Blogging, Part II: RSS Feeds

All About RSS Feeds & Content Syndication

Now that you know what blogging is all about, and a little bit about how to make your blog work for you, it’s time to learn about what RSS is all about.

When you have a blog, and write your posts – people are only going to read them if they take the effort to remember to regularly come to your blog and read your most recent content.  And if people like to read a lot of blogs, it is easy to remember which ones you have read, and which ones you have yet to catch up on.  This is where using RSS and blog readers comes into play.  RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and basically makes it very easy for you to syndicate (simultaneously publicize your blog to many places).  People can use a blog “reader” to subscribe to your blog (using RSS) and then here is where the magic happens:  every time you write a blog post, it will automatically be delivered into the inbox of your readers’ blog reader!  If you have a blog that you created using any of the major blog services (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad), then your blog already has RSS available to your readers.

So let’s talk about how to use a blog reader to keep up to date with all the blogs you like to read.  My favorite is Google Reader, although there are many others out there such as Bloglines and newsgator, or you can even signup to have blog posts delivered directly to your email inbox using a service such as Feed My Inbox.

Here’s another neat tip:  If you have an email newsletter that you send out to a list of customers, you can automatically have your blog posts delivered to the inbox of your email list members using MailChimp‘s “RSS to Email” feature.

So now you’ll know every time you see the RSS logo what it means.