Ways To Improve Your Blog’s Feed Experience

Feeds provide a useful way to pick up new readers by letting them view your content without having to visit your site. Recently the number of feed readers, both online and offline, has exploded, thus making blog feeds even more popular.

By default most blogging platforms provide you with simple RSS and Atom feed, but they provide nothing extra. Thankfully, you can get some extra features by adding buttons to your site and signing up with an online service called FeedBurner.

FeedBurner

By now most bloggers have probably seen a FeedBurner feed at least once. FeedBurner is, in a nutshell, a service that lets you analyze your feed’s statistics and provides you with some extra features.

When you first sign up with FeedBurner all you have to do it enter your blog’s feed, the title, and what you want the FeedBurner address to be (feed.feedburner.com/yourfeedaddress). Doing this will let you see some useful statistics about your feed, such as the number of readers, trends, and which feed-reader software people are using.

FeedBurner also lets you republish your feed as HTML, set up a daily e-mail newsletter based on your feed, and even set up a graphic to put on your site that will display the number of feed subscribers you have.

Note: If you want to get statistics for readers they must be viewing your FeedBurner feed, and not your blog’s feed. This may require changing your site’s head tags.

Blog Buttons

Many blog readers use what are called online feed readers, which are basically aggregators for blog content from their favorite feeds. The graphics under the “Syndicate” section of the sidebar of this blog are examples of feed buttons.

The first one points to the FeedBurner address for this blog, the second button lets you add your blog to either Google Reader or your Google homepage, the third is a Technorati button that lets you add this blog to your Technorati favorites, and the last one I use is for Yahoo.

There are literally hundreds of buttons out there that you can choose from, but I would highly recommend not posting more than 5 of them. If you put more than 5 or so it could make your blog look cluttered.

Offer different feed types

There are many versions of the two main formats, RSS and Atom. It is always a good idea to offer some different versions of your feed, as some reader software may not be compatible with one of the formats.

Make a link to your feed(s) easy to find!

One thing that irritates me about many blogs is they don’t give you any clear way to subscribe to their feeds. Many don’t even put a link to the feed in between their page’s head tags. If you truly want blog readers then put the link(s) to your feed(s) in an easy to find place.

Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?