Savvy Affiliate

Day 19 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

Direct referral traffic from other blogs is great, search engine traffic is even better, but by far the most important visitors you will get are those who subscribe to your blog via your RSS feed.  Subscribers to your blog are much more of a compliment than someone bookmarking your site.  When someone bookmarks your site they are saying, this would be nice to come back to.  When they subscribe to your blog, they don’t want to miss a single post.

 In fact running a blog with a fair number of subscribers gives you a reach that very few people had before the internet.  If you think about it 5 years ago, who had the ability to reach 24,000 other people like Problogger does on a daily basis?  Pretty much only television personalities and newspaper columnists.  Even if your site is small, and you only have ~30 subscribers, that is still the attention of as many people as your average grade school teacher gets.

Alright, alright, subscribers are great, feeds are great, but how do I get them?

If you are a new blogger, that could very well be a question you are finding it hard get an answer too.  A lot of people who have been blogging for a while have familiarity blindness.  They are so knowledgeable about a subject that they forget what a beginner knows.  Luckily, the answer isn’t a hard one.  If you publish a wordpress blog, you already have a feed.  You just need to get attention to it.

Your feed is at www.YourBlog.com/feed/  not to hard is it?

But hold on.  You don’t want to use that feed.   Although it is perfectly good for people to subscribe to, there is no way to get stats off of it.  If people start subscribing to that feed, you will quickly have no idea who is reading your blog, or how many.

You need Feedburner 

Feedburner is an all in one tool for handling your feed.  Just set it up (free), point it at your feed, and let it go.  In fact it is such a valuable tool, and so many people use it, that Google is reportedly buying it for $100 Million

And don’t worry about setting feedburner up, like most things dealing with Wordpress, there is a plugin for it.    One note of warning though, I found that after I installed the plugin, it took up to a day before it redirected all of my visits to the feed site to feedburner.  So if you don’t get redirects right away just be patient.

So that was the easy part.  Getting subscribers, that can be challenging.  But that is a topic for tomorrow’s post.