I stress to any new blogger and any blogger in general, that social media and networking is important. If your post can be popular on certain social media websites it can be very beneficial. We’ve just giving you the basic rules for social media and three new social media sites for bloggers. Now, to publicize!

What is a FeedFlare?

Along with using social media I believe it is important to burn your feed through Feedburner. This allows you to track and monitor your rss feed subscribers. One of the best features of Feedburner is adding FeedFlares to your blog and it’s feed.

A FeedFlare gives your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including social media sites. FeedFlares place a simple footer at the bottom of each article that helps you distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

This basically allows your blog posts to be easily submitted to different social media sites. We use our feed flares for stumbleupon, sphinn, and delicious.

Choose Your FeedFlares

Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner feed account you can select and add different social media sites as your FeedFlares.

I would of course recommend Stumbleupon, Sphinn, Digg, Delicious, and Mixx. However, you can add whichever sites that appeal to you and your blog.

How To Add FeedFlares

After you choose which FeedFlares to use, its easy after that. Simply select which place you want your FeedFlare to appear. If you select feed, Feedburner will automatically put it at the footer of your feed for you.

If you select “site” then you must install a code on your blog for your FeedFlares to be shown. The code is easy to install, we’ve chosen to put it at the end of every post.

Do you use FeedFlares? If so, which ones? If you don’t use them, why not?

Bloggers often tell you HOW you can increase your subscribers, but not why you should. Why do RSS subscribers matter? Why does John Chow mention that he has so many subscribers every week?

Chris from Wat da Wat asked this question about encouraging your rss readers to subscribe on the Bloggeries Forum. I thought I would answer.

Encourage your Readers to Subscribe

Loyalty

The first reason definitely has to be for loyalty. Once you get someone to subscribe to your blog, the chances are they will stay subscribed for a while. Getting someone to read your blog, gets them to visit, to comment, and participate.

Relationship

By getting them loyal to your blog, you can build a relationship with the reader, whether they never visit your blog or not. Getting them involved in your content gets them involved in your website or blog. Many times I’ve gone back on my RSS reader and searched for old posts I’ve read from bloggers. Usually I would then link to the website or post.

Ease

If you’ve made the switch from visiting every website to a RSS feed reader you know what I’m talking about. At times I’m sure I have had over 100 blogs I’ve followed in my google reader. It’s a lot easier to keep updated with blogs you like. That offers your reader that ease.

Numbers

This isn’t as important. Yet blogging, especially blogging for money, is about numbers. RSS readers are valuable. If you decided to sell your website with 1,000 readers compared to 10, it would be worth a lot more.

Likely to Join

A reader that finds your blog from a search engine are likely to click one thing and leave, it may not even be an ad. Unless they subscribe to your blog, you may never have that reader ever come back. A RSS subscriber will click and come back. By building a base from RSS feeds, it is a lot easier to get referrals for different websites you want to promote.

RSS Subscribers

The argument to oppose it can be that you will get less website visits. This is partially true, but you should include those reading your feed. If I had to chose more traffic or more subscribers, I would definitely have to go with the subscribers.

Also mentioned in the forum post, is that a better indicator of your rss feed is the “reach”. Make sure to get a Feedburner Stats Pro (free) account to get the “reach” to be displayed. You can go to your Analyze page of your feedburner feed.

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action, viewed or clicked, on the content in your feed.

Why do you encourage your readers to subscribe?

RSS feed buttons taken from AKoogle

The MyBlogLog contest was good for them sparking interest back into the old community site. MyBloglog has lost some ground with other new sites coming up like BlogCatalog as well as Entrecard really being a force in the blogosphere.

The contest was even better for those who won, and were close to winning. Feedest edged out my friend over at SEOLogs, for the win. Leo from Feedest won loads of prizes and has also decided to give some of them away.

The first prize that has come up for grabs is a One Year Pro Mybloglog Subscription. The value is worth about 25$ and it basically just offers real time stats for your blog. On Thursday I received a message notifying it that we won!

Since winning I had to reinstall the code for MyBlogLog, I had removed everything completely. Might as well give MBL another chance!

Thanks to Leo for giving us the prize, we haven’t won anything in a while.

Who’s the Feedest?

Feedest is actually an interesting website, so I thought why not tell you a little bit about the site. Feedest is a website where you basically can share your blog feed. You can check out that Blog about your Blog page on feedest. It displays our feed as well as how many saves and views we have.

After you register to feedest make sure to save our blog and I will do the same for you. As you can see we haven’t had many views on Feedest however I believe the more saves and tags you have, the better it is ranked.

Many new bloggers just don’t know how to increase their rss subscribers. It’s not that the content isn’t good, there just isn’t an audience yet. Blogs take a little bit of marketing regardless of who you are. We took a while to get rolling, but that was just due to inexperience. One tool that was vital to our success thus far, has been the power of giveaways.

Free Stuff Draws RSS Subscribers

When you subscribe to a blogs RSS feed, you do so because you don’t want to miss anything from the blog. Whether it be for the content or some sort of giveaway. Once you get a RSS subscriber chances are you should be able to keep them for a while. Sometimes I stay subscribed to a blog just because I’m too lazy to unsubscribe.

Our latest RSS boost came from just offering a few prizes for subscribing to our feed via email. The number went from 14 to 74 within about 2 weeks. Even with the contest over, our email subscribers remain at 74. I plan to have other smaller giveaways like our TNX points giveaway as well. Make sure you don’t miss them.

CyberStreet Proof

I have been subscribed to Cyber Street Report for a long time, when they had a completely different theme. When I subscribed their RSS feed numbers stayed at about 10-15. I hadn’t visited them in months, until the posts surrounded blogging reviews and entrecard.

With the entrecard craze surrounding the blogosphere, Cyberstreet jumped on board and promoted the hell out of it. They have even decided to giveaway entrecard points. Give the people what they want right?

In a few short days of offering free entrecard points, it has seemed that their rss feed count has doubled or tripled to 36 readers. While this isn’t that much yet, the growth is great. I’d imagine as the prizes continue so will the feed subscribers increase.

The great thing with this is that it didn’t cost them anything to give these points away. There isn’t any excuse not to reward and attract readers with the tons of opportunities out there. Pick a service and promote it!

There is Always Help

If you still haven’t been inspired as to what you can do, make sure to contact us with any idea you might have. We might be able to throw in a prize to make your giveaway that much better. To follow with Cyberstreet, I also plan on giving away some entrecard points. Give the people what they want… right?

So, you like a certain site, but you don’t like all the posts in all of the categories that the writer writes in, some of the topics just don’t interest you or you are only interested in one of the topics.

Well, did you know that for WordPress sites there is an RSS solution that will save you scanning through all those feeds your not interested in?? It is simple, use the category feed instead of the main site feed.

You can subscribe to the category feed, by simply go to the category page that you wish to subscribe too.

For an example the “blogging” category here at Blog About Your Blog is at this URL: http://blogaboutyourblog.com/category/blogging/

You will know it is a category page because the word category is in the URL itself. This is a default URL from WordPress and I don’t think there are very many bloggers that change this default as it is a good one. You can find the category pages on a lot of sidebars and on most sites somewhere next to where you click to leave comments.

You then just simply at the word “feed” with a backslash(/) to that category page, so the example blogging category feed is located at: http://blogaboutyourblog.com/category/blogging/feed/

You go to that page and it will allow you to subscribe to only the feeds of that category and you will no longer need to sort your RSS feeder of the stuff you aren’t interested in.

I am Jennifer from The Life of a School Bus Driver, hoping that you will check out my Blogger of the Day and even subscribe to the Feed.

Probably, like many bloggers, I get some of my posts ’stolen’ and then published on other blogs. It’s okay if there are proper return links - though personally I still think permission should be asked before publishing complete posts.

I even heard about one blogger who had his full site stolen - design, content - everything.

It can be frustrating when you find out that information you have sweated over and researched is copied without a second thought by lazy bloggers.

One of the big problems is the automated feeds brigade. They use other people’s content to fill their sites. It’s easy for them and they don’t have to worry about writing anything.

There seems to be no way to stop these as there is usually no contact details on such blogs. I have one person who copies nearly all of my posts.

With the automated feeds it was suggested to me that the best way to partly overcome this is to set the blog settings so that only short feeds are used. This way any readers will have to go to the original source to read the full post/article.

I was wondering what other bloggers thoughts are about having posts stolen, especially by automated feeds? What are others doing to combat this - if anything? Or perhaps you don’t see what the problem is?

Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission
Celebrity Insider - Photos & News

I wonder how many of you switched to desktop blog editors or even tried one after reading my 9 reasons to use a Desktop Blog Editor last week!

This week I would like to talk about a few reasons to consider using a desktop (installed or portable) RSS reader. As a blogger, I have found that a desktop RSS reader could be an important aid in your blogging toolkit.

I use the portable version of GreatNews RSS reader and have been a big fan of this free RSS reader for a while now. Most of these features are common to desktop feed readers but some may be specific to GreatNews.

Without much further ado, here they are:

1. Labels: This is similar to tagging. This allows you to label interesting posts in your feed reader that you might need for future reference. With a label’s cleanup frequency set to never, you can create your own library of posts. Some of mine: blog this, reading material, to comment, wordpress tips.
2. News Watches: Next to labels, this is a feature I use constantly. I have it configured for its simplest use - to watch for specific terms in my RSS feeds. For e.g. rss reader, firefox extension, paris hilton (just kidding about the last one). You can even use it to block certain news items. For instance if you are sick of all the iPhone coverage, you can do that too. Your own content filter!
3. Integrated Search: Most desktop readers have integrated search built in and they are very fast. I just blogged about this in ShanKri-la about how the most popular RSS reader, Google Reader doesn’t have this feature yet and a new comer Fast ladder does.
4. Easy Feed Organization: As much as I am a web 2.0 fan and use a lot of web applications, I still fnd it much easier to organize and maintain my feeds in a desktop reader. If you have hundreds of feeds, you’ll know that the best way to keep them tamed is to have meaningful groups. This will always be an evolving list for everyone and the ease of doing it is important.
5. Customizable reading panes: My favorite is the 3-pane structure like an email client where the left pane shows the list of feeds & feed groups, the right top portion has the list of headlines for the selected feed/group and the right bottom pane shows the content from the selected headline.
   GreatNews has button in this pane which makes collapsing and adding these panes back are so quick. You can switch from reading the headlines in the 3-pane or 2-pane mode to reading a long post or a series of posts from a feed in full screen so fast, you’ll be addicted to it.
6. Individual feed settings: You can set how often you want your feed to be refreshed automatically or you can set to feed to update only manually (I have a hundred feeds that I don’t read everyday but only once a week). You can set different styles to different feed groups and choose the frequency in which you want it cleaned up. You can set these features on a feed group but can override any of this for an individual feed by setting its own.
7. Styles: Most desktop readers allows some level of customization to the look and feel of the feed content.
   GreatNews comes with a few nice styles plus there are some user created styles that you can add to it or if you are CSS savvy, you can create your own to suit your taste.
8. Track comments: This is an excellent hidden feature in GreatNews or atleast I just found it and love it. If a blog offers a comment feed like BAYB does, you can track comments right under the post content from within your feed reader. No more jumping to your email to followup comments where you may not even know what the comments are about after a week.
9. Quick reference: You can control the cleanup schedule for an individual feed or a feed group. You could use your desktop RSS reader as a offline copy of a part of a blog by setting it to never cleanup. I have my ShanKri-la feed set to never cleanup which means I have instant access to my past posts since the time I added it to my feed reader. You can get creative with other blogs that you use frequently for tips or for the Weblog Tools Collection blog to have a quick reference to plugins/themes, etc.

If you are a RSS feed reader, then you are already committed to saving time and improving productivity by reading more content than you would be able to, by visiting every site. Why not take it to the next level of productivity, by using a desktop feed reader?

I haven’t ditched my web based feed reader. I still use Google Reader or Netvibes for casual surfing once in a while. But, GreatNews has definitely helped me with blogging efficiently as a lot of us are doing this besides our day jobs and anything that saves me time, I am all for it.

A few desktop readers to try: GreatNews, Omea Reader, FeedReader, etc. I use GreatNews for its excellent features and its portable so I use it from my USB drive.

Do you think a desktop RSS reader could increase your productivity as a blogger? If not, I’d love to hear why.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la - where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable.

Once a reader subscribes to your blog, it is your job as the blogger and author to keep them interested and engaged in your content. They obviously subscribed for a reason, so you have to keep them coming back. There are a few ways to do that.

Daily Content

Offering daily content is definitely the best thing to do, to keep a RSS feed reader. Once you publish an article that information is sent to them via email, feed reader, blog lines, whatever they subscribed with. The more you publish the more they will come back to your feed. Trying to average a post a day is very good practice. If you can’t do that participate in meme’s or perhaps Blog Roundups where you link to other blogs.

Offer a Full RSS Feed

I usually unsubscribe to a blog only offering a partial RSS Feed. I subscribe to blogs via RSS feed for the ease of it, not to visit a blog after reading half of an article. Blog about your Blog offers a full rss feed.

If you want me to visit your blog, offer a Full RSS feed, and an engaging article. Or simply, offer incentive.

Incentive?

In previous articles I have stressed how important it is for a blog to have incentive. Incentive for a reader to continue visiting your blog. There are millions of blogs on the internet, why is yours better?

Offering incentive to your readers is pretty easy once you figure out what it is you want to give. Whether it’s free links, prizes, money, advertising or participation on their blog, you can really start building more readers.

For example our comment friday gets 10-25 comments per friday generally. The incentive for commenting? A free link. I chose one comment and link to that persons blog. They get put on our blogroll for a week and get mentioned in an article. By offering incentive, we get several bloggers who come back each and every friday, sometimes before the article is even published!

If you follow those three steps not only will you continue to keep your RSS feed readers, you will continue to build your readership base.

While setting up your blog site, paying proper attention to the general website design is very important. A simple layout helps keep the RSS readers and saves their time and effort. For a novice, learning the web design basics is not any tough with the help of online tutorials and well-read web design books.