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Why You Should Read RSS Feeds

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rss reader

With the uproar over the closing of Google Reader earlier this month, it has been shown just how many people have depended on this popular RSS reader as their chosen way to read and consume content from their favorite blogs. Regularly reading blogs that appeal to your industry and personal interests is one of the best ways to stay current.

Choosing (and reading) the best blogs shouldn’t be something to hate or not look forward to. When you have chosen the right blogs, you will know because reading each day becomes enjoyable and a way to relax. This is why having a mixture of personal and professional blogs to follow mixes it up and makes it fun.

After deciding which blog to follow, sign up for a reader, like BlogLovin’ or Feedly. These two platforms are available on mobile devices as well, so you can access your content at any time, whether at home or on the metro during a long commute. Many reader services allow you to search for blogs by name to add, so you don’t have to worry about finding their RSS feed URLs.

Once this has been all set up, setting up a daily schedule to check the reader is crucial. Checking it daily will help keep you up to date and prevent too many posts from getting backed up. However, don’t let it stress you out if too many have piled up. BlogLovin’ for instance, allows users to mark all current unread posts as ‘read’, thus clearing their queue and getting it read for the next day.

Many people like reading their blog RSS reader at the beginning of each day as a way to start their day. However, there are many other places this can be done:

  • During lunch
  • On the work commute (if you aren’t the driver)
  • During a workout, on a machine like the treadmill or elliptical
  • Sitting at home watching TV
  • Converting to audio versions and listening during a walk or run

There are many places to consume content, it just depends on how much it is made into a priority and taking the time to get into the routine of reading each day.

The benefits of this are far-reaching. Not only will you be more educated and involved in what is happening in your industry, you will also never run out of material to share via social media and email to your audience and network. RSS readers are a great source of useful information that has many uses, both personal and for your business.

photo credit: Pensiero via photopin cc

BlogBurst Joins Demand Media Blog Distribution Network

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BlogBurst was once known as the free and ad-supported blog syndication service that could help bloggers get their content in front of wider audiences.  I’m a proponent of syndication with some caveats that I explain later in this post.  Since Demand Media announced at Blog World last week that BlogBurst was relaunching as part of the Demand Media Blog Distribution Network, I thought revisiting the topic of syndication would be a good idea.

Let’s take a step back and look at who Demand Media is.  If you’re not involved in the world of freelance writing, then you may have never heard of Demand Media before.  It’s actually a company that draws a lot of negative attention from the freelance writing community with many writers viewing Demand Media as nothing more than a dreaded content mill.  I actually disagree with that because in at least some of its published content production process, Demand Media does try to hire people who can actually write coherently.  Furthermore, Demand Media does pay freelance writers more than the typical content mill.

So what does this reputation mean for bloggers who have or are considering syndicating their content through BlogBurst — now Demand Media Blog Distribution Network?

The simple answer is two-fold — quality and association, which are two of the caveats I mentioned about blog syndication earlier.  Let’s take a closer look at each.

When you consider syndicating your blog content through another online publisher, you have to think about the quality of the sites where your content will be published as well as the type of content that will be published around your own blog content on those other sites.  Unlike licensed content syndication, free and ad-supported syndication models, like the syndication opportunities available through BlogBurst (now Demand Media Blog Distribution Network), publish your content on the free-Web.  That means it appears on multiple websites, which might steal a bit of page views from your own blog, but are more likely to drive more traffic to your blog through increased exposure.

However, you need to understand where your content will be viewed as part of the syndication agreement.  For example, Demand Media Blog Distribution Network publishes content on a variety of sites, including its own properties such as eHow.com and LiveStrong.com.  You need to determine if these sites are ones that will help or hurt your reputation and your blog’s reputation.  Also, you need to consider whether syndicating your content and allowing Demand Media Blog Distribution Network to earn money from it is worth it to you or if it would be better for you to take the time to publish your content on some of those other sites (such as eHow.com) without a middle-man.

Again, I’m an advocate of blog syndication for boosting exposure and growing an audience, but you need to research syndication opportunities and ensure you’re choosing the ones that will truly help you reach your long-term blogging goals rather than working against those goals.  Is syndication through Demand Media Blog Distribution Network right for everyone?  No.  Is it right for some bloggers?  Yes.  It’s up to you to evaluate the pros and cons and determine if this type of syndication will help or hurt you and your blog.

Image: stock.xchng

5-Minutes to Better Blog Email Subscriptions

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Have you ever subscribed to your own blog’s feed via email to see what those messages that your email subscribers receive from you actually look like?  Do you know what time of day those email messages are sent?  Do you know what the subscription confirmation message says that subscribers receive after they subscribe via email to your blog?

Go ahead … subscribe to your feed via email and see what happens.  Chances are high that you’ll want to make some changes.

If your feed is managed through FeedBurner, then it will take you less than five minutes to change your subscription email messages from boring or hard to read to visually appealing.  Here are the essential steps to giving your email subscription messages the makeover they probably need.

1. Make your first impression a memorable one.

Log into your FeedBurner account and navigate to your blog’s feed settings.  Click on the Publicize tab, and then click on the Communication Preferences link in the left menu under the Email Subscriptions heading.  This opens the Email Subscriptions-Communications Preferences page shown in the figure below.  This is where you configure the settings for the confirmation email that new email subscribers receive to confirm that they do want to subscribe to your blog’s feed via email.

Take a minute to revise the Email “From” Address (the address recipients see in their email inboxes as the Sender), the Confirmation Email Subject (the subject line of the message that recipients see in their email inboxes), and the Confirmation Email Body (the content of the email message).  Personalize the message, so recipients remember who you are and why they clicked on the Subscribe via Email link in the first place.

2. Design your email subscription messages so they look good.

Next, it’s important to click on the Email Branding link under the Email Subscriptions heading in the left menu to open the Email Subscriptions-Email Branding page shown below.  Here you can change the title of the actual feed update messages that subscribers receive in their email in boxes (you can even make the title of the email message match the title of your most recent blog post included in the feed email by clicking on and selecting the Hot Tip check box.

You can also include the URL for a logo that you want to include in your feed emails (as long as the image is already hosted elsewhere online), and you can make changes to the typeface, font size, and colors used in your email subscription messages.  All of your changes can be viewed by scrolling down the page where they are visible in a special section called HTML Preview Email.

Of course, if you’re already subscribed to your own blog by email, you’ll also be able to see how your edits look to other subscribers next time your blog is updated and feed messages are sent.

3. Select a delivery time.

Research shows that blog email subscriptions which are emailed in the morning get more click-throughs than those emailed in the middle of the night.  Of course, time zones can affect your statistics, but scheduling your blog email subscription updates to go out between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Eastern time is thought by many experts to be the best choice.

Therefore, your last step in making your blog email subscriptions even better is to click on the Delivery Options link under the Email Subscriptions section in your FeedBurner account.  Use the drop-down menus to select the time zone and specific two-hour window when you want your blog’s automated email subscription messages to be delivered anytime you publish new content on your blog.

That’s all there is to it.  In fact, it probably took you longer to read these instructions than it will take you to make these changes to your own FeedBurner email subscription settings!

Stay Informed: Learn About RSS Feeds

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One of the smartest things a new blogger can do, other than writing their own content, is to keep track of what others are doing. This is especially true if you are running a news focused blog, or are trying to compete with another blogger. Many of you probably understand that there are RSS feeds, and that you can subscribe to them, but do you know how or why?

In talking to a client of mine, I was asked, “why do I want to subscribe, rather than just bookmark and check back in?”

The simple answer to this is: so new content gets pushed to you. If you don’t want to miss potentially important content, and want to receive it in a reasonably timely fashion, making sure to subscribe to various RSS feeds, is like buying into your own, personalized newspaper consisting of all your favorite blogs. This will allow you to be more efficient, and if you turn that time savings into writing time, you’ll produce more content.

If you are still bookmarking sites, and visiting them each day, or getting their content in your e-mail inbox. How does that help you? Why are you still doing that when we have RSS subscriptions now that are near instant in pushing content out to you, easy to manage, and powerful, when you dive deep into controlling them.

Currently, I use Bloglines as my RSS reader of choice. It is a hosted, web-based service that makes subscribing, managing subscriptions and reading my subscriptions from any computer connected to the Internet very easy. I know the more popular choice is Google Reader, another hosted service, but I’ve never been completely happy with their user interface (probably because I used Bloglines first and have become accustomed to how it works).

There are also hundreds of desktop clients that you can install on your computer, no matter the operating system you use, and thus allow you to download and read your content when not connected to the Internet, or notify you when you have new content to read in a more “attention grabbing” way than an online RSS reader can do.

If you are looking for more information on the best available options, LifeHacker did a roundup a while back with some great choices.

Start using an RSS reader, keep yourself organized and informed, and you might just be more productive on your blog, but don’t blame me if you start subscribing to everything under the sun, and it consumes your whole day. RSS subscription overload can be a common problem as well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Help Us Name our Our RSS Subscription Link

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Taking the cue from a post on Copyblogger a while back, I now wonder what we should name our RSS subscription link in our site redesign. On the Blog Herald, Lorelle reinforces the view that using the term “subscribe” might turn away people.

True–“subscriptions” usually cost money. And folks are attracted to free stuff. While we do have a premium subscription site, the Hive, the main Performancing.com site content continues to be free, whether you read on-site, via email or your RSS reader.

So saying “Subscribe to Performancing” might come across incorrectly as Perf being a pay site.

Lorelle suggests you use clever ways to name your subscription links. For instance, a blog about cats can say “Track this cat,” and a blog about health or medicine can say “Get a daily dose …” But generic ones will work, too.

For Performancing.com, we need a catchy line for our RSS subscription link. If you can give us good suggestions, we will give the top choice a free year’s pro pMetrics subscription and a free six month membership to the Hive.

What do you think we should put up there on the RSS link?

Filed Under: RSS

50 Tips To Gain RSS Subscribers

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DailyBlogTips has published 50 simple ways to gain more RSS subscribers.

1. Have a big RSS icon. People are lazy. You need to keep that fact always in mind. If you use a little RSS icon, visitors might have a problem finding it. Most of those will just give up after a couple of seconds, so make sure the RSS icon is big and easily recognizable.

2. Display the RSS icon above the fold. Apart from using a big RSS icon, you must make sure that you display it above the fold. That is where most blogs have one, and that is where people are used to look for when they want to subscribe, so go with the flow.

3. Display the RSS icon on every page of your blog. When I started blogging I did this mistake. Only my homepage used to have an RSS icon…. As soon as I added it to every single page on the blog, the number of subscribers jumped.

Be sure to check out the full list as there are a number of tips I haven’t seen before.

Filed Under: RSS

Full RSS Feed Versus Partial

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Within the realm of blogging, there are some arguments that seem to go on forever. Whether or not one should use partial or full RSS feeds happens to be one of those arguments. Those in favor of partial feeds usually argue that this prevents duplicate content from showing up on blogs who scrape their content. Based on previous experience and from monitoring the debate across multiple blogs, I’d say that this has become a moot point. For starters, you can’t catch everyone who is ripping off your content. Secondly, you will not get penalized for having duplicate content because it was published on your site first. Google is smart enough to determine where the content was published first.

Full RSS feeds enables the subscriber the luxury of reading what your site has to offer from the comfort of their feed reader. There is no need to click through in order to see the full post. I’ve talked with many blog owners and RSS Feed readers and most of them agree that full RSS feeds are the way to go. Partial feeds are annoying and actually turn many people away from subscribing.

In my own travels across the web, I only subscribe to the RSS feed of a blog if it provides the full feed. I don’t have time to click through to the actual article. I’ll only do that if I want to publish a comment or two. I’ve learned a long time ago that people scraping your content is just another part of blogging. As far as I’m concerned, you can never win the war on content scraping, you can only win individual battles. But what is the point if the battles are never ending? So, my advice is to offer a full content RSS feed to your readers. Anything less is just not worth it.

If that wasn’t convincing enough, perhaps this comic created by Noise To Signal will help.

Post inspired by Cartoon: Partial Text RSS Feeds

Filed Under: RSS

Customized RSS Icons Via Photoshop Shapes

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Anidandesign.com has released a pretty cool shape set for Photoshop. These shapes will allow you to create RSS icons with shapes that can be enlarged or shrunken while still maintaining high quality. If you are unsure as to what a Photoshop shape is, be sure to read the About.com shape guide which explains the difference between brushes and shapes while also explaining how to install them.

The format for these shapes are Photoshop CS3. Be sure to check out the terms of use as it relates to these shapes.

P.S. My favorite shape is the light bulb, what is yours?

Filed Under: RSS