Promote Your Blog's RSS Feeds

Ever wonder what exactly you should be doing with those RSS feeds that come with your blog? Or maybe you're just wondering what RSS is - well, you wouldn't be the first person.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a data format based on the XML standard, which allows the efficient, standardized transmission of digital information from place to place. That could be from website to website, from database to database, from database to website, and so on. What RSS means to you as a blogger is that you have an easy, ready-made format for syndicating whatever you publish on your blog. And just how would that work? Here are a few examples:

A fan of your blog can add your RSS feed to their RSS reader (sometimes also called a "newsreader"), which will update them every time you add a new post by displaying a link to the headline, along with a few sentences or even the full post, if you choose to include it in your feed. Popular RSS readers include My Yahoo, Google Reader, BlogLines, and NewsGator. (You can find a list of the most popular RSS readers in this article.)

So rather than needing to check your blog every day to see if you've posted something new, your fan can just sit back and wait for your latest post to pop up in their RSS reader. Much more convenient.

Another use of RSS feeds is to syndicate your content to someone else's site. For example, the site StockBlogs.com is based almost entirely on RSS feeds from blogs about the stock market. StockBlogs will display the latest headlines from each blog, along with related information and some advertising (of course), and visitors can then click off to whatever blog post interests them. The result is a nice source of traffic to the featured sites via their RSS feeds, and a useful resource for stock researchers looking for commentary from the blogosphere in one central location.

There are a number of ways you can promote your RSS feeds to take advantage of these traffic opportunities. First, and most simply, just make sure they're prominently displayed on each page of your blog. Place a link in the blog's sidebar with the text "Subscribe to My RSS Feed!" or something similar, and any RSS-savvy visitor will be able to easily grab your feed and add it to their reader.

Make sure your friends know about your blog's RSS feed. Millions of people use Yahoo email, and if they have a Yahoo email account, they already have a My Yahoo page with RSS capabilities. All they'll need to do is sign in to their Yahoo account and add your feed to get instant updates whenever you update your blog.

You can also add small graphic links called buttons to your blog that will allow RSS users to subscribe to your feed with just a couple clicks. You can download the graphics and code for dozens of these buttons from this handy page.

Another RSS promotion strategy is to submit your feed to sites that feature RSS content. These include specialized sites like StockBlogs, as well as RSS search engines and directories. Here's a list of sites I've had good luck submitting my own RSS feeds to:

Bloogz RSS Finder

RSSFeeds.com

2RSS.com

FeedShow
(shares revenues they earn from your feed content with you!)

Plazoo.com

Inform.com

BlogDigger

And this is just the tip of the feedberg - there are many more RSS directories, search engines and aggregators out there. You can find dozens of them on this RSS submission list, one of my favorite bookmarks.

Once you've submitted your feed to all these RSS sites, the next step is to keep them fed with fresh blog posts!

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., Real Simple Syndication, sindication, syndicate, sindicate, feeds, feedreader, newsreader, subscribe, subsribe, subscription, agregator, aggregater