Blogging - To feed or not to feed

Activate your rss feeds. If you're a blogger, you'd be a fool not to.

Now I know it can be frustrating to spend time manipulating your template to make your website look just how you want it, only to find that your precious readers never look beyond what comes into their feed reader, but that's their choice. If they don't want to see your full colour 1024 by 768 Audrey Hepburn background then don't force them to.

On a regular day, this blog's feed has almost as many subscribers as visitors to the site itself. I doubt many of these subscribers would go out of their way to read my content, did I not have an rss feed and I would lose half of my audience.

Your most valued readers (i.e. the ones who come back time after time and leave regular comments) will probably be using feeds because if they have a decent feed reader, new posts will come to them and so they won't have to constantly check for new content.

I touched upon how to create a feed in my article about promoting your website but all of the popular blogging platforms have feed facilities built in, which can be enabled and disabled with just a few clicks.

There are extra things you can do to spice up your feeds, such as using Feed Burner to add comment links, analyse statistics or splice your feeds with photos, but these are just icing on the top of the cake and in some cases, can actually damage your feed by making it cluttered.

Many articles I've read say that you must put your subscribe link somewhere prominent if you want people to use it, but I don't think it's that important. If people are keen, they'll find your feed as long as it's displayed somewhere, preferably with the eye-catching orange feed logo. Most rss readers have a discovery option that automatically detects all of the feeds on a page.

And if you don't mind incorporating adverts into your feeds, Kaitlin has determined that adsense for feeds is more lucrative than adsense for content.

Another advantage to enabling feeds is that others can easily grab your content to include on their own sites. For example I used to publish a section showing the most recent posts by my blogging friends, the workings of which relies on feeds. Blogger now offers a blogroll widget that displays intros to other's recent posts rather than just the blog name, which I assume runs on feeds.

So yes, working on the layout of your blog is important, but don't neglect to take care of your subscribers. Try subscribing to your own feed to find out what others see.

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