Ever wondered how you can do something more about your RSS Feed than just displaying a chickelet in the sidebar? Well, wonder no-more for today’s discussion will be solely based on that.

• Shoe Show ‘em your chickelet!
  Yes I know! This is a bit obvious. But the important thing to remember is that it is the stepping stone for your feed. Most people who read blogs are used to look for that orange button rather than browsing to the footer and clicking on ‘XML Entries’.So keep you button visible and place it high in the sidebar so that in whatever corner your reader may be in your blog, he/she can see it as soon as the page loads, without scrolling.
• If possible, show them your Feed count.

Here’s a question – Do you timestamp your posts? Or are you just simply ignoring that – not knowing what you can achieve with it? Most bloggers do not utilize this feature when posting… are you one of them? If so, listen closely.A lot of bloggers can’t find the time to write around the clock. Or at least, post an article at 12 noon and then again wake up and post it at 12 midnight – just like I seem to do. Yes, I post on MindBlogger in 12 hour intervals. And I write my articles, one time, covering for like two days in advance.

Since this post is going to be a bit long, I am going to break it into 2 parts; Building your Feed and Promoting your Feed! So, let’s get down and dirty folks…

Building your RSS Feed with FeedBurner

Ok, technically, you won’t have to build your Feed, as almost all the blogging platforms build a RSS Feed for you by default; Yes, Wordpress, Movable Pad, Blogger and almost everything else. Usually, with Wordpress, you’ll be able to access it with ‘http://YourBlogDomain.com/feed/’; for RSS ‘../feed/rss’ and for atom ‘../feed/atom’. Yes! You get both with Wordpress.

Now, let’s take your feed one step further. Let’s BURN it!

I got this idea when I was going through problogger’s “When it Feels Like Nobody is Reading Your Blog” post. So I would like to give the credit for my inspiration for Darren Rowse.

Every one of us does have those times at the beginning. When it simply seems like the world isn’t moving when you see 1 subscriber (you) and 1 unique visitor (again, you!) to you blog. And even when you see to be working in full throttle it just seems like you’re nothing more than a super-ignored-slow-poke in the blog-sphere.

Let’s get straight to the point shall we? When people subscribe to your RSS Feed, they simply get all the things that they need from your blog right to their RSS reader. And they will sometimes never visit your site again. So if subscription costs you a hell a lot of page hits, why do you bother giving out a Feed on your blog?

The answer is simple. Would you have a person checking out your blog content a day in his life and never again or would you have that person checking your blog content everyday?

I came across this cartoon of a dying man, his son and his last request quite by accident. Yes, I accept. It’s quite funny. But, there’s a lot more to it I think.

This cartoon was in my head for a while and it kept me thinking. How far had our blogs taken over our lives? I’m a blog addict and I’m so sure I’m not the only blog addict around town. And yes, if I ever got married and had a son or a daughter there’s a high chance of me making a similar request.