Technical Setup – RSS & Analytics

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is a way of allowing your blog visitors to have your blog posts automatically delivered using a method of their choice rather than having to manually visit your web page every day to check for updates. This is particularly helpful when somebody reads many blogs as they can use a tool called an RSS reader to read all of those blogs in 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?

There is an RSS feature that will send just a small piece of the published post to the RSS feed, and if the reader would like to view the whole post, they have to click to follow it through to your web page to read it. Be aware though that WordPress is set, by default, to publish a full feed, so your whole post will be sent via the feed. You can see, and amend, this setting by going to your WordPress Dashboard, then go to 'Settings', 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.

Now there is something to understand about RSS readers – these are people who understand the Internet, they know what RSS is, they have chosen their RSS reader, they have decided to subscribe to your feed because they want to hear what you have to say and so they are far less likely to click on an ad than somebody who arrived at your website from a search engine. Also, these people are hungry for information which is why they are using RSS in the first place.

Using their RSS reader means that they can read all the blogs that they have subscribed to swiftly without having to visit lots of different websites. This creates the down side to only publishing a partial feed as these people are much less likely to bother to follow the link to your website to read the whole post. A lot of these readers will probably even unsubscribe and so your posts will not get viewed at all.

It is my recommendation that to grow a social blog and to build a loyal audience that are going to read absolutely everything you ever write, you must make the feed a full one. On the other hand for a heavily monetized and commercial blog that does not require such a large readership, a partial feed would be better.

However, the best revenue from your blog does not come from on-page ads! When you learn to use your blog to launch much bigger revenue streams then it doesn't matter if people read your content through your RSS feed or your webpage so for nearly all cases I would recommend a full feed.

Utilizing a Feedburner

If you use the WordPress theme unchanged then there is nothing you need to do in order to allow people to subscribe to your feed but you have no way of knowing how many people have subscribed. If you care about your subscriber number and want to be able to track it then the Feedburner service is for you.

The Feedburner service is run by Google is incredibly easy to set up and best of all is totally free. Once signed up, all you have to do is give the URL of your original blog feed to Feedburner and that will create a new Feedburner URL to use. Then just edit your WordPress theme using the new Feedburner URL instead.

Google Analytics – What is it?

Google Analytics is a very nice bit of software that will allow you to follow all manner of statistics about your website. For example, the amount of traffic you've had, which keywords have been used to reach you, any links that point to your site, your visitors' location and much more. It is incredibly good software and is totally 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.

To put the code onto your WordPress blog, you can do it manually but that involves editing your theme files and if you change themes you will have to do it again. Instead, I recommend Semiologic which manages your Analytics for you. The download page has full instructions on how to use the plugin so I don't need to repeat it here.

Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since September 2007 which earns a 4-figure monthly income. She teaches how to make money blogging and provides free downloads of her free guides & courses.