April’s Challenge: Burn, Baby, Burn

I have a confession to make before I continue with this blog post. I struggled big time trying to understand how RSS feeds work for blogs! I consider myself to be pretty technologically advanced, so when something so seemingly easy is hard for me, it drives me nuts! So after much research, hand wringing and a a glass of wine I bring you the following post.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is used to publish blog posts to RSS readers, emails and social networking sites. In English, it is how people find your blog and get updates when you post something new.

How do I set up my RSS feed?

Every blog has a RSS feed built into it. The real work is directing that feed out to the world. Typically a feed service does this and you have to register your website with the service.

Okay, where do I find my Blog feed?

In WordPress.com your blog feed is: http://yourdomaname.wordpress.com/feed

If you have permalinks set up on your WordPress.org blog, your blog feed is: http://yourdomain.com/feed/

If you do not have permalinks set up on your WordPress.org blog, your blog feed is: http://yourdomain.com/feed/

In Blogger.com your feed is: http://blogspot.yourdomainname.com/feeds/

What service should I use?

There are two popular feed services, Feedburner, which is owned by Google, and Feedblitz, which has been gaining a lot of popularity over the last few years. Let’s take a look at both.

Feedburner

The best thing about Feedburner is that it is free and fairly easy to use. You simply create an account and right there on the home page it will ask you to burn your feed. Enter the URL and click Next. At that point you will want to walk through Feedburner’s site to publish your feed.

There are some drawbacks to Feedburner, namely the acuracy of the subscribers. Many users report that Feedburner does not report an accurate count of the people that subscribe to your blog. Another concern is that Feedburner isn’t publishing the feeds to subscribers in a timely fashion. It was this issue that lead me to Feedblitz…

Feedblitz

I moved Automated Marketing’s feed to Feedblitz last week and I am a happy girl! Feedblitz capture my RSS feed and sends it to Google Reader and my subscribers very quickly. I also love that it publishes my posts to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for me. I also like that my posts can be sent as a traditional email newsletter to my subscribers. Feedblitz costs $1.49 a month and goes up based only on email subscribers.

The only drawback to Feedblitz is it’s clunky design on the back end. It can be hard to navigate and hard to use at first.

So which should you use? I highly, highly recommend Feedblitz. For a measly $1.49 a month you get so many services and options that Feedburner can’t touch– even if it is free. Now it is important to note, that if you start out with Feedburner and move to Feedblitz, you may lose subscribers along the way. Once your feed is burned it almost becomes property of one of these services so if you decide to change your feed, make sure you let your subscribers know.

Did you have issues understanding the feed concept? What is your preferred feed service?

Buffer

Related posts:

Tags: blogging, rss, 30 day marketing challenge