Yes, RSS feeds is a standard for most off the shelf blogs. Making good use of them however is another story. Most site do not optimize their feed to help in their marketing efforts. Here is a quick list of pointers you should consider implementing in order to optimize the RSS feeds of your blogs.

Consider 3rd Party Service

Although common blogging software such as Wordpress includes RSS feeds, you should consider using a 3rd party service to add additional benefits to your feed. For starters, the free service allows you to get detailed statistics and demographic information on your subscribers. You also get to use additional features such as indiviual news reader signup and email based feeds. There aren’t many negatives to the service and it’s used by many of the leading bloggers on the Internet.

Make It Noticeable

Placement of your feed subscriptions is important. Consider adding an image or rss logo to the feed and place it somewhere above the fold of your pages. When you reach an amount of subscribers that will help promote the feeds, switch to the image that dynamically inserts the amount of readers in your blog. This site is waiting until it hits aroung the 500 subscriber range.

Links In Your Posts

Full news feed readers sometimes grabs your entire post for viewing through the reader or website. In this case you won’t get the traffic value and in turn advertising is not shown to the reader. By placing links to other posts on your blog or to sites you mention (with affiliate code), you can benefit form additional traffic or revenues derived from your subscribers.

Summary

These are the basic optimization techniques for your feeds. In the future i’ll discuss more advanced strategies that allow you to promote your website on the Internet. For now, implement these concepts and you’ll benefit from the results.

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