The Gospel According To Rhys - Colwyn Bay North Wales Web blog About Sport, Wrestling, PHP, SEO, Social Media & Networking

I have been suffering recently with my RSS Feed, and it has shown stats wise, the past couple of days have been about a third of what I usually get. Basically, it hasn’t been propegating properly, so the last post is my post on Car Number Plates, missing The Great Facebook Post. Feeds are crucial to blogs, so why do people don’t do as much as they should with them? Most of us burn our feed through Feedburner, but then what? Usually they do things that could detract from blogs, things like installing the Feedburner Feedcount (how many times do you subscribe to a blog with 3 readers? Didn’t think so). So what should you do to your feed to help your blog?

1. Subscribe To Your Feedmedic

One thing I have learnt with my Great RSS Failure of 2007 has been that you should subscribe to your Feedmedic. Rather than staring blankly at your feed, it’ll tell you if anythings wrong or not. Sure, it may get annoying getting half hour reminders saying “All is Well”, but when things do go wrong, you’re glad you have subscribed, so you can act quickly and efficiently.

2. Track Your Future Readers

In my opinion, getting RSS readers is the most important thing your blog can do if you want to grow your blog, and eventually monetize it. Feedburner has a stats package to give you raw numbers, but with a Google Analytics account you can track where most of your new readers arrive from. I explain how to do this in How To Track Your New Readers With Google Analytics in 3 Easy Steps, but for those familiar with refreshes and Google Goals, I will illustrate this with an image.

3. Put as much as Possible within your Feed (within Reason)

The next thing to do is not only get eyes on your feed, but get them to view your site. Of course, some posts such as my new design does automatically attract comments, but to add interactivity, why not add Feedflares to your feed? Feedflares contain links to the comment box, allow you to submit the feed to social networking sites, or even browse related posts.

One thing I wouldn’t recommend to encourage people to visit your blog is overdo things such as advertising (one link should be enough) as well as switching to a Partial feed (I can’t really formulate into words how bad partial feeds are, but doctorvee has produced a better thought out post than I could ever produce, and there’s a lot less swearing than I’d put in a similar post).

This post was written for the Daily Blog Tips “Tips & Tricks” Group Writing Project