I Hate RSS Feeds And RSS Readers

To Many Options
Entire post or a snippet? E-mail or through a reader? Pictures or no pictures? To consolidate or to not consolidate? There are just to many options to "burning" your feed. Instead of working on building your content or helping establish yourself in your niche, you are stuck trying to work this feed to make it look pretty. Unnecessary.

Full RSS feed vs. partial RSS feed
Yeah, okay, this is kind of an addition to "to many options" but I feel this needed it's own bold headline. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger even two people debate about using full or partial RSS feeds.

A partial RSS feed will only show a small snippet of your post to your subscribers and will make them click on the link to actually read the post. This allows the reader to read the title of the article and then make his or her own decision on whether or not to visit the site and read the rest of the post. Now if you have advertising (of course you do, you are a blogger! =P ) on your site, a partial feed will not show it. So you are missing out on unique visitors and/or page views that could ultimately increase the price you charge for advertising, and that's bad.

A full feed shows the subscriber the entire post in their reader. This means they have no reason to visit your site at all. So once again, they miss out on advertising and are basically just reading a newspaper.

Less comments?
If someone reads your posts through a reader they are probably less likely to comment on the post. You want them to comment. You want to build a community around your site and less comments means there are less people contributing.

Less recognition
When someone is subscribing through a reader it is a sign that they like what you write and wish to read more. But, on the flip side there is no reason for them to return. Your site just becomes another story among hundreds of others that someone may be subscribing to.

So if readers are lame, what do you do?
Write great content that makes the reader want to come back and read your posts, but not through an RSS reader. You want your readers to bookmark the site and come back every day. Now for some people that might get annoying but if you are truly interested in the persons material, then you should be coming back and visiting.

I still keep my site available to subscribe because I know that people like to use them, I just prefer for people to bookmark my site and come back every day.

Blogging 101 – Your Topic Is Interesting And Unique, Now What?

Once you have decided on a topic, the goal is to find some place to host it. I suggest starting your site at a free blog host like Blogger or Wordpress. Not only are they very reliable but they offer a ton of tools to help get your blog started. This will be the best way for you to work on building the content of your site. Once your site becomes popular or you feel like you can afford it, go ahead and buy a domain name and pay for hosting. Until then build your readership, as they will follow you when you move.

Personally I recommend Blogger. I have used them for years and they offer almost complete customization. At Blogger, you can use their themes, change the colors, change the fonts, and add as many widgets and applications you want. Once again, this will make it very easy for you to focus on your content. After you have started your blog it is time to configure it the way you like by changing the colors and fonts. If you feel like being a little bit different, search for blogger themes and you will be able to download it and then upload it to your site. This will help your blog stand out just a little bit more. Blogger also allows you to modify the HTML for free, something Wordpress doesn’t, so you can further design your blog to stand out. Now that your blog is online and designed the way you want, it is time to start writing posts.