Add Interactive Elements to Your RSS Feeds

Somehow, you managed to increase the number of people subscribing your blog. Congratulations! A matter of fact is RSS subscribers are the bedrock of a successful blog. Regardless, feeds are often read in independent software without the reader actually being present on the blog itself. How to make it more interactive and at the same time, make your loyal readers happy? These 4 simple tips might help.

1. Add related posts to feeds
Your readers attracted to your post and decided to subscribe. Sweet! Why don’t you add more related post that may interest subscribers to the feed? You have great advantage of doing so as it may help to increase the number of subscribers that click through your blog.

To achieve this, I used a plugin known as Similar Feed developed by Rob Marsh. In order to use this plugin, you need to install “Similar Posts” plugin since the menu for feed is activated via this plugin. Use the “Manage” page to process terms. Through my experience, this plugin practically works out of the box (example at the bottom).

2. Offer full feeds rather than partial feeds
People subscribe to your feeds because they want to read the whole content without being present on your blog. In fact, I read most of the subscribed feeds via email. There is the odd person who prefers partial feeds but they are in the minority. Full feeds will help you to grow your subscriber base. The more subscribers you have, the greater the chance of someone linking to one of your posts. As subscribers are considered your regular readers, it is vital to keep them happy.

3. Thanks your subscribers
It may sound stupid but be thankful to your subscribers is important in making them happy, thus build-up more interactivity between you and the subscribers. Let’s face it. We work hard to convince them to subscribe yet when they did, we ignore them? Not my style to say the least. Even first time commentator will receive a thankful email from me.

Additionally, I used the graphic below at the footer of my feed; well, as my gratitude. Credit to Trevor Fitzgerald for the plugin, Subscribe-Remind.

thankyou

Want to see it in action? Then why don’t you subscribe to my feed?

4. Use FeedBurner FeedFlare
Thanks to FeedBurner for its FeedFlare, you can add more interactivity to the feed’s footer, known as flares. Setting up is very straightforward, you select what you want to add and Feedburner will automatically append it to the end of your feed. Be creative when using flares as it may boost your feeds pretty well, and make it more user-friendly to readers.

FeedFlare

Picture 1: Flare configurations

FeedFlare

Picture 2: Flares used for this blog

There you go. 4 simple tips to create an interactive yet successful feed. Do I miss anything?

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Posted on: June 27, 2008 | Under Tips & Tricks 
 

One Response to “Add Interactive Elements to Your RSS Feeds”

  1. Jacob from Group Writing Projects on July 11th, 2008 7:22 am

    Hey Wan, you should enter these tips in my Building RSS Group Writing Project:

    http://groupwritingprojects.com/blog/building-rss-group-writing-project/

    All you would need to qualify for over $350 in prizes - including consults with Liz Strauss and David Airey - is to link your above article to the announcement post at the above link. Although additional tips before Sunday night’s deadline would increase your chances of winning even more.

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