I'm such a noob!

I'm thinking about adding RSS feeds from a site.

How would this help a site and what are the benefits ?

What are the benefits if noone uses your feeds or visa versa?

Is there programs to read and publish RSS?

I assume you mean publishing your content via RSS. The advantages are that you give potential visitors another way to get your content. Not everyone wants to visit a site to read. Some prefer viewing things in a feed reader.

Just like some people will want to contact you by calling and others want to email. Give them both the option they want.

It also makes it easier for your content to travel, which can be both good and bad, but generally it's more good than bad. The bad is that it makes it a little easier for someone to republish your content as their own. The good is that by letting your content travel you can potentially reach more people. Most sites will be honest and post an intro to your content and then a link back to your site to read the rest.

RSS opens up another set of relevant directories and search engines that can lead to visits. Search engines tend to like sites that consistently put up new content. Not that your content will rank better because it's rss, but if you keep updating they'll come back more often. Blog search engines do give a boost to new pages.

If you're looking to publish basic content through rss any blog software will do the trick. It's built in. I use WordPress myself. When I publish a new post WP is set to ping some rss services and within a few minutes they all come crawl the new page and sometimes start ranking it right away.

The main advantage is that rss gives your content a chance to reach more people.

I'm for it and against it.

I don't mind it if I know where it's being syndicated to (e.g. Technorati, Feedburner, Google Blog Search). I personally don't want others reading my feed because readers aren't often participaters, and I want active participation to my blog (and exposure to the ads).

I still publish a full feed, but WordPress truncates any blog post at the <!--more--> comment line. I use the comment to ensure that I don't end up with 10 long post pages on my category and index pages, and it serves the added purpose of not displaying my full feed.

So I can see an argument either way. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

RSS can be steal by scrappers , but if they don't remove the link to your pages(that is copyright infrigements) you get some backlinks.

Adam there are a lot of people who are passionate about only subscribing to posts with full feeds. I used to publish partial feeds, because I didn't want my content taken so easily and I wanted people on my site.

But I looked into it and found far too many people saying they refused to subscribe to a blog that didn't publish the full feed. The people still click through to comment and also if you link to your other posts.

I've noticed subscription rate is up too since I made the switch to full feeds.

I don't necessarily have a problem with that, Steve. The people who refuse to subscribe to a blog because it doesn't have a full feed obviously aren't appreciative enough of the content that the blog offers to come back and provide the kind of positive contribution I would want anyway.

And i'm not going to go out of my way to hack the RSS feed file in WordPress just to placate people who will, in all likelihood, not offer something in return that would constitute a fair trade in my eyes.

That's just me, though.

RSS can get you some more traffic.
Just don't expect miracles.
If you use RSS on your own site to make it unique, put it at the bottom, the focus should be on th emain content.

If you publish your own, definitely this is great advertising for your site. you will get traffic through it. I use RSSGroud (used to be rssfeedgenerator)

I wouldn't say it's because they're not appreciative. Think about the people who might not be using a browser to read the feeds they subscribe to. Think of a standalone reader or one that's built into Thunderbird or Outlook.

I've been using the Sage extension for Firefox to manage my feeds and I do tend to click and read on site. But waiting for each page to load does take time. When I only read a few feeds it wasn't a big deal to wait a few seconds here or there for a page to load.

Now that I read a few dozen feeds that time to wait does add up and I'm rethinking the best way to read those feeds.

I'll still visit the sites though when there's a link in the feed I want to see or if I want to comment on a post.

There are also some ways you can place ads directly in the feed itself.

RSS feeds may not bring you search engine traffic for the keyword you are targetting but search engines would love you for fresh contents and will give you traffic from long-tail-keywords...