RSS On-Site Promotion: To Market or Not to Market

I've been reading the comments to "What Can Seth Godin Do To Increase His RSS Readership", seeing that publishers and marketers need to make a fundamental yes or no decision regarding RSS marketing:

Are we going to use RSS to help us increase our marketing results?

Or in the case of publishers: Are we going to use RSS to increase our regular readership and entice more visitors to come back more often?

Or put more bluntly, are you going to use RSS for marketing or not?

The comments came "after" my statement that we should in fact use multiple RSS subscribe buttons from key RSS aggregators to get as many people as possible to subscribe to our feeds.

While all commentators seemed to agree that this more or less does the trick, many of them also think the idea is lame ... because it doesn't look good on the site, is just stupid and so on.

Some readers also proposed some other solutions, such as using a uniform subscribe button (good idea, but will you really click on a subscribe button without really knowing what hides behind?), coming up with a standard subscribe mechanism (another great idea, but we're not there quite yet) and using a single button to lead you to other buttons (hmmm ... how about for the users that don't know RSS?).

All of these ideas have merit and all are good, but they lack one thing: none of them answers the question of what happens, when a user doesn't know what RSS is, and we want to actually get that user to subscribe without him thinking for even a second.

Why don't we want them to think?

Well, because once they start thinking, they might not just want to bother to subscribe to our content ... they only have hundreds of other sources available to them with a click anyway:)

Why is the Yahoo! button so good? Simply because so many people are using it ... and most of those don't know or care what RSS is, but they are using that little button ...

Returning to the beginning --- this should not be turned in to a philosopical discussion on what looks better or what makes more sense, but should be simply about what works best.

Or as one of the commentators (Hendry Lee) to the post said:
"As a marketer, what we focus on is always result. One click subscription ease the process for consumers."