When I asked for feedback on what people wanted to know about blogs and blogging, many of them wanted to know about RSS. The main question being what is RSS?
So here is an explanation of those who do not know:
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is easily recognisable through the orange square icon found at the top of most blogs’ sidebars.
It is like a subscription service, enabling your followers to receive any new material you’ve written as soon as it’s published. It saves you time and makes it easy for you to keep up with new stuff without having to search all your favourite blogs for it.
Think of it like subscribing to a magazine: the new post (or message) gets delivered straight to you, either via email into your in-box, or into search engine readers if you’ve subscribed via that method.
A search engine reader provides pages with links to newly available posts, or individual ‘cookies’ on the search engine homepage which lists the last three posts of that blog through headline links.
Apart from allowing your followers to keep track of your new material, RSS also has other uses, mainly through social media.
When you publish a new blog post, it can be ‘fed’ into your social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. This means that each new message appears as a link automatically in these sites. The RSS feed delivers your new content in this format for your followers to read.
In Facebook the whole post is published in the Notes pages, and your Homepage or Status page shows the headline link (known as a permalink) with perhaps the first few lines of the post as a taster.
In Twitter your post is listed as the title and the first few words, followed by a tinyurl (or reduced link) to the blog post. As a Twitter message uses only 140 characters, there will not be room for the whole permalink, so various methods are used to shorten it.
RSS is important if you wish to increase your readership or encourage more interest from search engines. It is a piece of software that encourages the search engine spiders to follow your blog, and automatically spreads your news throughout the web. Without it your blog would appear lifeless as only those who are invited would get a chance to read it, and only if they bothered to visit it regularly. RSS automatically delivers your messages without effort, saves time and encourages a new readership, especially through social media.
If you want to find out how to include RSS into your blog, I have written a blogging visual e-course on the subject, called “Setting up a RSS feed = how to set up RSS feed so others can follow your blog posts”. You can view it from my blogging pages, and will be available to buy, along with the other e-courses, from September, so watch this space!
Alice Elliott of Design Your Marketing has created a series of visual e-courses to help you set up and maintain a blog from WordPress.com. They are designed to take you through the blogging journey either completely from the beginning, or to allow you to dip into those areas you are unsure of, or would like to know more. They should be ready to purchase from September 2009.
Think of your blog as another platform to advertise from. Call it promoting yourself, your product and your company. But you could write endless posts providing valuable insights and top tips about your business, and even though they would be interesting reading, they are missing a vital element.
Would your business like more exposure?
How do I use my blog to promote my business?
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009Hello Alice,
I do have a blog but I am not sure if I use it correctly. I created my blog to promote my business and to benefit from Google ranking. I am afraid I am not writing as much as I wanted … my excuse not enough time, but the real reason is I don’t really know how to use it correctly and benefit from it.
I am open to suggestions. Please visit www.penelopesweddings.com/blog.
Penelope
–oo00oo–
Hi Penelope
Yes, you’re on the way to producing a great blog! But we need to make it more interesting, for both your readers and the internet spiders.
As a wedding business I’m sure you have some great images you can share – beautiful brides, sumptuous cakes, fabulous dresses, elegant receptions, giggling bridesmaids – advertise and promote your business through pictures! If you have a great set of photos to share you needn’t write that much to go with it, they will speak for themselves.
You need to upload an image that resembles the header on your website so that your blog looks more like its extension. You can do this through the Appearance link on the Dashboard and go down to Custom Header and download a header image. Wordpress give instructions on how to do this, alternatively you could use my blogging package ‘Creating a visual identity’ which is part of my ‘Beautifying your Blog’ series I’m creating on my new blogsite.
I’m glad to see you’ve created categories and blogs, but I think you should vary your tags to capture a wider audience for search engine optimisation. I imagine you got these keywords from Wordtracker or some similar provider – great – but other words that are relevant to your post will increase spider activity and therefore traffic to your blog, and ultimately your website. And don’t forget to put the tag cloud widget onto your sidebar along with one for your recent posts.
Post a nice picture of you on your About page, plus a bit more about you and some links to your website. People like a personal touch, especially for the service industry.
And if you want to accumulate a following, get a RSS feed URL from feedburner.com or feedblitz.com and put the code for the chicklit button or new post subscription link into a text widget and place it at the top of your sidebar.
There’s quite a lot to be getting on with here, so take it step by step. But the best way to promote your blog is to keep putting up new posts, preferably short, concise and relevant, regularly rather than frequently, with content gathered from your day-to-day activities that you think will interest your readers and potential customers.
Alice
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Hi Penelope
On further inspection I’ve worked out that your blog is actually a self-hosted Wordpress blog attached to your existing website!
To accomplish what I said in my last post, uploading your matching header will have to be done through your ftp provider into an images file, and then allocated to that particular area of the .css within the theme. This is quite techie, so if you are not inclined in that department you will have to get your webmaster to do this for you.
The widget stuff is the same, except that because it is a self-hosted blog you can upload forms into your text widgets and posts, something you cannot do in a ‘free’ Wordpress blog. Take advantage of this with a new post subscription sign-up box which is included with your blog’s RSS feed – encourage your followers to keep in the loop with any new information you post.
Alice
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