There’s a Blog in my Soup

Don’t hate me - I totally just found out about this - kinda funny actually - but my feed should be showing full-posts now. 

I am so embarassed I wrote about how important it is for full feeds, yesterday, and found out from a subscriber today that mine aren’t showing full feeds. I swear I’m not a hypocrite. lol.

 Don’t worry I took care of that - please feel free to subscribe now.

 I’d like to thank Rob Williams over at 170spoons.com for letting me know.

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Twitter continues to Amaze me - Doubled my subscribers in 2 days!

I wrote yesterday how I got about 15 new subscribers in one day using twitter.

I woke up today, and checked my stats. Today I had 63 subscribers, up from 47.

My blog had approximately 600+ hits yesterday.

The most I’ve ever received on any of my online entities.

This truly is awesome, I am a twitter believer.

There is a downside though, with twitter comes a lot of distractions, the same can also be said of friendfeed, pownce, etc…(which I’m also trying to tap into a little bit.)

My major advice is to be devoted to your blog above all else. Twitter is great, and can give you some great ideas as to what to blog about, but the bottom line to being successful is to blog, and blog often.

I try for 2 times per day, 3 would be great, but even once per day if you’re really busy. If you go long periods without writing you’ll never build a true following, and you will lose a lot of your current readers.

Yesterday, I also asked about people who ‘Google Themselves‘. I got a lot of responses in comments, as well as a few on twitter.

As an experiment, I’ve decided to make a change in the Title of this blog, from ‘There’s a Blog in My Soup’, to “There’s a Blog in my Soup: A Blog by Patrick Curl”.

My goal is to see if that raises my ‘brand’, in the search engines.

Also if this is your first time reading my blog you might want to check out, my latest pillar article, on 40 some odd ways to increase your rss subscriber count - which I will be updating regularly.

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 Full feeds, are the ONLY way to Go!

I wrote in my post “
Blogs need to eat too! Feed your blog with 39 ways to build your RSS Subscriber base. So easy a slackjawed yokel could do it!” one of the tips that I state to increase your subscribers is is to use full feeds, I’m going to expand on this a little further.

There are 2 main reasons that opponents of this thinking cite as their reasons for using partial feeds.

1. Using a partial feed forces the reader to visit their site - and essentially raise their stats, ranking, and bring in more money from advertisers. This may actually be true if you’re a large blog, with tons of great content like mashable.com, but for the small-time blogger, 90% of your readers are going to be too lazy to click on through and read the rest of your article.This hurts your credibility. You build credibility by writing awesome articles that everyone bookmarks, shares, and loves. If people can’t, don’t, or won’t read your post, they can’t see how great it is, and won’t bother visiting your blog anymore. You want people to read your content no matter what to build up your name, brand, and reputation.

   Secondly, many readers, automatically just unsubscribe from any and all blogs that use partial feeds, if you’re ok with losing 40% of readers out there, then by all means use partial feeds, but I highly advise against it.

   Also according to feedburner, having a partial feed will not increase clickthroughs to your site at all.

2. Using partial feeds, can save your content from being scraped. That’s not always true, and the damage of losing subscribers, followers, etc out-weighs the alternative.It’s also possible that partial feeds can actually help scrapers, as the keyword density may be better.

Conclusion:

Successful blogging is about getting your message out there, and making your readers happy, think of what you would do in their situation, if reading a partial post do you always click through to the website? If so you’re the exception…

Personally, I get pissed if a blogger actually expects me to click through to their website, when I’m surfing my reader.

Most bloggers are lazy, or way to busy to click through on every post, especially if they’re researching for a new blog post, which is what I am doing 90% of the time I’m using my reader.

Bottom line: Stop pissing off people off and Switch to a Full Feed!

Here are a few other great blog posts I read recently to back this up.

• Full Feeds are Better
• Why Not to Switch to Partial Feeds

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How to use RSS Feeds to break up Writers Topic…

I’ve written a lot lately about rss feeds, however this topic is more about getting over writer’s block, & speed blogging.

It’s a fact that more content = more search engine rankings / directory listings, and more visitors. Of course quality matters too — but I’m going to show you a quick way to write high quality articles fast.

First, I recommend google reader, as it’s my feed reader of choice. I’m currently signed up to all of the major blogs that interest me, a good site to see a list of blogs ranked by # of RSS subscribers is RatingBurner.

I recommend signing up for about 20+ blogs, the more the merrier. Then you will open your reader and just browse headlines that intrigue you, when you see one you like, click on the little star next to it, this will flag it. I generally do this about 3-4 times a day, sometimes more…

I generally pick 1-2 days a week where I speed-blog and write a majority of my posts, my goal is to write 3 blogs per day, of course with my busy schedule it’s hard to always hit that, but it’s something to shoot for.

Now, in your reader click on the ‘Starred Items’ link on the top left. It will show you all the posts you checked as your favorites. Now look for the headline that you think would be the funnest to write about. I subscriber to gizmodo, techcrunch, ars technica, and other tech blogs, and a lot of the time you will have posts that are almost identical. This is actually good - it means its a hot topic.

What I do is I pick the best keyword for that article, and search for it in the search form at the top of the reader, an example would be a post I found on all of the tech blogs about a PC Synching Elmo that after a battery change, started saying ‘Kill James’, James, being the 2 year old owner of the psychotic doll. Then you’ll notice, I linked to the posts it came from - this will build links back to your site, and increase your traffic, especially for blogs that remove no-follow.

If you’re not using your feed reader to help your blogging efforts you’re missing out on a lot of quality blog posts, and if you’re not writing at least one post per day it will take you a very long time to catch up with the likes of Darren Rowse and John Chow.

Another tip is to be sure if you’re writing late at night to set your post timestamp to the next morning, after 6am EST, I find this will net you the largest amount of traffic, as that’s when the world is most active, especially the english speaking world(no offense to Australians or Brits, )….

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If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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• Wow, Twitter + Digg = 1755 New Subscribers over the Weekend! (5)
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Blogs gotta Eat Too! Here are 39 Great Ways to Feed Your blog so it Grows

1. Educate Your Readers - How can they subscribe to an RSS Feed, if they don’t KNOW what an RSS Feed is?It is essential to discuss what an rss feed is, what a feed reader is, and how to subscribe, don’t assume your readers are the most tech savvy, go slow and have patience with them. You may also want to give them some links to feed reader programs and sites.Examples:
   • What in Tarnation is an RSS FEED
   • Fak3r Subscribe
   • What is an RSS?
   • What in the Heck is an RSS Feed? 
2. Give them the Email Option. Feed readers are the rave, most of us know how to use them, and have a favorite feed reader, but not ALL of us. Some people aren’t comfortable with new software - so offer them something familiar - a way to subscribe via email. Feedburner, and Feedblitz, are two companies that make this easy.I highly recommend using feedburner, in fact I’d say that feedburner is a necessary tool for a successful blogger. Besides giving an email option, you can also use feedburner to track how many subscribers you have, and there are a myriad of great features inside feedburner that just make blogging easier. You can even make money with it!Feedburner Email Example:
   

   Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner

3. Feedcount example:

   

4. Throw a Contest. A lot of blogs I’ve noticed are using this tactic more and more. Blog contests can drive a lot of traffic to your site, and making the only entry requirement, having them subscribe ensures that you will get a lot of entries, and each entry is a new subscriber. Here’s some good articles on running a good contest:
   • How to triple your blog’s street value, by throwing a Contest!
   • 3 Surefire ways to run a Radical Blog Contest
5. Give something away. Rewarding people for subscribing is a great way to build a large subscriber base, free hosting, free wordpress installation, entrecard credits, ebooks, etc…Here’s a good Wordpress plugin to help you along: WP RSS Sticky
   
6. Promote it Boldly, with a graphic. Above the fold. Like mine is! By the way if you haven’t subscribed yet, maybe you should now, before you forget!
7. Contribute to online communities. Promote the feed on forums / comments / email signatures, etc..wherever you can ethically post your link. Another good way to do this is answer a lot of questions on yahoo answers, and keep your feed subscription link in your signature, this is a wonderful way to build yourself up as an authority on an issue, and with credibility come the flock of subscribers.Maki - from Dosh Dosh - wrote “how you can increase your RSS subscriptions through comments alone.”
8. Use Full Feeds. I’m an American, I don’t know about the rest of the world but I’m lazy and most people are, people are also impatient, they do not want to have to visit your site, wait for it to load, etc…Make your feed a full feed, and your subscribers will love you, and they may stick around for the long haul.
9. Run an ad campaign. Use a special landing page designed to receive subscribers to your blog. Giving something away on this page could be a bonus, you could also use entrecard and promote a landing page as well, designed to drive people to subscribe to your blog, one thing you might do here is list some of your best blog posts.
10. Write compelling content. Of course when it all boils down, compelling content is the best surefire way to build and keep people coming back to your blog, and subscribing to your feed.
11. Be a Guest Blogging Pro. A good way to introduce yourself to new people, is via guest blogging on other’s blogs, especially if you can land a spot on a blog with a little more authority or reach than your own.
12. Start a Podcast. Podcasts are great way to gain more visitors, there are many people who love and follow podcasts, and for those who are camera shy, it beats youtube. Although youtube videos would be another method.
13. Network with other bloggers. Probably one of the biggest, the more friends you have the more people you have linking to your best posts. I know I don’t always have something to write about so I write a small overview of a post someone else wrote and link to the post(of course this benefits me because of the pingback/trackback)
14. Cross Promotional Deals. Using the blogs that you networked with in step 12, as a starting point you can show a link to their rss subscription link in your feed, and they can do the same for you. The biggest benefit of this is that everyone who sees your link, is seeing it because they are subscribed to an rss feed - or in other words, they are familiar with rss, and don’t need to be educated. Here are some plugins to help in setting up text ads on your feeds:
    • Feedvertising
    • Feed Footer
15. Use Feedflare. Feedflare is a built in plugin through feedburner which will make it easy for people to stumble, digg, or bookmark your blog.
16. Use Noindex. This will keep search engines from indexing your feed, and will thus help from getting duplicate content.
17. A little black hat for you. Find popular blogs not using feedburner and burn their feed as yours. Then have feedburner link the feed to yours, automatically you will have a large number of subscribers. This isn’t very ethical, but alas I figured I’d list it here, as I found it through another blog.
18. Get Social! Use the following social media sites, and be sure to bookmark your posts. You should also focus to building relationships on these sites and gathering friends.
    • Bumpzee
    • Digg
    • Reddit
    • Stumbleupon
    • Delicious
    • MyBlogLog
    • BlogCatalog
    • Sphinn
    • Bloggingzoom
19. Use catchy headlines. In the inundation of information, you only have 1-3 seconds to catch someone’s attention enough to make them click on your post, the more catchy, and un-boring the headline the more likely you are to win their attention for the next 5 minutes.
20. Enlist the help of friends. Sort of along the lines of networking, but instead of building new friends, use your existing network to spread the word about your blog.
21. SEO and SEM. It’s a no brainer if people find your site via search engines, and see a post they like, they are more likely to keep coming back, and might subscribe to your feed.
22. Post as if your life were on the line. The More posts, the more people will find your blog. Also the more valuable your blog will be, but keep the topics relevant.You really need to post at least one blog post per day, it doesn’t matter if you write them all during the week you should use the timestamp feature to make them post later on in the day or week, the best time a day for blog posts are usually between 8am and noon Eastern time, in my opinion.
23. Stick to your niche. At least try and stick to your niche as much as possible, it will keep your seo high, and your subscribers will be satisfied, after all - they subscribed because they like the stuff you’re writing about - don’t change niches, and expect them to stick around.
24. Citations from other bloggers in your niche. Or blog reviews. Getting write-ups from other bloggers is a good way to gain credibility and authority. If you can get some citations, whether by asking, trading, or just writing content that is so damn good everybody wants to link to it, you will see your subscriber count skyrocket.
25. Pillar Articles. You Must have 5 Pillar Articles as soon as possible, these will make or break you. I recommend writing one per week, or every two weeks at the least. You also will want to put a link to these prominently on your blog.
26. Linkbait & Traffic Bait. Link bait, is just something like a blog post, picture, video, etc that pulls in people, its sometimes viral and people share it with their friends, good examples of linkbait can be found at the front of digg, and reddit.
27. GEt listed in Blog / Rss Directories. Here are a few lists:
    • http://www.vandelaydesign.com/rss/rssdirectories.htm
    • http://www.vandelaydesign.com/blogging/blogdirectories.htm
    • 55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote your Feeds
28. Be sure you’re pinging. Pinging basically notifies rss and blog directories that your blog has updated, and a lot of people check the rss sites when they are looking for topics to read. Two really good ping sites are ping-o-matic, and pingoat.
29. Share the link love(don’t let them know you’re really being greedy…). Include plenty of outbound links to blogs with relevant posts, this adds credibility to your post, provides your readers with more information on the topic they’re searching for, and also gives you some trackback and link love on the blog that you’re linking to. Especially if you link to blogs that remove nofollow on trackbacks / pingbacks.
30. Widgetize your Blog. Use mybloglog, blogcatalog, bumpzee, digg, and reddit widgets. Gregarious is a good wordpress plugin that helps with this.
31. Make sure your blogs’ autodiscovery feature is working. This is pretty simple you basically just need to add some html to your blog in the header file. Here’s the code that you should add:
    

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"   title="RSS Feed for theresabloginmysoup.com"   href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheresABlogInMySoup" mce_href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheresABlogInMySoup" />

32. Get personal! Send personalized emails to each commenter on your blog, and at the end of the email ask them to do you a favor and subscribe to your blog - make this as personal as possible and this is a great way to network. Also if any readers send you an email, please make sure to email them asap, and again ask them to subscribe.Also of course you definitely MUST answer and respond to ALL comments, asap. Your blog should feel more like a community site, or at the least a question and answer session.
33. Write easy to scan content.  Most people who use readers have limited attention and patience - they usually want the meat of what you have to say and they want it now! I bet half of you reading this now, are just reading the subtopics in bold, but that’s ok. I also know many of you have subscribed, or will subscribe.
34. Participate in Blog Carnivals. Blog carnivals are great ways to gain new subscribers, alas it is beyond the scope of this article, and this is actually one spot that I myself could use some more experience in, but here are some good articles on blog carnivals:
    • Problogger’s Introduction to Blog Carnivals
    • Five Questions (and Answers) About Blog Carnivals
    • Blog carnivals - a link building secret weapon
      
35. Hire Guest Bloggers. Encourage bloggers to post guest posts on your blog. Their fans will usually check out your blog, and they will usually link up their guest posts, plus it’s free totally unique high quality content for your blog. I don’t see how you can go wrong.
36. Become an Authority.  If you help people who have questions on sites like Yahoo Answers. Also becoming very active in Forums and linking to some of your pillar articles, and your RSS feed url, will drastically grow your feed. I recommend that you regularly post to 6-8 forums relating to your blog. I’d also recommend that you find the highest ranking forums for your niche, as not all forums are created equal. Don’t just rely on one ranking method though.I’d recommend checking their alexa ranking, google pr, and if they remove nofollow from signatures that’s a big bonus(if they don’t have signatures, then you should stay away from the forum altogether…from a marketing standpoint.)
37. Post a Series. Start a series of posts, if you grab your readers attention, then they will subscribe so that they don’t miss the conclusion.
38. Display your Subscriber Stats.  Once you reach 100 subscribers display your RSS Subscriber count, people like to follow, and seeing that you have a large following will push some into subscribing.
39. Collaborate with other bloggers. This can be a lot of fun you could co-write a series of posts, and alternate which blog you post it on, you can share ads with each other’s rss feed, you can start a business together, etc.. Anything’s possible.
40. Remind your Subscribers. Adding a ‘If you liked this post, please subscribe to my feed’ link at the end of each blog post is a good way to get a few more subscribers. There’s a really great plugin for this called Subscribe-Remind, check it out!

This list is by no means complete and full, I’m definitely going to be adding more as I learn more. I’ve scoured the net for the most accurate and up-to-date information on building RSS subscribers.

Below are some of the wonderful resources I’ve found regarding getting more rss subscribers:

•  How to increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 days!
• 11 Ways to find New Rss Subscribers for your Blog
• Shoemoney’s guide to getting more Rss Subscribers via Feedburner
• Subscribe Remind - A great plugin to remind your readers to subscribe.
• Top 5 Ways to Get More RSS Subscribers
• Get More RSS Feed Subscribers!
• What the Heck is RSS?
• How to get Traffic and Links from Popular Blogs
• 35 Guaranteed ways to increase your RSS Subscribers
• The Great Explanation of RSS
• Free Rss Feed Icon Generator
• 3 Reasons you Desparately NEED rss subscribers
• How to increase rss feedburner subscribers
• Join the 500 subscribers per month Challenge
• Why you should Want More Subscribers and How to Get them
• The Ultimate RSS ToolBox 120+ Resources for RSS
• 30+ Wordpress plugins to get More Blog Readers

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RSS, which stands for really simple syndication, is simply an internet technology that allows busy people to receive quick and easy updates from news sources, like blogs.

It isn’t just for blogs though, using rss you can syndicate images, videos, lifestreams, etc…

The essence is this, you visit a site you like, you click their “subscribe” link, and it may ask you which feed reader you want to load it in, choose your favorite feed reader, and badda bing, badda bang you’re receiving all the updates from the site, without having to waste your time visiting the site.

Ok, but what exactly is a feed reader?

There are many feed readers, they are actually quite similar to an email account, you have your software programs like microsoft outlook, and you have online services like yahoo or gmail.

Feed readers are the same, there are a number of different feed readers. My personal favorite is the google feed reader, which can be found here:

Google Feed Reader

Some other popular online feed readers include:

• - Bloglines
• - Netvibes
• - Feedlounge

Some popular desktop solutions include:

• - Newsgator
• - Feed Demon

Another example of how to use an RSS feed, is when you create a yahoo home page, or google homepage.

However, if you are confused and don’t want to learn a new software program, the good news is - most sites have setup ways for you to subscribe to their feeds via email, so you’ll just receive updates like you would from any email newsletter.

To recap feeds and feed readers are very similar to using email programs or receiving an email subscription, it’s just organized a lot better.

OK, I’ve got my feedreader, uh how do I subscribe?

First off, look for the standard rss logo, it looks kinda like this:

Alternately look for the words subscribe, or click on a chicklet that might look like this:

Post inspired by:

What the Heck is RSS?

Other links /posts about RSS:

• Dive Into XML
• What is RSS?
• How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way
• Getting Started with RSS
• Beginners Guide to RSS

Popularity: 30% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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• Twitter is awesome - 600 Visitors and 30 new subscribers in 2 days! Also on Googling yourself…. (7)
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