Get Money Maker

RSS – A Brief Intro

RSS is ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It allows visitors to your blog to have your posts sent to them automatically with a method of their choosing, instead of having to come to your web page each day to look for an update. This can be helpful if someone follows several blogs as they can use the RSS reader tool to look at all the blogs in just one place.

The RSS feed is a unique URL published by the blog, this is what is needed for your visitors to subscribe to your blog with RSS. You’ll be glad to hear that there is very little to do, as all the blog platforms have the RSS technology already built in, including WordPress. In fact, chances are you won’t have to do anything if you have already chosen your theme.

What you should look for is that the RSS icon is prominently displayed in the top part of your blog theme. If the reader has to scroll to see it, pick another one. Make sure the icon is fairly large and prominent. Basically, you want to ensure that your reader’s eye is drawn towards it. If it is hidden away then it won’t get used.

Choosing Full or Partial Feeds

RSS has a feature that allows just a snippet of your post to be published to your RSS feed and if a reader wants to read the full entry then they must click through to your website to continue reading. By default, WordPress is setup to publish full feeds which means that your entire post is published to the feed. To check what setting you are on, from your WordPress Dashboard click on ‘Settings’ and then ‘Reading’.

There are good and bad points to each method. If you publish the entire post to the RSS feed it means that the reader will no longer need to visit your website as they can view all of your posts on their RSS reader. It may be that that scenario does not suit you, as it would mean that the reader will not see any of the ads on your pages. However, Google have recently changed this by setting up a system that will allow ads to be embedded straight in to your feed.

The thing to realise about RSS users, is that these people understand the internet. They know all about RSS, have already chosen their RSS reader and they chose to subscribe to your feed as they want to read what you have to say. There is much less chance of these people clicking on an ad than someone who came to your website via a search engine. These are people who are hungry for information, that is why they use RSS in the first place.

Using an RSS reader allows them to read all their chosen blogs nice and quickly without having to navigate around a bunch of websites. If you make your RSS feed partial in order to force the reader to click through to your site, you are likely to find that many of your readers simply don’t bother to click and may even unsubscribe. In other words – your content does not get read.

I would recommend that, if you want to grow a social blog and you are keen to build up a loyal audience who will read everything you write, you will need to make it a full feed. But if you are looking to create a commercial blog that is monetized heavily, and that you are not so concerned about readership, you can do a partial feed.

However, the greatest revenue from your blog will not just be from on-page ads! Once you learn how to use your blog to initiate bigger revenue streams, then it won’t matter so much if your readers view your posts via their RSS reader or on your web page. Therefore, in the majority of cases, a full feed is recommended.

How To Use Feedburner

If you are using the default WordPress theme then you don’t need to do anything in order for your viewers to be able to subscribe to your feed. This would mean, however, that you would not be able to see your subscription numbers. If you want to know how many people are subscribing to your feed then you can use the Feedburner service to track this.

The Feedburner service is completely free and is run by Google. It is also incredibly easy to set up. All you need to do once you are signed up, is give your original blog’s URL to Feedburner and it will create a new Feedburner URL for you to use. You can then edit your WordPress theme to use the Feedburner URL instead.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a nice piece of software that allows you to track all kinds of stats about your website such as how much traffic you have had, what keywords are used to find you, other links that point to you, the location of your visitors and a lot more. It’s damn good software and it’s completely free!

When you are signed up, you will have to insert a website profile for your blog. All you have to do is just add the URL of your blog and maybe reset your time zone if you wish. It will then give you some code that you will need to display on your web pages – Just click on this code and copy it to the clipboard.

To put the code onto your WordPress blog, you can do it manually but that involves editing your theme files and if you change themes you will have to do it again. Instead, I recommend Semiologic which manages your Analytics for you. The download page has full instructions on how to use the plugin so I don’t need to repeat it here.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, business, earn money blogging, home based business, internet marketing, make money blogging, make money online