For bloggers, RSS is an important tool. The more subscribers you have, the more loyal readers you will have, meaning that they enjoy your credibility, reputation, they respect you.
Blogging platforms (whatever they may be) generate RSS links to Websites where they belong, making easier the admin’s work. RSS is interesting because it loads quickly (if it is cleared of unnecessary formatting). Many try their chance with RSS and FeedBurner and many of them want to use those tools, but they have no idea how to use them.
Let’s talk about RSS, which I think it does an acceptable job. I think it is important that after each article, at the footer of the article to give your readers some information about the article (permalink, number of comments, tags, related articles). So if the reader liked the article, he should be able to find other information there and also to subscribe to your list in oder to get more articles from you.
At the same time, it seems essential that the article to be published in full. If you are not an online journalism guru, the chances to capture the attention of your subscribers in the first paragraphs of the article are well… little. Therefore, why waste a chance, when you can slightly improve the situation.
The RSS links can be used for a large number of aggregators, more or less competent. Because I think it’s good to have more places from where to get your information, you should also use Google Reader. The reason for using this application is the fact that it lets you download the articles that appear on the feeds to which you subscribed, in order to read them later.
Recently I bumped into one article where it was said that even the articles with no title can be successful. For example, the guy talks about an article with about 200 words, with no title whatsoever, but which was extremely popular. How did he do it? Of course, you may think that the author is one of the gurus were talking article marketing. Probably he is, we don’t know, what we do know is that you have to create a big community in order to be popular, thus successful, thus rich. Anyway, from my point of view, a blog is meant to inform.
In terms of plugins for WordPress, there are Better Feed and FeedStats. They make a pretty good job, but you can also try FeedBurner to see how it’s like. For Blogger users, or other free platforms, the advice is to use, however, FeedBurner, since you cannot install other plugins to replace it.11