My WAHM Blog » blogging

Are Your RSS Feeds Auto Discovery Friendly?

Lauren — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:51:03 +0000

Just imagine. Every time someone visits your website, their browser notifies them of your RSS feed. No, it’s not as interuptive and no where near as annoying as pop-up subscription boxes but still a good chance to get people to subscribe to something you have to offer. In a nutshell, that’s how auto discovery works. There ‘s usually a small flag somewhere in the browser telling people your feed is available for them and if the visitor is interested in subscribing, they will simply click subscribe – much like bookmarking a page.

Now you know how it works, why is it so important? For one, many feed readers and browsers already support auto discovery RSS feeds. But perhaps what’s more important, Microsoft is incorporating this starting with Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer still commands a good chunk of browser share out there, especially those who are new to the Internet or non technical Internet users. If your RSS feeds are not auto discovery enabled, it’s a good chance you’ll lose out on a bunch of subscribers.

As it is today, browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari can auto discover feeds. Many use this to subscribe because it’s just so much easier. While this group may not be that large but why should you not take advantage? If just making your feeds auto discovery friendly you get an extra subscriber, even if it’s only one it would be worth it because it costs nothing but maybe 2 minutes of your time.

So how do you find out if your feeds are auto discovery friendly? The good news is, if you’re using a blog to manage your content, many have this feature built in. But it doesn’t hurt to just check it anyway. If you don’t use a blog, chances are, your feed is not auto discovery enabled.

Before I go, here are two little tips that would help your RSS distribution and subscription using auto discovery.

1. Put the auto discovery tag in other web pages too. Just because it’s not a blog doesn’t mean you can’t have an RSS feed on it. Take advantage of that, put your feed in your main website’s template. Now you have two opportunities to get in touch with people. When you update your website and when you update your blog.

2. If you use a service like FeedBurner to track your subscriptions, remember to update the feed URL in your blog or website template. This way, you’re capturing all your feed traffic statistics.

What’s next? Go make your RSS feeds auto discovery friendly right now. Because RSS is not always visible to us, don’t run the risk of forgetting this.

About the author

Lynette Chandler helps entreprenuers leverage readily available technology for their marketing. Learn more about RSS and blogging at TechBasedPlugins.com

Fire Up Your Blog

Lauren — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:16:47 +0000

Free Download to Make Your Blogging a Whole Lot Easier

If you’re a blogger (or want to be one) and are looking for ways to create more content, traffic and income opportunities for your blog – this free report is going to come in handy.

It’s called: “Fire Up Your Blog with PLR Content”

…and it explains 6 attractive benefits to using PLR (private label rights) content with your blogging, 12 creative ideas for using PLR and more. It’s a quick 3 page report with plenty of ideas you can use right away.

Click here to download yours*

*This is a PDF document and you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software to view it. If you don’t have this software, you can get it here.

The M in WAHM stands for Mom

Lauren — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:40:48 +0000

Last month I found this great graphic! (Right) I think it kinda looks like me, with my new haircut, and Matthew, my youngest. It was so inspiring, I had this crazy thought to start a Mom blog! ROF! It was the last thing I needed to do – start yet another blog!

Then this past weekend, going between all of my outdated blogs I started to wish I had put my Momblog graphic here on this blog. And it came to me – you should combine the two! I mean after all – the M in WAHM stands for Mom! Besides before my impetuous decision to start it in the first place I had thoughts of putting those posts here anyway. LOL!

So my apologies to my friends who added my mom blog to their readers – delete that okay? Tune in here instead for all of my WAHM-Mom adventures from now on. Promise