Feed Flare lesson #1- Servicing your readers!

It is quite funny how everybody wants to increase there feed reader counts but do not do everything they can to insure there readers and visitors have every available option open to them to be able to subscribe. Just today I was over at The Rating Blog looking at a very large contest there holding over the next month. One of the ways to enter this contest was to subscribe to there feed. I figured sure, why not as I am all about increasing someones feed reader subscriptions. So I clicked on his subscribe button and guess what I found out. He does not offer his readers the choice of subscribing via email, I was like WTF. What he wants you to do is subscribe in a reader then take a screen shot of it and send him the link to where he can verify the subscription. I got turned off right there, and then I thought to my self well maybe he does not know how to set up the email subscription option. So with that here comes my frist lesson for you.

Setting up the email option for your RSS readers. 

Log into your Feed Burner account as you would normally do if you are checking up on how many readers you have or checking up on your stats.. Once you have logged into your feeds dashboard select which feed you want to look at and once you have done that a screen will appear and  you will see some buttons you can click on right at the top of the screen. One of those buttons says “Publicize” Most people go in this section to grab the Subscribe in a reader buttons you see everywhere as well as the feed counter chickets but if you look down the left side of the screen under the “Services” heading you will see a link for Email Subscriptions. Click on that button!

Once you click on the link you will be brought to a new screen simply called “Subscription Management“. First thing your going to do is pick your language, for most people this service is offered in English. Once that has been done scroll down to the bottom of this screen and click on the word Enable. Once you have enabled that option you are now ready to copy and paste the HTML code supplied to you from Feed Burner to place  anywhere on your site. You do not have to have a big banner on your site like I do displayed after each post, they also offer a code for a simple text link submit. I like the banner sign up forms simply because they stand out better and you increase your chances of getting more subscribers. Not everyone has room though in there site for another feature to be displayed so all you need to do they is let your readers know you now support this option of RSS subscriptions and when someone goes to sign up to your feed  all they have to do is choose it.

There are some other great features from Feed Burner for this method of RSS subscriptions but I will get into those in another lesson so make sure you have subscribed to our feed either in a reader or by email so you can be updated when that post is live.

Do you offer your RSS Feed by email, if so let me know as I always love reading a blogs post in my email. It is like reading the news paper in the morning for me when I get up.