Blogging Tips: Unify your RSS feeds Subscriptions

This is a common mistake especially for bloggers: many blogs don’t have a unified RSS Subscription. Here is what I mean by that: all blog themes have an RSS icon, usually on top of the blog and another one at the bottom of the blog.

Additionally bloggers subscribe to feedburner in order to create an easy newsletter that contains their content. Everyone that likes the content on the blog but doesn’t want to visit it every day can simply enter his/hers e-mail address and receive the blog in their inbox.

The problem is that after people burned their feedburner feed and place the subscription form on their blog they leave the other RSS feeds set up to the blog’s feed. The result is that some of your subscribers will subscribe via e-mail, others will choose to read your feed. The issue is that you don’t know how many subscribers you really have.

My advice is to redirect all your feeds to feedburner so that you have a unified feed. Here is how you can simply do it:

Usually the RSS link is placed in the header or footer. So you need to do a small tweak. The feedburner feeds have a link structure like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Your-Feed-Name. So whatever your feed name is place it at the end of the link and that is your feed link. Use this link to replace the old ones that are just pointing to your blog’s feed.

WordPress additional feed placement suggestions

You can also implement an additional feature: every article can have such a subscription link at the beginning or the end. To do this, place the link along with some text in the singlepost.php file in your WordPress theme:

1. Here is a simple example of code that will show the link surrounded by a dotted line:
   <div align=”center” style=”border: 1px dashed #3333FF;font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size: 15px; padding-top: 3px;padding-bottom: 3px;font-style: italic;text-decoration: none;”>Hi and thanks for the visit. If you’re new here you may want to <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR_FEED_NAME” title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”>subscribe to my feed</a></div>
2. The code can be placed at the beginning of the article or the end:
   1. The Beginning of each article: open your theme editor in WordPress, select the file singlepost.php to edit and place the link before <div class=”postContent”>. Usually all themes have this class
   2. The End of the article: you can have multiple choices here, right when the article ends, or when the comments begin. So you can post the link right before <div class=”postTags”> or right before <p class=”comments”>

Let me know what you think about this article and if you like it don’t forget to subscribe