Even if you are new to the aspect of blogging, the term ‘RSS’ is one that you most likely already recognize. RSS feeds are simply an aggregation of your blog’s posts that are pushed – often times through a feed reader – to another source. Sometimes, this means being pushed via email to users, while other times, it may result in your RSS feed being published on another site. This method of news distribution has become vital to blogs and websites that seek to share similar information and interests with their visitors, so you do not want to be missing out on this opportunity. Below are several tips to help you setup your RSS feed and to make the most of it.

Consider Management Tools

One of the best systems to use for monitoring RSS feeds is Feed Burner, which allows you to not only see how many followers your feed currently has, but also details who is reading your posts and  the click-thru rate. The information collected by Feed Burner can give you insight into who is reading your RSS feed and from there, you can make more customized decisions that will cater your feed to the targeted audience. Signing up for a Feed Burner account is simple enough; head over to Google and use your existing account credentials to setup the account.

Don’t Truncate Your Feed

Many websites take it upon themselves to shorten each entry in their feed so that individuals have to click on the link and go to the site in question. While this may be a great idea from the perspective of the webmaster or blogger, individuals reading your feed may grow tired of having to navigate to your site each time they want to read a post. Many people use RSS feeds for the simplicity of having all the information they desire in one place. When they have to click on your links to read the entire post, there is no real difference between your RSS feed and a typical news site.

Add Multimedia

Some bloggers stray from adding interactive content or graphics to their feeds, but there’s no reason why your RSS feed cannot incorporate a little bit of multimedia flare. Relevant photos and videos pertaining to your site’s content should always be viewed as another opportunity to garner traffic. If you host the images/videos from your site, then this is an easy way to drive people to your site to view the content. You can also share or add social networking buttons and links directly to the content of the messages, as opposed to adding them in the footer.

Create Custom Offers

Since RSS feeds are designed to be circulated among people who share its interests, you can create an array of different offers, promotions or events that can be custom-tailored to your audience. For example, if you run both an RSS feed and a mailing list, you can transmit your mailing list subscription information through your RSS feed. In order to prevent your email address from being abused by bots and other automated web crawlers, you can use Pingler’s Email to Image Converter so that users can clearly see the instructions but bots cannot take advantage.