyway.
Jamie
December 17th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Ah man, I’m the only dumbass.
I’m new to blogging, and especially to wordpress.
However, great tip…. but the code appeared in Left Column, not Sidebar for me…
And it’s not working
It’s not appearing on the RSS feeds. I can’t get rid of the RSS option on the sidebar.
Genius though, can’t wait to actually get it sorted out.
Thanks
Chris
December 17th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Another tip for those using the category widget…
browse to wp-includes directory and find the widgets.php file. Open it in a text editor. Find the following code
$cat_args = “&orderby=name&show_count={$c}&hierarchical={$h}”;
and enter the exclude like so
$cat_args = “exclude=36&orderby=name&show_count={$c}&hierarchical={$h}”;
For best results, should exclude in both the widget and the sidebar so you can add or remove the widget anytime you want.
Hope this helps some as I spent the last hour working it out, lol.
Art
December 18th, 2007 at 2:56 am
[…] Creare un post che appare solo nei feed rss by Curtney Tuttle, geniale no? […]
December 18th, 2007 at 2:58 am
I’ve found a better one, so you don’t have to change your script.
http://www.tastycornbread.com/category-plugin/
Much easier. And it works.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:17 am
Unfortunately, that link is currently pointing to a expired domain/search ads type of page - not very useful
Cheers
Stephen
December 18th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
[…] My main goal for this is promotion is to raise my site’s RSS count and use this and some other upcoming tournaments to ramp my site to the next level. I plan using my RSS feed to my advantage similar to how Mr. Chow and Shoemoney did in their RSS competition. The password to the tournament will be posted the day of, and the post will only go out to my RSS subscribers. Thanks to Courtney Tuttle for the little tip on making a post only your RSS subscribers can see. […]
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:46 am
[…] Posts only appear in RSS [Court’s Internet Marketing School] […]
December 23rd, 2007 at 4:12 am
Looks good! I think I will try this. Thx
January 15th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
[…] RSS-Only Articles. This involves the production of content only viewable by users who subscribe to your web feed. This is useful if you want to encourage subscriptions and I do think it can be combined with the mullet for extra promotional strength. Here’s a tip on how to create RSS-only articles. […]
January 18th, 2008 at 5:11 am
[…] love to say it was my idea but it wasn’t; I found out who to do so from a valuable post on Courtney Tuttle’s blog. Take a look; unfortunately this post will leave a damned trackback but lets hope no one (else) […]
February 5th, 2008 at 10:17 am
[…] 5.RSS专有文章。这是指只有订阅了你的网站种子的用户才能看到你的内容。如果你想增加订阅的话可以采取这种方式，而且我认为把该法与鲱鱼策略结合使用效果更佳。这里有生成RSS专有文章的建议。 […]
February 16th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
The only flaw is that your posts will still show up in the category page.
http://courtneytuttle.com/category/rss-only/
March 10th, 2008 at 8:32 am
[…] to your subscribers but will not be displayed on your blog itself. I first read of this trick from Courtney Tuttle at this post. If you have a message that you want to go to just your subscribers, this might be a good thing to […]
March 16th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
It seems that if you include a list of your “recent posts” in your sidebar using the standard php get_archives(’postbypost’) structure… then the “hidden” RSS only posts will still be visible.
So to hide them there, I’ve found the “recent posts” plugin at http://rmarsh.com/plugins/recent-posts/ which allows you (among other things) to exclude selected categories from that list.
Cheers
Stephen
March 31st, 2008 at 11:27 am
That’s quite cool, however I’ve been wondering about doing the opposite - is it possible to make a post which doesn’t appear in your RSS feed?
April 6th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
[…] Tuttle has an excellent article that shows you how to setup an RSS Only Area. I’ve followed Court’s instructions and added a couple of […]
May 3rd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Perfect, just what need. I asked how to do this on Blog Premiere Forum, and they referred me to this page. Thanks!
May 27th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
[…] RSS-Only Articles. This involves the production of content only viewable by users who subscribe to your web feed. This is useful if you want to encourage subscriptions and I do think it can be combined with the mullet for extra promotional strength. Here’s a tip on how to create RSS-only articles. […]
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April 20th, 2009 at 6:23 am
Well in automated blog like it fetches from others RRS , can u tell how to do on them?
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