Promoting your Blog Fiction: Get a "Feed"

Let me make myself clear. Setup and turn on a feed for your blog and promote the heck out of it. I know that many people reading this post will file this advice under "d" for "duh". However, I can't help but notice that not every blog fiction site does a very good job of promoting their feed. Or worse, they don't even have one.

If you know what a feed is, you can skip the rest of this post. For those who don't know, a feed is just a way for people to get the latest sampling of your blog. It's uses are nearly limitless. For instance I use the feeds to create my left sidebar. BlogRush uses it to promote feeds. People use it to be notified when their favorite blogs have a new post. I put some of them on my yahoo homepage. Others put them on their google homepage.

There are 2 types of "feeds". An RSS feed, and an ATOM feed. Blogger does ATOM feeds. Others default to using an RSS feed. In the end, which type your blog supports is not an issue. Any program that reads feeds can read both types. Any program that's worth using, that is.

If you're a blogger, fictional or otherwise, you want to make "subscribing" to your feed as easy and quickly as possible. It should always be a click away. Most bloggers will also use something like feedburner so that readers can sign up to be notified via email when there's a new post. Look at my sidebar to the right. Towards the top is the international gigantic orange symbol for a feed. Under it is a link to subscribe via email. Some people will put the email signup form into their webpage so that people can sign up with the click of a button(example here).

Does promoting a feed help? Let me answer with an emphatic YES!!! Everytime I have a new post on this blog, I can't help but notice that the number of unique visitors for the day spikes. I can only conclude that those are my loyal subscribers checking out my latest post. I know it's my feed that prompts their visit. If they were manually checking, my traffic wouldn't spike.

I won't make this another tutorial on setting up a feed. There are plenty that do a better job than I ever could. I just want to make sure that you get one and promote the heck out of it. With the exception of creating an engrossing and entertaining story, it's the most important thing you can do to increase readership. This reminds me, subscribe to this blog's feed!!!

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