Internet Marketing Strategies

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Bring Previous Visitors Back to Your Blog: Don’t Ignore your Blog RSS Feeds

One of the least understood aspects of blogging is RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication (amongst others) and is a way for others to receive your content without having to visit your blog. There are a number of ways people use RSS feeds, and the two most common ones are:

i.    As a source of content for their own website and blogs. If they find your content useful they can take your RSS feed and turn it into content on their on website or blog. This is known as syndication.

ii.    Instead of visiting your blog each time you make a post, they can plug your RSS feed into a feed reader. They will be alerted to your new posts and can then read your posts on the feed reader, for example the email client Mozilla Thunderbird allows users to subscribe to RSS feeds.

In either case you have to decide whether to provide a full feed (i.e. the whole post appears in the RSS feed) or a partial feed (i.e. only excerpts of the post are included in the RSS feed) in which case people who use your feeds will have to visit your blog to read the whole post. By default, WordPress automatically creates two RSS feeds - one for new posts and one for new comments.

The default WordPress RSS feeds are very basic. An effective way to enhance and manage your RSS feeds is to join FeedBurner, which has these main advantages:

i.    Feedburner will automatically translate your feed into a format (RSS or Atom) that is compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.

ii.    Feedburner gives you the option to add the rel=”noindex” element to your feeds so the search engines will not index your feed. This is important because duplicate content filters are indiscriminate and they could filter out your main blog content in favor of your RSS feed. By adding the “noindex” element, you ensure that only your blog content is indexed.

iii.    Feedburner has a “chicklet creator” which is simply a system for creating custom icons and the relevant html code from the popular web aggregators to help your readers easily subscribe to your feed.

To get the full benefits of joining Feedburner does mean the html code in your blog theme needs to be modified. The Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin from Steve Smith will do it for you. It works by forwarding all your feed traffic to FeedBurner.

Allowing others to subscribe to your RSS feeds is not the whole story… You can also monetize your feeds. Considering most RSS subscribers won’t visit your blog, and one of the main reasons behind blogging is to make money, it makes sense to monetize your feeds.

Feedburner has such a system, but it is only available to RSS feeds which receive a lot of subscribers. On the other hand, the Feedvertising plugin is free and allows you to run text link ads in your RSS feeds. The ads can come from the plugin supplier (Text-Link_ads.com), your own products, or your affiliate links.

If you decide to go with advertising in your RSS feeds, keep your ads relevant to the content in the feed, and be aware that you will lose some feed subscribers. There are people in this world who simply hate the idea that you are making money out of the free content you are providing…

Your Success - My Passion

Alejandro Reyes
skype:  whoisalejandro
yahoo:  whoisalejandro

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