One of the things my clients worry about, is whether people are reading their blog posts. They worry that even if someone stumbles across their blog and reads a couple of posts, they’ll never find their way back again. Or if those elusive people like what they read, how will they ever remember to take time out of their busy lives, to check whether you’ve written another mind-blowing post?
Of course, you post a link to your latest post on Social Media – you do, don’t you?! – but that doesn’t guarantee that people will see it. Newsfeed moves so quickly that it can be hard to catch up, and when something’s gone, unless you keep posting links, it’s gone.
So how can you help your readers keep up to date with your blog? One way is to make sure you have RSS activated for your site, and tell them about RSS Readers. Back when I was setting up The Write Angles, my web developer wasn’t going to activate RSS for my site. I’d asked him to do it, but he reckoned that RSS was on the way out, and so it’d be a waste of time. I insisted. And I’m glad I did.
RSS Readers collate all of the blog posts that you want to read and present them to you in one place. They make it easy for you to keep up to date with your favourite blogs, at a time and place that’s convenient for you. Many only display the first couple of paragraphs of the blog post, so if you want to read on, you click through to the host website; which means that your readers still end up on your blog to read your posts.
There are several different RSS Readers available. I like Feedly for it’s simplicity, and the fact that you can arrange your blog posts into categories. I’ve recently returned to Flipboard, and I’m trying that out to compare it with Feedly. I love how Flipboard looks: it displays everything so beautifully. You can also create magazines with whatever content you want, and then share them with others. I don’t know much about that yet, but I’ll be experimenting with it and I’ll report back if there’s anything of significance to tell you.
If you want to make sure that your readers don’t miss a thing, let them know about RSS Readers and how to add your blog. My RSS address is http://www.samdounis.com/feed .
Comment below with your RSS address and I’ll add you to my Readers. 🙂