What The Heck Is RSS?
We believe that there is a general misunderstanding of what exactly RSS is and how it can benefit your blog. We’ll try to explain and answer the most often asked questions.
Really Simple Syndication. The second S in RSS stands for simple and it really is! All you need to do is subscribe to your favorite site’s RSS feed by clicking the site’s rss button and the latest posts get delivered to your news aggregator of choice. Nearly 50% of our readers prefer the Google Reader as you can see in the screenshot.
Being subscribed to a feed gives you a couple of advantages. You’ll hardly ever miss the latest news and you’re able to use less time consuming more information. Besides these pros for readers, RSS also provides bloggers a way to create a community and they use it as a tool to see how well they’re doing. The amount of subscribers can partly be used as a metric to measure your blog’s success. That’s why loads of blogs have a little counter which tells us how many people are subscribed. And since most of us are sheeple, we tend to subscribe only when there’s already a vast amount of members.
There is a common misconception about the feedburner stats though. People seem to think that the number reflects the actual amount of readers that are currently subscribed. This is not true. The number you see reflects the number of subscribers that have pulled up your feed in the last 24 hours. Putting one and one together, this probably means that you have more subscribers than the number claims. Not every subscriber will read your feed everyday. This explains the fluctuation.
Here’s how FeedBurner explains it:
The subscriber number represents how many distinct computers/feed readers (such as iTunes, newsgator, etc.) accessed your feed that day. It doesn’t represent new or old but a total for that day. It also counts all unique subscribers once, wether they pull your feed once a day or once per minute.
Why are your subscribers important?
They’re the people that read your blog and appreciate your opinion. Certain advertising companies translate your subscriber stats into traffic stats and will label you accordingly for their customers. The higher your stats, the more money they will pay you to advertise for them. Sure, not all of them will visit your site so you’re not getting rich with your adsense but remember that if they see an article they like in your RSS, they might even link to it on their blog which gets you more traffic.
We’re not the first to give out these simple tips and we won’t be the last. The point is that there’s always new people coming on the scene (~5000 new bloggers out there every day) and they will eventually have questions about optimizing their RSS feed.
- Burn your feeds with Feed Burner, they’re the best at what they do.
- Provide a full feed, don’t be a tease. (unless your name is galilea montijo).
- Make sure people know they can subscribe to you.
- Make sure your feed works from time to time. A broken feed will result in a traffic drop.
Blogtrepreneur just wrote an interesting article about RSS; “How I Increased RSS Subscribers By 142% By Being A Purple Cow“, and Becky tells a bit more about FeedBurner in this article if you still feel hungry after this post!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Great article John. Today I wrote some tips about how to tweak FeedBurner if you are interested in reading them. Things like email subscriptions offer and email this link in the feed can be a great addition and an easy way to get people to come back.
Becks
Good article, added your link to the post.
i also recently wrote an article, about having trouble getting full summary with feedburner! not much information was available! i hope you link it!
Damn, mines set to autopost in two days
Great article. Everybody who doesn’t use RSS should head over to CashQuests.com and practice using it.
Thanks John, now if only I had filled out the URL in that last comment properly !
Hey John - thanks so much for the linkback.
I emailed your site because I thought you would like the reference to any type of cow - but on further inspection today, I just realised that the images of cows are actually rather purple. Again, congratulations on another small and clever detail - you must have read the book
I’ve reached my first milestone of 50. That was a week or so ago. When/if I hit 100 i’m going to be pretty pumped. I’ve got about 12 feeds on my “iGoogle”.
Feedburner is really a must have these days for a blog. Their site stats are ok, but a little slow now (sometimes reporting 4-5 hours late). All still, it is a great way to measure. I still use Google Analytics for measurement though. They are about a day behind, but provide lots of good other info that feedburner does not.
Good post Mr Cow
Thank you Mr Vaughan. Long time no see?
My girlfriend was in town, so was pre occupied for the past 2 weeks really. Will be hitting the ground running later on today, lots of rss feeds to catch up on.
Hi Mr Moo
Nice post about the RSS feeds, a tip I picked up from another blog is to remind people to subscribe to your RSS feed in one of your post’s.
I know it sounds a bit cheeky, but if you word it right it works, I tested this on my blog and the readers shot up by 30 for that day, and have been increasing steadily ever since (I put it in one of my posts which I saw was becoming popular)
fatgadget,
Mr. Cow has it at the bottom of every post.
Hi Colin,
I realised that
, what I meant was that this is something I hadn’t thought about doing before.
What I put on my blog in one post was ‘ PS if you get the chance please subscribe to our RSS feed’, and it seemed to work.
I posted a similar article to this. It’s not really an article, but a very well-made video I found on YouTube. Check it out:
http://slyvisions.com/files/what-is-rss-and-how-to-use-rss-feeds.html
Sly from Slyvisions.com
Good article. I wrote one very similar couple of days ago.
Ph dear, wrote my domain wrong.
What the heck am I doing wrong?
I just came across your blog… if nothing else it’s pretty funny. I think you have come up with what Seth Godin would call a “purple cow”
Good luck with it!
that book is amazing!
[...] post about RSS, so I think it would only be fair that I give him a link to his post about “What the Heck is RSS“. John has some more details about [...]
Feedburners are also a pain in the arse, whilst you cannot read all the content that comes to your reader.
I understood one thing. Regular blogging is the only way to keep your RSS subscriber count high. Mine went as high as 24, then went down to 8
thanks for the nice article , well explained milk man
Hey John - thanks so much for the linkback.
I emailed your site because I thought you would like the reference to any type of cow - but on further inspection today, I just realised that the images of cows are actually rather purple. Again, congratulations on another small and clever detail - you must have read the book
haha, when you said hit the ground running i thought for a second it was sex innuendo!
I am out of town right now too so I know the feeling Brian. I barely have time to check this site as much as I did when I was at home. I’ll be back this weekend though so hopefully I’ll be able to get my daily milk =]