Technical Setup – RSS & Analytics

August 26th, 2009 by Caroline Middlebrook

by Caroline Middlebrook

RSS – What is it?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to allow your blog’s visitors to automatically receive your posts, by their chosen method, without having to manually go to your website day-in, day-out to check for any new updates. This is a great tool for someone who follows multiple blogs as it means that they can use the RSS reader to view all the blogs in just the one place.

Each separate blog will publish a unique URL, this is the RSS feed and is what any visitors will need to use to subscribe to the blog via RSS. All of the blog platforms, including WordPress, have RSS technology built in already which is great as this means that there is very little that you need to do to set it up. The chances are, in fact, that if you’ve already chosen the theme to use, you won’t have to do anything at all.

What you should look for is that the RSS icon is prominently displayed in the top part of your blog theme. If the reader has to scroll to see it, pick another one. Make sure the icon is fairly large and prominent. Basically, you want to ensure that your reader’s eye is drawn towards it. If it is hidden away then it won’t get used.

Full or Partial Feeds – Which to Choose?

RSS contains a feature that will allow just a small section of your post to be sent to the RSS feed, then if the reader chooses to view the whole post, they must then follow the link to your website to be able to read it. Watch out though as the WordPress default is to publish the entire post to the feed. You can check and change your settings by going to the WordPress Dashboard, then going to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Reading’.

There are good and bad points to each method. If you publish the entire post to the RSS feed it means that the reader will no longer need to visit your website as they can view all of your posts on their RSS reader. It may be that that scenario does not suit you, as it would mean that the reader will not see any of the ads on your pages. However, Google have recently changed this by setting up a system that will allow ads to be embedded straight in to your feed.

The thing to realise about RSS users, is that these people understand the internet. They know all about RSS, have already chosen their RSS reader and they chose to subscribe to your feed as they want to read what you have to say. There is much less chance of these people clicking on an ad than someone who came to your website via a search engine. These are people who are hungry for information, that is why they use RSS in the first place.

Using an RSS reader allows them to read all their chosen blogs nice and quickly without having to navigate around a bunch of websites. If you make your RSS feed partial in order to force the reader to click through to your site, you are likely to find that many of your readers simply don’t bother to click and may even unsubscribe. In other words – your content does not get read.

My recommendation is that if you are growing a social blog where you want to build up an audience of loyal readers who read every word you say then make the feed full. If you are creating a commercial blog which is heavily monetized and you are not so bothered about readership then make it a partial feed.

However, the greatest revenue from your blog will not just be from on-page ads! Once you learn how to use your blog to initiate bigger revenue streams, then it won’t matter so much if your readers view your posts via their RSS reader or on your web page. Therefore, in the majority of cases, a full feed is recommended.

How To Use Feedburner

If you are using the unchanged WordPress theme then you will not need to do anything for viewers to be able to subscribe to your feed. However there will be no way to see how many readers have subscribed. If this is an issue and you want to know your subscriber number, then a Feedburner service will allow you to be able to track it.

Feedburner is a completely free service which is run by Google and it is extremely easy to setup. Once you have signed up all you need to do is to give Feedburner the URL of your original blog feed and it will create a new Feedburner URL for you. Then you edit your WordPress theme to use this URL instead.

Google Analytics – What is it?

Google Analytics is a nice piece of software that allows you to track all kinds of stats about your website such as how much traffic you have had, what keywords are used to find you, other links that point to you, the location of your visitors and a lot more. It’s damn good software and it’s completely free!

When you are signed up, you will have to insert a website profile for your blog. All you have to do is just add the URL of your blog and maybe reset your time zone if you wish. It will then give you some code that you will need to display on your web pages – Just click on this code and copy it to the clipboard.

You can manually add the code on to your WordPress blog but this will involve editing your theme files, but if you change themes, you will then have to do it again. Alternatively, I would recommend Semiologic as this will manage your Analytics for you. The download page shows complete instructions about how to use the plugin, so it need not be repeated here.

About the Author:

Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since September 2007 which generates 4-figures a month. She demonstrates how to make money blogging and provides free downloads of her free guides & courses.