Subscribers are solid gold. You need them, and the only way you will get them is if you offer them good content, with a means to subscribe. Enter RSS feeds. RSS is probably one of the most important commodities for any blog. It drives “free” visitors to your content, and allows you to know your messages will be heard at least by some – so it’s all about building up a good base. Maximize the potential and optimize the effectiveness in 6 easy steps…

1) Feed it up!

Don’t just have 1 RSS feed, have many! Have an RSS feed for your comments, your categories, your tags, and even a feed per article. Blogging systems like WordPress just do this, so it’s actually not that hard, but the theory is the more you offer, the more likely you will see subscribers – so do it!

2) Replace your basic RSS feed with Feedburner

FeedBurner is an RSS feed management system with lots of added extras, but mainly RSS subscriber stats. Without it, you’ll find it pretty darn hard to get any useable numbers out of your RSS feeds. Feedburner is also now owned by Google so some sweet integration with Adsense is already in place, however we should hopefully see more integration with Google Analytics this year!

Simply signup over at FeedBurner.com and start “burning” feeds. Instructions on implementation into your blogging system can be found on their site. Once you’ve built up a good subscriber number, you can then start showing off the stats on your site. People are drawn to big numbers… The mentality is, if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me!

3) Use ads to monetize feeds

The jury is still out on this one as to whether or not this is actually effective – from personal experience I haven’t seen any interest via RSS ads, but that hasn’t stopped me from including them! Feedburner has an easy to use feature for ad integration, so again – another good reason to use it.

4) Add social media links

Another no brainer – give the ability to your readers to share your useful article that they have just read and enjoyed at the bottom of each RSS entry. Again, another easy to use FeedBurner feature!

5) Pimp your RSS

Place prominent links to your feeds on your blog on all pages, as well as at the bottom of each post. Give your users every opportunity to subscribe, and keep reminding them to! I’m actually currently breaking this rule – I need to fix that!

6) Send out updates

Some blogs (WordPress for example) include the ability to send out updates to RPC services (You can find this under Tools -> Writing in WordPress admin). This is really helpful because it tells the likes of Google that you have just updated your blog and therefore your RSS, so services like Google Reader should re-index sooner rather than later. Otherwise, your readers are at the mercy of the re-index service so could be waiting hours before they see your content in their RSS reader applications.

Further Reading on this topic…

Developing RSS & Atom	RSS For Dummies	Beginning RSS & Atom

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 and is filed under Social-Web, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.