Does Your Blog Have a Feed?
Last October I wrote this post: “Six Reasons Why You Need a Full Feed RSS.” It is one of my most popular articles. If you don’t have a feed on your blog, read the post. If your blogging friends don’t have feeds, direct them to that post.
And, if you have a feed, here’s a little tip: Make Sure the Subscribe Link for Your RSS Feed Stands Out! And, use the standard orange icon too. You can try to be cute like this where the RSS icon blends with the rest of your site, but therein lies the problem: it blends in with the rest of your site! That makes it harder to find. I discovered this first hand just minutes ago while trying to subscribe to their feed!
You should have both the text and the icon too, if possible. Newbie readers will look for the text, while more RSS experienced people will just look for the icon. And, just like we become blind to ads over time, we too become blind to text links to a degree. Especially when we’re looking to subscribe to a feed and are skimming the page to quickly find the link.
I use my RSS feed reader every day. Multiple times a day, in fact. I don’t usually keep it open all the time, though I occasionally do. It helps me keep track of blogs more easily. Plus, if you don’t blog for a while, it saves me continually checking your site for an update and not finding any.
And, before you start thinking but I want you to visit my site even when I’m not blogging because I have ads running, think again. After several visits with no updates, and if you don’t have an RSS feed, I am likely to forget about your blog and miss new content when you do post it.
There is a limited amount of time that people will visit a seemingly dead blog. Your online friends may visit more often, but the bulk of your readers will be long gone. If you have an RSS feed, you stand a better chance of getting them back when you do start posting again because, unless they’ve deleted you from their reader, they’ll see when you have new content.
This evening, I spent some time going through MyBlogLog communities, and subscribing to the RSS feeds of some I hadn’t subscribed to already and also some which I had forgotten about as I hadn’t visited them in so long (and many of those go back to my pre-RSS reader days). But, some of those blogs don’t have feeds! So, there’s a good chance I won’t read them again until months from now when I go through those MBL communities again.
I don’t bookmark blogs. If I don’t remember them or don’t have them in my feed reader, I won’t visit them often. Here’s the point: My feed reader is the first thing I look at every day in order to check for new content on blogs. If you don’t have a feed, chances are I’m not reading your blog every day. Okay, truth is, I am NOT reading your blog every day if you don’t have a feed, because every blog that I read regularly is in my feed reader.
If you don’t have a feed, go set one up. Next, provide a link for it and make sure that link stands out!
Now, whether I read your blog every day or not isn’t going to make or break your blog, but what you have to think about is all the other people like me that use their feed readers to keep up to date on what’s going on. I track all my favorite blogs in my feed reader. I keep track of the news through my feed reader. I even keep track of new products from one of my favorite online stores through my feed reader. If you don’t have a feed, you are missing out!!!
Thanks for the tip. This technical stuff is difficult. I will have to double check it. I use it all the time now. It comes in very handy.
Your blog has a feed, but the link is not easy to find.
I do have an RSS orange icon, but it sends people to their general site. I don’t know how to correct it. I have e-mailed RSS for assistance, but have not heard from them. Do you know how I can correct this? I’m a new blogger. I want people to be able to link my blog to their reader easily, but don’t know how. Feel free to e-mail me if you want.
Thanks, Lynie
MillionRSS looks like it’s designed to promote feeds rather than host them.
You might want to sign up with Feedburner and run your blog’s feed through it. If you don’t know your current feed’s URL, you can just enter your blog URL and Feedburner will find the feed for you.
Then, use your Feedburner feed URL on your blog for others to subscribe.
After your Feedburner feed is setup, go into your MillionRSS account and change your feed there to your Feedburner feed’s URL.
If you don’t want to use Feedburner, just go into your MillionRSS account and make sure your feed is set correctly. I think the MillionRSS link is just supposed to link to them and not directly to your feed, as from what I can tell, they don’t manage your feed at all–they just help you promote it. In which case, you’ll need to manually set up a link to your blog’s feed in your sidebar.
If you get stuck somewhere, just leave a comment!
It was my second time signing up with Feedburner. I got stuck in the same loop, then I think I figured it out. I now have an icon. I think it works? This tech stuff is a pain.
Thanks for your help,
Lynie
Yes, the link appears to be working fine. I put it in my feed reader, and your recent posts popped up.
Great! Thank you!
I’m glad that you told me that MillionRSS might be “designed to promote feeds rather than host them”. Now I know that I was barking up the wrong tree. I added you to my blogroll. I hope that you do the same.
Thanks again for the advice,
Lynie