Why RSS is important to your blog

Gone are the days of private journals. Most blogs nowadays are immediately publsihed online and that happens with just one click. Now if you have a personal blog, you may wonder how readers could reach your blog. 


What is RSS? Ping? Subscribe?


Ping. Feeds. RSS. Subscribe by email. They all mean the same thing - readers should know that you have a new post. Just imagine you put so much effort into creating the greatest post of your life and then it generates no readers. Uh-oh. So, when you publish a new post, immediately ping the world. Then, submit to article directories.


Make friends with Feedburner


To send the new post directly to your readers' emails, shake hands with Feedburner (now owned by Google; not a surprise). See the little gadget on my right sidebar that says Subscribe by Email? Enter your email and you see this:

If you enter your email address, then your email address receives an email that says you have to activate your subscription. Once it becomes active, you will receive my future posts everytime i update. Pretty simple huh? Nope, actually. You see, how do you encourage visitors to become readers. And how do you encourage readers to become subscribers? It's a matter of luck if they want to or not want to subscribe.


Who are the Visitors, Readers, and Subscibers?


Visitors are those who happen to find your blog through Google, Yahoo, Technorati (very powerful), or telling friends to visit your blog. Readers are those who read your posts, even your posts two years ago, because they enjoy your content. The, the subscribers are those who subscribed to your blog because they are watching out to read your fresh posts.


YOu see, your blog must have a lot of visitors everyday because surely, one in a million will subscribe. Right? What are the odds? And if you  achieve one million subscribers, your blog will have a lot of visitors everyday. Confusing? Yeah, search engine optimization (SEO)really is. SEo is a matter of perseverance, luck, and major luck. Blogging is all about luck... but the best part is, you can get lucky if you have persevearnce. I'm being confusing again.


So there, I hope I cleared your mind about feeds or pings or rss. Have I? Please do drop a comment ;)