How RSS Feeds Add Value to Your Blog
Most of today’s bloggers are learning or would already have RSS feeds embedded in their blogs. The RSS feed is one of the most valuable tools to increase traffic and exposure to a blog. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and it is exactly what its name promises; a simple way to distribute your blog to thousands of readers.
In short, RSS uses a programming language, XML, to advertise each new blog post. Either the full post or a summary of it is instantly syndicated (or “syndicated”) so that readers know there is something new on the blog and with that new readers can discover the blog.
There are a variety of ways that blog posts can be syndicated. The distribution could have been done by other website owners, who found the blog post interesting or relevant to their niche. They, in turn, have the blog post published on their own website. Most blogs would have to wait a long time for this type of syndication to occur. This is why most bloggers use a smarter and more efficient way. They distribute their content through a feed reader program.
Spreading the word of a new post through a feed reader exposes the content to a wider group of people in a very short period of time.
When using a feed reader, bloggers don’t have to wait for other sites to find their content or even to find their content relevant. In fact, they can distribute it themselves. People who have read the blogger post through the feed reader, enjoy reading or find the post interesting, will visit the site and become regular readers.
Many good and interesting blogs lose readers due to the fact that the same readers simply forget to come back and find updated information. This is a frustrating fact for bloggers. However, with the use of the RSS feed, the problem is solved. Readers are notified whenever there is something new on a particular blog. You can think of the notification as a reminder to revisit the blog.
Readers are often interested in more blogs than they can realistically crawl. If so, RSS feed readers present themselves as a very useful tool that allows them to crawl hundreds of blogs, since they do not have to click on each one to see if there is new content published. Now they receive notifications through the feed and easily obtain the information that interests them in a short period of time.
In today’s current context, most bloggers are aligning themselves with RSS feeds. They are making that button available on their websites so that interested readers can sign up and receive notifications of new content on their excellent blog. These XML or RSS read buttons are popping up even on popular internet websites.
