It's not sexy... but it is important...

For the next few posts we are going to cover the things that anyone/everyone who has a website or blog needs to do to ensure that folks can find them. That is our intent isn't it, to attract visitors?

A presences on the web is not a "build it and they will come" scenario.

So in this post we are going to cover RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

RSS is a real time saver in that you don't need to keep checking your favorite sites to see if there is anything new since your last visit, instead what happens is when something new is posted you will get a notification email.

If you want folks to follow your website or blog for very long having RSS setup on your site is an absolute MUST.

I use FeedBurner, not only does it provide RSS for your site, it will also give you all kinds of useful statistical information about who is subscribing, where your readers are coming from, and (very important) will help you get the word out that your site exists.

If you follow this link you will see a detailed video tutorial on how to setup an RSS feed with Feedburner.

You can also feed your Facebook page using RSS Graffiti, it will read your feed and write it on your Facebook wall, a very useful tool.

One bad thing about feeds is that videos that are part of your post do not get "fed" through, so if you are one of my blog subscribers you'll need to return to the blog to watch the video below that is a great demonstration of what RSS is and how it works.

4 comments:

Miguel Palaviccini said...

Thanks for putting this together!

Andrew Macpherson said...

Feedburner is great if you are running on Blogger/Blogspot. If you have your own Wordpress installation (rather than a wordpress.com site) then you intrinsically have RSS running,and you can add the StatPress plugin to give you a very good analysis, on the admin / dashboard side of the site.

Scott said...

Thanks for the Wordpress info...

Joanna Kapica said...

What a great timing! I was just having some issues with my RSS feed. Also I was looking for alternatives to feedburner and Andrew have suggested interesting plug in for wordpress.
Thank you!