Many of us struggle with Social Media and all of it’s quirks, both socially and techno-illogically. Everything we do now is seen as some sort of ‘tool.’ The really interesting thing is that many mainstream tools may be powerful, but their implementation can be overwhelming. One of these technologies is the use of RSS feeds to subscribe to content on blogs. I find it surprising that while many bloggers know the feeds exist, they don’t put any effort into making sure people can find them.
One of the most common ways people find out about and stay current with topics of interest is reading blogs. Nothing new there you say. Agreed. But how do people know you have new content? Some of us send an email, or an ezine with a link to the content. We can also automate this process through the use of RSS Feeds.
For those that want a clearer understanding of the concept of RSS feeds (we can just call them ‘feeds’) I liken them to a TV station that never goes off the air. Content from the blog is content that goes out over the airwaves. But it doesn’t go out all of the time. It only goes out when it’s new. Then, from the receiving end, or the viewers side, they have to know the feed is there, and tune into it with feeds to pick it up. They can also use the feed to check for content ‘on-demand’.
When I find something that explains one of these tools to the degree that I can understand it I like to share. Here are two tools that may help you if you are depending on either/or RSS Feeds from a blog and/or a newsletter or ezine combination.
Your blog has multiple feeds. You have RSS for the content, RSS2 for your comments, Atom (for content), RTF, and email. But you have to let people know they exist and make it easy for them to connect with you. Feedburner is recognized as one of the top RSS feed aggregating utilities for all feeds coming from your blog. Google acquired Feedburner and for a while things went haywire, as if they bought out their competition and didn’t care about developing it. That may have changed recently though. We’ll see if they get more consistent. Here’s an excellent pictorial walk through of setting up Feedburner settings (after you have created a Feedburner feed name for your feeds). http://bit.ly/91FdAZ
An alternative is FeedBlitz http://www.feedblitz.com. I got a call from the owner of FeedBlitz when I went on Twitter and told the masses that Feedburner is getting worse and I wanted an alternative. Feedburner is free. FeedBlitz is not, but it looks relatively inexpensive, especially when you see what it can do. My understanding from the phone call is that in using FeedBlitz not only are your RSS feeds and variations published and sent correctly, but you can also set things up to take the content from your new blog post and automatically create and send an ezine to your email distribution list. So, it replaces both Feedburner and Constant Contact, etc. You only pay for the emails you send. You don’t pay for the feeds sent.
I hope this helps you out. Let me know if you have questions or comments.
Bart
Here’s an explanation of WordPress feeds – http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds
Print This Post
