RSS and Blogs (Part 2)

Posted on February 18th, 2009 in RSS for Beginners

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In part 1 we discussed what RSS is and how you can use it. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, you might want to read it first (Here).

You may come across something called an Atom Feed. It’s similar to the RSS feed and can generally be sent to your reader as well. For our purposes, we will call the feeds RSS because we are speaking of general use anyway. (Don’t muddy the water…)

I must confess, I am no expert in these things but after getting it somewhat sorted out, I wanted to help others who are working their way through it as well. If you aren’t using RSS feeds to keep tabs on your favorite blog sites, you are wasting time checking each site daily. A reader makes things so much simpler.

Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s look at how RSS feeds affect blogs. First off, a feed makes your posts more accessable to your readers which helps you to build a blog community. The more people who follow you, the more likely they will be to visit and comment on your posts which adds life to your blog. A reader keeps them from forgetting about you or losing you in the general chatter of the Internet. Don’t be shy about asking people to join your email list or RSS feed. One of the people I follow sends a weekly recap of his posts to his email list. I’m sure it encourages people to visit and comment. (I know I have.)

One of the criticisms of RSS feeds is that people can read your posts in their readers and don’t visit your site (or see your advertisements there.) This isn’t a problem if you are promoting your affiliate products through your posts with a link as it will go where the feed goes. Google is also getting on board with a program that sends ads through your feed. Another way to deal with this is to set your blog settings to only send a blurb to the reader so that interested readers will go to your blog to finish reading it.

The bottom line is that once you are found, loyal readers want to keep track of what you have to share and RSS feeds allow them to do that easily.