Your complete guide to RSS – Part 4 – Harnessing the maximum from your RSS Feed: Tips and Tricks

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.
  One thing I learnt from John Chow is that ‘people are like sheep’. They will subscribe to your blog when they see the others do the same. So if your subscriber count shows more than like 50 readers, then show your Feed count right under the subscribe button.This will give a good first-impression of your blog to your visitors. If people see many people referring to your blog daily, they will also be willing to check you out. But do not show your Feed count if it doesn’t show a decent number of subscribers. This will discourage a potential subscriber.
• As your blog grows, offer comments feed also.
  When you start to get a lot of comments, offering comments feed will come in handy. Having good commentators on your blog and you answering relevant questions to your articles is just as good as reading a good blog article. Your readers will appreciate such a measure.
• Utilize the FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in
  FeedSmith plug-in so totally integrates your FeedBurner feed with your blog. It replaces all the links to those XML files in your blog that Wordpress built with much cooler FeedBurner feeds with instant subscription button. And it allows you to track your blog stats via FeedBurner as a bonus. You can download the plug-in here.
• Ping all those RSS directories
  Although the click through rate may be small at first, submitting your RSS Feed for RSS directories is one way of getting good traffic. FeedBurner has a nice feature called Ping Shot dedicated for this. It pings around a dozen RSS directories automatically when you publish. You got to activate it.Wordpress also has this ‘Ping’ feature built in where you can give the Pinging URL to Wordpress and it automatically Pings the directories. That’s what I use to ping my Technorati account automatically whenever I post.
• Publicize your RSS Feed
  Why don’t you just go out there and tell everyone what a great blog you’ve got running here? Publicize it in your personal homepage, e-mail signatures, and friends’ blogs! FeedBurner has got a great feature called the ‘Headline Animator’. It gets random titles from your blog and animates them wherever! Much like a news ticker. Just build your own ‘Headline Animator’, get the code, and start pasting it everywhere!
• Offer e-mail subscription
  You know, there are those people who hate using RSS readers. The only thing to do about these people is to offer e-mail subscription. Some devour when their favorite content gets e-mailed as soon as it gets published. If you want to automate this, FeedBurner has got a nice little feature dedicated for this.