Jamdo Marketing Blog

In the world of blogging there are a few things that really stand out. Here’s what I think they are.

BoingBoing - the blog that set the benchmark from the beginning on content, attitude and community. This is the most linked to blog in the world and it is still the best.

Scribefire - a little tool that has revolutionised blog posting and cut massive amounts of time off the usual process of logging in and posting content. You don’t even have to be online to use it.

Adsense - the most popular form of monetisation for bloggers the world over. It is the benchmark by which all other forms of blog monetisation are judged and the tool that allows more bloggers to make a living and thus produce more great content than any other monetisation strategy.

Wordpress - one of the biggest open source success stories of the new millenium, this free software has given a voice to millions and allowed the technically incompetent access to the world of online content provision.

Old Media - the more jealous and bitchy these guys get, the more power they give to the new revolution of democratised information.  Thanks for the props guys - it’s almost sad watching you go down in flames.

XML - the thing that allows us to easily keep up with new information on the internet. This language allows us to take information, share others’ information or share our own.

Google - still the granddaddy of traffic and the pimp that every blogger panders to. Find what you’re blogging about, get traffic, Google is indespensible for the blogger.

They are pretty much what I would regrd as the top 7 in the blogging world. Any other contenders?

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Getting more people to read what you have to write is a factor of making it is easy for them as possible. One of the strategies that you should be using to get people reading you is promoting your RSS feed as one of the options for them to do that.

What is RSS?

Most of the readers of this blog are fairly tech savvy, so will probably already know what RSS is. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a way for people to subscribe to the exact content they want from your (and other) sites by pulling it from an XML file on your site into a reader (such as Bloglines). That way they don’t have to visit every individual site but just get a list of updated stories from the websites they want all in one convenient location. Yaro Starak has a nice introduction to RSS if you are in the dark.

Get Accurate Statistics

The first part of getting more people to subscribe to your blog is to make sure you can measure your results. The most popular way to do this is to join FeedBurner (it’s free) and burn your RSS feed with them. Just follow the instructions on their site. The reason you want to do this is because FeedBurner provide nice stats to do with your RSS feed - something your current stats program probably doesn’t do.

The next trick is to make sure that everyone is subscribing to that feed alone. To do this, I use a great little plugin for Wordpress. It’s called FeedBurner Feed Replacement and it is one of my must have plugins. It makes sure that every person who subscribes to your feed from your blog is actually subscribing to the Feedburner feed.

After that is installed, your Feedburner feed will be able to record accurate statistics to do with your RSS readership.

Educate Your Audience

One of the things you will want to do is to let your audience know what RSS is. That means writing a short article about RSS and how they can use it. It is also good practice to link to that article from an obvious place - many people do it from a “What’s This?” link next to their RSS button. I haven’t done this yet on Jamdo out of pure laziness.

Make it Obvious and Easy

You will notice that there is a great big ugly RSS symbol at the top of the right hand collumn here on Jamdo. That is my attempt to make it damn obvious that the site has an RSS feed and that you might like to subscribe. That graphic is a link that will take you straight to the feedburner feed. Go on.. press it… you know you want to!

Simply putting that big graphic there increased readership by 20 overnight. Not fantastic, but better than a kick in the teeth.

The Single Best Way to Increase RSS Readership

Well, as the title promised, I guess I have to reveal how to get a bunch of new subscribers to your RSS feed. Assuming that you have followed the rest of the advice on making it easy and obvious how to subscribe to your feed and that you also have accurate stats so that you will even know if anyone has subscribed to your feed then there is one other way to get a lot of people subscribing to it.

Get plugged! If you get a plug in a blog post from another high quality website with good traffic then you will see your RSS stats go up overnight. When Jamdo was mentioned on CopyBlogger a week or two back, it was worth an extra 50 or 60 subscribers. The same thing happened the once or twice Jamdo was mentioned on ProBlogger. I have had feed stats go up by several hundred overnight when one of my sites has been mentioned on a very popular blog.

Of course, you have to get noticed by other bloggers first, but I have covered that before.

Anyway, enjoy your new RSS readership!

Further Resources:

What is RSS and How do I Use it? (A good introduction by Yaro)

Feedburner Feed Replacement Plugin for Wordpress

Feedburner

How to Email Other Bloggers (Useful for asking for a plug).

Technorati Tags: rss, feedburner, xml

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Keeping track of your projects (blogging or otherwise) is something that is best done on a spreadsheet. Most people use Microsoft Excel, but I have taken a shine to using an online spreadsheet service called iRows.

It has most of the things you would expect in a spreadsheet program. You can lay out information complete with formulas and whatnot and each spreadsheet can have several worksheets etc. Now, if you are wondering if it is compatible with your own spreadsheet
programs then the answer is yes. iRows allows you to import xls files
and csv files which are formats that most spreadsheet programs can work
with. I tested it with some basic formulas too and there were no
problems - you can create them on iRows or import them from your
current spreadsheets.

What I like about it is the fact that it is an online application. This improves its utility for me. I can access my spreadsheets from any computer on the internet with a simple login. More importantly, I can share those spreadsheets with others and have them work on them as well by assigning access levels to specific users.

This really increases productivity for online collaborations. Used in conjunction with BaseCamp, you bassically now have the ability to have a complete online office.

I use iRows for keeping track of the finances of my blogs as well as to-do lists that I work on with my fellow blog co-owners. It is very handy, especially if you don’t want to be worrying about sending email attachments back and forth and worry about who got which version.

Some of the things I have used iRows for:

• Contact Lists
• To Do Lists
• Finance Tracking of Specific Sites
• Collaborating on all of the Above with Blogging Partners

Now, the guys at iRows also back up data everday and save it to several different machines with data encryption. That can give security freaks peace of mind.

As I said, if you use spreadsheets a lot to organise yourself (like I do),  and you would like the utility of being abl eto share real time updates with your colaborators, then this is something worth checking out.

Resources:

iRows
Basecamp

Technorati Tags: iRows, Base Camp, Web 2.0

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