Money Blogger

No matter which niche you are in, you are probably not alone: there is certainly somebody out there already doing more or less the same you do. Or, if you’re the first, there will be somebody following your steps.

To be updated on the moves of the other competitors, on interesting posts and so on read them periodically or, better, subscribe their feeds. In this way, if they publish a news you haven’t published, you can always mention it and put a reminder to the competitor’s site: this, in the blogosphere, is a very nice sign, as I’ve already explained in this post.

I’ve already dealt with RSS. One very common question is what to put into a RSS feed.
RSS feeds, in fact, are composed by the news title and usually by a summary of the news. Sometimes, however, this summary is the whole news.

As in every field of life, there are people thinking that feeds should contain only a short summary, and other people thinking that the feeds should contain the whole news.

Personally, I tend to prefer the first hypotesys, which is better for many reasons:

• first and foremost, with a long text on the screen people tend to skip it, since it would be boring
• the way news aggregator and browser present the feed, moreover, is very boring: it’s just text, text, text
• feed-subscribers should go to your site/blog: if they don’t, they won’t probably click on advertising, since advertising inside RSS feeds is still at an embrionic stage and has lower click-throughs than ads displayed on the site

As always, do not summarize too much the news: people should understand what you’re talking about in the summary, and get interested by the first lines of the news, so that they click and go to your blog. If you can’t summarize well, let your blogging platform do it for you, by extracting the first words of every post.
And this is why I go for short RSS feeds.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a common way of giving people a feed of your news. People that subscribe these news can easily be alerted by their browser or news aggregator if a news is published on your blog, and thus they can read it.

Since RSS is a service to your users that doesn’t cost you too much, you have to go with it.