RSS – What is it?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to allow your blog’s visitors to automatically receive your posts, by their chosen method, without having to manually go to your website day-in, day-out to check for any new updates. This is a great tool for someone who follows multiple blogs as it means that they can use the RSS reader to view all the blogs in just the 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 need to look out for is that the RSS icon is displayed prominently in the upper section of your blog theme. If your visitor has to scroll down to find it, use a different one. Ensure that the icon is relatively big and stands out. Basically, you need to make sure that it will draw the visitor’s eye straight to it. If it’s out of sight, it’s unlikely that it will be used.

Choosing Full or Partial Feeds

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 advantages and disadvantages to both methods. If you provide a full text feed it means that your reader doesn’t ever need to visit your website again – they can get all of your material directly through their feed reader. Some webmasters don’t like this because it means that those people won’t see their ads that they have on their site. However, all that has changed now as Google has setup a system to allow ads to be embedded directly in your feed.

The thing to realise about RSS users, is that these people understand the internet. They know all about RSS, have already chosen their RSS reader and they chose to subscribe to your feed as they want to read what you have to say. There is much less chance of these people clicking on an ad than someone who came to your website via a search engine. These are people who are hungry for information, that is why they use RSS in the first place.

Using their RSS reader means that they can read all the blogs that they have subscribed to swiftly without having to visit lots of different websites. This creates the down side to only publishing a partial feed as these people are much less likely to bother to follow the link to your website to read the whole post. A lot of these readers will probably even unsubscribe and so your posts will not get viewed at all.

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 use the WordPress theme unchanged then there is nothing you need to do in order to allow people to subscribe to your feed but you have no way of knowing how many people have subscribed. If you care about your subscriber number and want to be able to track it then the Feedburner service is for you.

The Feedburner service is run by Google is incredibly easy to set up and best of all is totally free. Once signed up, all you have to do is give the URL of your original blog feed to Feedburner and that will create a new Feedburner URL to use. Then just edit your WordPress theme using the new Feedburner URL instead.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a great piece of software that will let you track all sorts of statistics about your website. This can include information on the amount of traffic you are getting, the keywords people are using to find you, links elsewhere that point to your site, where your visitors are located and so on. It’s absolutely fantastic software and again is entirely 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.

You can manually add the code on to your WordPress blog but this will involve editing your theme files, but if you change themes, you will then have to do it again. Alternatively, I would recommend Semiologic as this will manage your Analytics for you. The download page shows complete instructions about how to use the plugin, so it need not be repeated here.

Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She teaches how to make money blogging and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.