Thursday, November 30, 2006 6:42 AM
In his post What's Going On, Rick Klau at Feedburner highlights an updated Feedburner Publisher Tips blog: Do you lie awake wondering how you can get more from your FeedBurner feed? No? Well, that's ok - 'cause we do. The result is this regularly updated site filled with pointers, little-known features, reminders and links to tutorials to help you leverage FeedBurner services to their fullest.
Reading through some of the suggestions posted in the Publisher Tips blog, I was reminded of my past, occasional posts on the subject. Directed to those in the blawgosphere who did not include a feed with their blawg, it went something like this: Please, please, please consider adding a feed!
My opinion today remains unchanged. I can say that the number of blawgs that don't include a feed has shrunk considerably. It has (happily) become rare for me to add or update a blawg listing that does not have a feed. However, for the stragglers out there, I say again, Please, please, please consider adding a feed!
If you don't have a feed, you are relying on people taking the time to browse to your site every day to simply to see if you posted anything new. Candidly, how likely is that? To answer a question like this, I tend to ask myself a simple question: "would I do that?" If I wouldn't do it, I pretty much figure no one else is going to do it either. So, ask yourself, how many websites do you randomly visit each day, simply to check if there is something new posted there?
For me, it is about five: CNN, Moneycentral, Yahoo!Finance, WallStrip and Law.com.
Now, I read a heck of lot more content in a week than is posted on those six sites, but I don't do it by bouncing around, randomly browsing. I do it via RSS feeds. I use a combination of Newgator and Internet Explorer 7's feed reader, which allows me to quickly scan a multitude of other websites, blawgs and news sources, clicking-through to read full posts and articles when so inclined. Simply put, it is an extremely efficient way to cover a lot of ground on the web. It works for me, and it increasingly works for lots of others, as well.
In addition, and especially if your blawg's purpose is to market yourself and your skills and/or services to the world (see potential clients), an RSS feed makes your content easy to syndicate to other websites and feed aggregators. You want to make it easy for people to find you. And, with RSS, you get a lot of potential bang for the buck. You can still advertise, send out press releases and personally market your blawg, but just don't forget the low hanging fruit that an RSS feed can provide.
A number of other knowledgeable people in the blawgosphere have covered the topic of RSS Feeds in more depth than this post. Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell just wrote an article, RSS Resources You Can Use: Automated Web Surfing for Lawyers, in Law Practice Today. Kevin O'Keefe frequently covers RSS and related issues of interest. Steve Matthews has found his post Top 10 Uses for RSS in Law Firms heavily linked across the web.
Ultimately, whether you choose to use a third party feed management service like Feedburner, or just use the feed that comes 'out of the box' with your weblog editor, the single most important decision is simply to do it. Go ahead, add that feed.