If you saw my last Blog Hacks post you probably noticed the part about RSS feeds. But I don't think I emphasized it enough. I believe that the capability to generate RSS Feeds is by far one of the most important tools of a blog. Why?
Because once the syndication starts to flow you can shape it and bake it in almost anyway you see fit. The first thing I did today was sign up for a free Feedburner account and plug in this blog's RSS feed. Feedburner lets you soup up your feed in grand style. Your feed goes from being the equivalent to stale oatmeal to gaining the richness and spice of a 5 Star Filet Mignon (with apologies to Debbie). Seriously. Check out my feed to get a glimpse. What? You think it's boring? Well, let me tell you why it's so cool.
Many browsers (with the exception of IE7, Firefox, or Safari) don't display RSS feeds. They just display raw ugly and incomprehensible XML code. I'd show you an example, but it's just confusing. Feedburner takes raw XML and turns it into a 
universally browser friendly page with helpful links to online Feedreaders. This makes RSS feeds accessible to almost everyone, regardless of tech savvy!
Those who already have Feedreaders benefit too. Did you see those cool links at the bottom of my feed (number of comments, email this, submit to reddit, stumbleupon)? Each one of those links gives readers an easy opportunity to interact with or promote your blog post.
Are you worried that people will just read your feed and not come to your blog and leave comments? There's a simple solution to that. Set your Syndication Options to "Partial." That way only the blog's title and a defined number of words will show up in the feed. Readers will have to click through to your blog to read the rest of the story.
There are tons and tons of options in Feedburner and they do a pretty good job at describing how everything works, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here. I encourage you to sign up! At the very least add the "Feed Flair" and set your syndication to "Partial." You just might get a lot more readers... (and Feedburner has stats too, so you can keep track of your rapidly growing audience).
Let me know if you need any help, for now I'm off to tweak my Feedburner settings.
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