RSS – A Brief Intro
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is a way of allowing your blog visitors to have your blog posts automatically delivered using a method of their choice rather than having to manually visit your web page every day to check for updates. This is particularly helpful when somebody reads many blogs as they can use a tool called an RSS reader to read all of those blogs in one place.
The RSS feed is a unique URL published by the blog, this is what is needed for your visitors to subscribe to your blog with RSS. You’ll be glad to hear that there is very little to do, as all the blog platforms have the RSS technology already built in, including WordPress. In fact, chances are you won’t have to do anything if you have already chosen your theme.
What you do want to watch out for is that your RSS icon will be clearly displayed in the top section of the blog theme. If the visitor needs to scroll way down to get to it, choose another one. Be sure that the icon is relatively large and that it stands out. Fundamentally, you need to be sure that your visitor’s eyes will be drawn straight to it. If it’s tucked away then it more than likely won’t get used.
Should You Choose a Full or Partial Feed?
RSS has a feature that allows just a snippet of your post to be published to your RSS feed and if a reader wants to read the full entry then they must click through to your website to continue reading. By default, WordPress is setup to publish full feeds which means that your entire post is published to the feed. To check what setting you are on, from your WordPress Dashboard click on ‘Settings’ and then ‘Reading’.
There are good and bad points to each method. If you publish the entire post to the RSS feed it means that the reader will no longer need to visit your website as they can view all of your posts on their RSS reader. It may be that that scenario does not suit you, as it would mean that the reader will not see any of the ads on your pages. However, Google have recently changed this by setting up a system that will allow ads to be embedded straight in to your feed.
Now there is something to understand about RSS readers – these are people who understand the Internet, they know what RSS is, they have chosen their RSS reader, they have decided to subscribe to your feed because they want to hear what you have to say and so they are far less likely to click on an ad than somebody who arrived at your website from a search engine. Also, these people are hungry for information which is why they are using RSS in the first place.
The use of an RSS reader will allow them to view all of their chosen blogs speedily and saves them from the need to navigate round a whole horde of websites. The downside, then, of only sending a partial feed to your reader, is that if these people are forced to then have to click and follow through to your website, they may simply not bother, and many may even unsubscribe. This then means that your posts do not get viewed.
My recommendation is that if you are growing a social blog where you want to build up an audience of loyal readers who read every word you say then make the feed full. If you are creating a commercial blog which is heavily monetized and you are not so bothered about readership then make it a partial feed.
On-page ads, however, are not the only revenue that can be generated by your blog. When you have learned how to utilise your blog to create much greater revenue streams, it will not matter whether your readers follow your posts on your website or via an RSS feeder. With this in mind, a full feed would be my recommendation.
Utilization of a Feedburner
If you are using the unchanged WordPress theme then you will not need to do anything for viewers to be able to subscribe to your feed. However there will be no way to see how many readers have subscribed. If this is an issue and you want to know your subscriber number, then a Feedburner service will allow you to be able to track it.
Feedburner is a completely free service which is run by Google and it is extremely easy to setup. Once you have signed up all you need to do is to give Feedburner the URL of your original blog feed and it will create a new Feedburner URL for you. Then you edit your WordPress theme to use this URL instead.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a nice piece of software that allows you to track all kinds of stats about your website such as how much traffic you have had, what keywords are used to find you, other links that point to you, the location of your visitors and a lot more. It’s damn good software and it’s completely free!
You will have to insert a website profile for your blog once you are all signed up. This just requires you to put in the URL of your blog and possibly your time zone, if you wish, then it will provide you with some code that you should display on your pages. Just click and copy the code on to the clipboard.
To put the code onto your WordPress blog, you can do it manually but that involves editing your theme files and if you change themes you will have to do it again. Instead, I recommend Semiologic which manages your Analytics for you. The download page has full instructions on how to use the plugin so I don’t need to repeat it here.
Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since September 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She teaches how to make money blogging and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.
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