Feed Me!

Okay, so for some reason, whenever I hear someone refer to a RSS Feed, I instantly think of Seymour for the Little Shop of Horrors. So, let me just clarify… I’m talking about RSS feeds here people… not the Venus Fly Trap.

It’s very important to give people easy access to your RSS Feed.

I do so with my super cute little button up in the top right hand corner of my blog. It took me a long time to fnd the perfect RSS icon, and I finally settled on my green one.

If you are having trouble finding the perfect one, just do a google image search for “Cute RSS buttons” and you will get tons. But, I think it’s important to the aesthetics of your website to have one you really like.

So, I have this little RSS button, and I assume people subscribe to my feed, but I am about to let you in on another one of my dirty little secrets…

I have no idea how many subscribers I have.

None, I know how many people do the google friend connect thing, and I know how many people do the facebook connect thing. (I promise to talk about these later.)

So, I did some asked my husband the web development professional did some research, and decided the best way to go here is Feed Burner.

I logged right in with my trusty google account, and stuck my feed into the URL box and burned away! Now my feed is ready to be tracked! Remember how we were talking about clickthroughs, and how important they were? Well, guess what they have a statistics page designed to track just that! Look at all the great stats they track:

Now, since I’m a self hosted wordpress girl, I just downloaded the plugin in order to get everything up and going. (If you’re not a self hosted wordpress gal… I suggest you fix that. It’s just too easy these days, and the only way to ensure the contents of your blog TRULY belong to you.) All the isntructions are on the feed burner page, but as always if you need some help please let me know.

There’s so much stuff to play with in feed burner. For now, we just want to make sure all the feeds on our website are using our feedburner address and add a ‘subscribe in email’ feature. Then, we will give it a few days and analyze our statistics.

Now that we have a good handle on our readers and statistics, I think we are ready to take our blogs and start making money with them. Next week we will work on this. (I’ll give you a hint: content is king.)