RSS Feeds Tips

Posted by scoop on May 29th, 2009 in Blog basics, RSS, Tips |

Last month one of the tips I gave to make your blog more accessible is by offering RSS feeds. This time we’ll be discussing some ways to make sure that people actually end up subscribing to your blog feeds. Here are some of the things you can do:

1. Use a feed button and think placement – When people wish to subscribe to feeds what they usually automatically look for is the bright orange RSS feed button. Make it easy for your readers to subscribe by providing this button and placing it in a very visible spot. Place it near the top of the page. Never place it on the bottom of the page where people can easily miss the link. You can use a customized feed button but make sure that the function of the button is obvious.

2. Full or partial feeds – As mentioned last time your decision to use full or partial feeds will depend entirely on your preference. As a general rule though blogs with overly long posts and with very frequent posting schedules (at least daily) are the ones that should seriously think about using partial feeds. Another thing you can do is to offer both full and partial feeds to cater to all your readers’ preference. The good thing about this is that you can even use this option to force your readers to decide whether to see full feeds but with ads or to get partial feeds and not have to deal with ads but have to go to your actual blog to read posts in their entirety. Either way, you win.