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Business Blog Step 19 - The Importance of RSS

Guest post by: Gary Baker

Article Overview: Communication and dissemination of information is key to achieving a successful blog and the RSS functionality is the way to achieve that.

Business Blog Step 19 - The Importance of RSS

Communication and dissemination of information is key to achieving a successful blog and the RSS functionality is the way to achieve that.

When someone subscribes to your RSS Feed, it means that they have shown a commitment to continuing the interaction – they are interested in receiving more information from you and you are now able to provide them with immediate and unobtrusive updates from your blog.

You want to make sure that the RSS feeds are prominent on your blog to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find. The generic orange logo is now becoming more and more commonplace although even more sites still retain the orange box with RSS or XML in it.

You can also add a series of small logos which are set up with the logos of the main RSS Readers to help the recognition element and help people feel more comfortable. The take up of RSS has been steady but relatively slow although it is certainly increasing and this will continue as it is incorporated directly into the main browsers this year.

However, to cover all options, you should also give them the ability to subscribe to the RSS feed by email which is now a 3rd party service which is available – not quite the way that RSS was intended to be delivered but the main point is delivering the content it contains to those who want to receive it.

If you feel that it would help the take up levels, create a page which explains what RSS is and what RSS Readers are available – it may seem excessive but it will break down the barriers to its use and you in turn will benefit because you make sure that the readers can receive your content as and when you post it.

As your blog develops, you should consider creating a separate RSS Feed for individual topics, probably divided according to the categories you have set up. This will allow your readers even greater choice in terms of the information they receive from you and in terms of giving your readers what they want, more choice is going to be better. But whether you work from a single RSS feed or develop multiple feeds, it is important that you make RSS a central part of your blog promotion and reader retention program.

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Article Tags: blog, blogging, blogging for beginners, business blogs, RSS, wordpress, wordpresscom, wordpressorg



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