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RSS feeds are your friend

April 20th, 2010

If you are trying to promote something, feeds can help you.  You should monitor what industry leaders are saying by subscribing to their feeds, try to get people to subscribe to a your own feed, be able to customize how your feed looks, and be aware of how feeds can be automatically added to a web page.  I hope this Chapter 6 of Digging Into WordPress shows you how important feeds are to marketers.

Choosing Your Feed Reader

Get Google Reader, and if you use a mac person or have an iPhone the program NetNewsWire is nice.  Subscribing to people’s rss feeds keeps you up to date with their thoughts and feelings that they share on their blog posts.  You need to figure out which community you want to be considered a part of and start listening to what people are saying.  I don’t really like to subscribe to feeds that publish more than one post daily, but if you are the kind of person that likes constant distractions then subscribe away.

Full Feeds vs. Partial Feeds

Generate full feeds.  Partial feeds suck.

FeedBurner

This is a must for marketers.  I just reactivated the FD FeedBurner plugin after giving up on podcasting via WordPress.  Definitely allow people to subscribe via email.  I wouldn’t worry about letting people subscribe to comments, unless you are getting lots of commentators.  Can you create an RSS and an RSS email email icon to put in your header and sidebar? Here is my sidebar html code:

<a title="Dr. Horowitz <span class=" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/DrHoro">rss</a><a title="Dr. Horowitz <span class=" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/DrHoro">"><img title="Dr. Horowitz rss" src="http://drho.ro/images/rss-icon.png" alt="Dr. Horowitz rss" width="48" height="48" /></a>
<a title="Dr. Horowitz <span class=" href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DrHoro">rss</a><a title="Dr. Horowitz <span class=" href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DrHoro"> email"><img title="Dr. Horowitz rss email" src="http://drho.ro/images/email-icon.png" alt="Dr. Horowitz rss email" /></a>

Can you create a subdomain for your rss and rss email feeds so that you can tell your parents to go to rssemail.drho.ro and get your feed?

It’s cool to display your feed subscriber count if it’s high, but I don’t think that FeedBurner chicklets are very cool.

As marketers it’s a good idea to brand your feed.  I got a little carried away following the custom feed image instructions.  FeedBurner lets you add a small brand image to your feed’s page under the “Optimize” tab–>”Feed Image Burner”.

I wouldn’t mess around with Yahoo Pipes or excluding stuff from your feed at this point, but you never know what the boss is going to ask for.

Custom Feed Content

Once you get enough people subscribed to your feed it can’t hurt to add some custom content that you’re trying to promote.  I’d recommend adding custom content to the end of the post…adding it at the beginning looks kind of lame.  I think I might have to try the Better Feed WordPress Plugin, not that I have a lot of subscribers…

Importing and Displaying External Feeds

This is powerful stuff.  It’s a pain in the ass to update a web page, so if you can automatically pull in RSS content like blog posts, tweets, flickr images, or YouTube videos to a web page it makes it easy to keep a web page fresh.  Maybe Yahoo Pipes could be helpful here.

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