Blog RSS Feed

One of the benefits of having a blog as part of your website or just having a blog is that your audience can sign up for a feed. For anyone who has not come across this yet, a feed, or web feed, is a way to subscribe and bring content to one convenient place through an aggregator. So people who like your site can use an aggregator like My Yahoo to bring posts from your site to their customized page along with anything else they like to read. Suddenly, your content is on a site they check often instead of hoping they will remember to stop by. This is a great way to ensure that you are constantly at the top of their minds and gives you another way to reach your audience.

In order to get people to sign up for a feed to your blog, make sure it is easy for them. Let your audience know about this option and consider having a link or page explaining about feeds for visitors who don’t know they can get your content this way. Fortunately, Squarespace automatically sets up an RSS feed for your blog, making it that much easier for both you and your visitors. For more information on your feed, stop by the Squarespace FAQ.

One drawback to syndication is that now there are people who are reading your content but may not be coming to your site. This can mean valuable customers are missing from your regular site traffic numbers. There are a couple ways to solve this problem. One way is to only allow an excerpt from your post to be sent to subscribers, which lets them know there is new content and gives them a taste of what you have to say and then offers a link for them to come to your site and read the whole thing. This can draw more people to your actual site but may result in less readership since not everyone will want to click through. Another option is let the subscribers get the whole post but keep track of them through the My RSS Subscriber Count feature. Since subscribers want updates on your blog, they are often your target audience and are very valuable readers to connect with and track. Collecting this data is a great opportunity that will give you insight into how your readers get your content and help you find new and creative ways to reach out to them. However you choose to manage your RSS feed, this is a vital component to your blog, expanding your base audience and bringing your voice to their home pages.

Blogging within Websites

A little while ago I received an email asking if it is better to have a main home page that is a static page that links to a blog or a blog that has links to static pages. My first instinct was to recommend having a static page ensuring that the most important keywords are also on the main site. However, I took some time and asked a few people both at Squarespace and elsewhere what the best option really is. There were some interesting thoughts and this series of discussions has led me to change my answer to having the main site be a blog and I’ll tell you why.

There are amazing sites that are mainly blogs. They are constantly changing and Google knows this, revisiting frequently. This changing content can give you search results on a wide variety of topics and give you a distinct advantage on timely keywords. It also gives every visitor direct access to the blog and lets them know that the site is active and up-to-date instead of sending them looking for the blog link. Plus, this is a feature that not everyone can do. Anyone can add a blog from Blogger onto their existing site, but not many can integrate is as cleanly into the site design as you can. This offers you a distinct advantage. And if you have a pass-through section in the margin with a quick “about us” paragraph, you can get the best of all worlds by making sure your top keywords always appear on the page in addition to the changing content.

Therefore, if you’re setting up a site and you’re trying to figure out what the landing page should be, I’d recommend using the journal. It puts your best foot forward and gives you an edge in Google. Commenters have been noting an aversion to being known as a “blog” as opposed to a “website” but in the end I think this is a very arbitrary distinction to begin with. What’s so bad about blogging within a website?

Blogging Tips and Resources

From the beginner to the seasoned veteran, everyone has something to learn about blogging. It is still a relatively new method of information dissemination, yet there are guides, strategies, and tips being published on the Internet every day. What ideas are out there that can help you bring in more traffic and, if you’re a business site/blog, revenue as well? I’m listing some of the sites and articles that I’ve found helpful in case you may also be looking for some good resources.

Blogger Reference Sites

Copy Blogger - Copy Blogger has some great ideas for blogging topics and strategies.

A List Apart – For web designers, bloggers, or anyone else that has site, this is an essential

Tip Lists

A lot of these tips are pretty straight forward pieces of advice that you may have heard before, but there are also some great hidden gems, so take a look.

Blog Marketing - If you want to get your blog out there and visible, it’s all about marketing.

Blog Writing - If you ever run out of ideas, this list of 101 blog tips is sure to have something inspiring for you.

Blog Outreach - This blogger outreach advice is coming from a blogger who has been successfully pitched, so it’s always good to hear about when it works and how.

Blog Profitability - Once you’ve made a name for yourself, this guide can help you make some money too.

I’m sure there are lots more out there that we all can benefit from. Please feel free to add any more that you have found useful.

Web Design Wisdom

This is the start of a new segment for the Squarespace Insider blog. For a while now, we’ve been offering advice and ideas about blogging, but today we wanted to change the pace a little. We’ve put together a few poll questions and would love for you to tell us your thoughts so we can learn more about your website experience. Consider this a rallying cry for the Squarespace community to point to the trends and share their collective knowledge. Vote in our poll and let your voice be heard!

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