Saturday, September 10, 2011

RSS Feeds- 10 things you can do for more clicks- Part 1

RSS 101
  • An RSS Feed allows followers to keep up on your content without remembering to check back in!
  • You can see the analytics of your feed and interaction HERE
  • Optimize your RSS feed for better, more professional viewing, and more clicks!



Starting from scratch...
#1 Thing you can do for more clicks: Find your RSS feed under settings!

We have so many tools available to us to foster growth. 
Let them sit unused and you are wasting resources!


MAKE SURE you have a subscribe button somewhere VISIBLE
 There's a gadget for that! Subscription Links

My RSS feed was something that just always SAT there, until I started to see "feedproxy.google.com" in my referring URL's. I decided then, to check out MY RSS feed. Well I was pretty discouraged with its appearance! Plain, without formatting. COOK-E-CUTTER! (You know how I hate that...)

I started poking around, and found THIS!


Since I had never looked at my RSS feed, although obviously hundreds of other people were, I had no idea that there is an awesome site to manage your feed! Features, goodies, oh my!

#2 Thing you can do for more clicks: KNOW how many clicks you are getting!

I had no idea!

When you go to the feedburner site, there are OODLES of reports!

See which posts are clicked the most

Views- When they actually click on the post and view it in your site
Clicks- When they click on links within the post

Get subscriber stats, including how they are receiving the feed. 98% of mine is through Google Feedfetcher 
 
Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle. Subscriber counts include Google Reader and the iGoogle. 

If you are anything like me, you will spend...too much time looking through all of these reports.

So DO something with that!

The first thing I did, was make sure that I am using Google Reader. I want to see what they see.
I want to replay popular posts.
I want to make it pretty.
I want my click-through to be higher.

Part 2- Tomorrow 9/10
#3 Thing you can do for more clicks- Improve your image
#4 Thing you can do for more clicks-  Publicize

Resources: 

FREE COOL ICONS
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Halloween Vector RSS Icons
Free Jeans RSS Icons




4 comments:

AO said...

awesome post! i had to bookmark this and i look forward to part 2. now back to feedburner lol! thanks for sharing! c",)

BlogWithMom said...

My feed looks like this: http://www.blogwithmom.com/feed/

I thought I read somewhere that when I joined Triberr I couldn't change the address to this feed. Wouldn't signing up with feedburner change my feed address?

Bobbie Anne

Cindy said...

Hi Bobbie!
You can change your feed in Triberr whenever you want! You can even add 2 feeds and assign them to different tribes! Let me know if you ever need help doing this :)

Unknown said...

Help! I see my site feed in setings, I have full access selected, but I can't click anywhere else to see how many subscribers I have...