I’ve been looking a lot at RSS feeds lately. How to use them, how to promote them, and how to make my numbers grow. I know from my own experience that I forget about sites, even ones that I enjoy, and I’ve begun to use readers and find out what a great tool RSS really is.

So I want my own readers to be able to take advantage of this and be able to find me again if they’ve enjoyed something they’ve read. (This “they” is YOU, by the way.)

When I first started out I got the message, “Make your feed easy to find.” Check. I’ve put it at the top of my blogs.

But now I want to do even more!

First, I noticed that other people had nifty little footers at the bottom of their feeds. Some with adverts and some with messages that didn’t appear on their sites, so I did some research.

Wordpress Plugins:

• Feed Footer Plugin
• Better Feed Plugin
• PostPost
• Sig2Feed

But none did exactly what I was seeing, so I keep looking, and guess what? It’s a standard feature you can get for free on Feedburner. (Yes, I feel dumb.)

Seen these? Well all you have to do to have them on your own feed is click a few buttons! It’s incredibly easy if you’re already using Feedburner. Log in to your Feedburner account and click “Optimize”.

Then Click “Feed Flare” on the left column.

Then simply go down the list and tick which options you wish to show up on your feed in the Footer.

Save. And it’s done!

This will increase the chances that your RSS readers will interact with your blog!

Other good articles on RSS feeds:

• Increase RSS Subscriptions 
• John Chow’s RSS Competition.   (I include this as I think it’s a great idea and inspiring to think of creative ways to raise reader’s awareness of your feed!)

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I would never advocate lying about stats, income, or, well, much of anything on your business blog. (If it’s a personal blog, feel free to lie your hiney off… I do on mine! C’mon. It’s a humor blog.)

However, too many blogs owners make the mistake of being too honest about their lack of experience or lack of success.

I think it was the movie Working Girl where the advice was given: “Dress like the person whose job you want”. I.e. if you want to be an exec, don’t dress like a cheap, trailer-trash, gum-popping hooker. Now ask yourself:

Does your blog dress like a hooker?

Find a blog that you think feels professional. It should be one either in your niche or something compatible. A blog on dealing with bereavement shouldn’t look like one full of celebrity gossip. Open a new browser window and look at it side-by-side with yours. What are the main differences you spot?

I’m not saying clone it, but I am saying you can learn a lot from others! Likewise, when you visit a site you don’t like, ask yourself if you make any of those same mistakes. When you visit a blog that annoys you, or something causes you to hit the “unsubscribe” button in your reader, it’s a good time to evaluate why, so you can learn from it.

Because with all blogs, big and small, what you think is “homey” or “funny” on your blog could very well be gum-popping tacky.   And even your friends don’t like it.  Seriously.

When you decide on a theme, make it your own. Change the header or logo at the very least. I’ve been working very hard at that at my blogs, but this one is the last to get the treatment because A. I see this theme less often than I was tripping over clones of my other sites and B. I gotta admit I really like this theme as it is, so improving it is going to be difficult!

This is doubly-triply-fortymillion-tupply important if you use something like Blogger.com. If I see one more blog with the “Dots” theme, I might strangle someone.

If you have low stats, keep them to yourself

1. Don’t put up feedburner stats showing you have 6 subscribers.
2. It doesn’t look good when you have post after post after post with ZERO comments. (I’ve noticed that blogs, such as celebrity blogs, who rely on google and not community don’t seem to get many comments.  But those aren’t the type of blogs I’m talking about here… I’m talking about community blogs that require feedback in order to survive.) Comments are one stat that you can’t fake. Well you could, but it would be time-consuming and awkward to comment yourself. But you CAN ask friends to post comments for you. But more importantly, comment for other people. 9/10 people that I write comments for visit my sites and comment in return.
3. Don’t make posts whining about how no one visits. Find out why, and fix it. Or take a day off. But complaining will only drive people away.

DON’T: lie, pretend you’re an expert if you’re not, or fake stats (Trust me… people can tell. Or at least I can, and I’m a people.)
DO: talk up the successes you HAVE had, talk about the things you HAVE learned, talk about your blogging “journey”.

DON’T: talk yourself down, talk your blog down, or most importantly talk your readers (or lack thereof) down (it’ll only offend whatever lurkers you might have.)

If you’re not enjoying the success you expected, ask someone you respect to take a look at your site and give you an honest evaluation. And no, don’t ask John Chow. Ask someone you know. [NOTE: If you don’t know anyone else who blogs, that’s your problem right there.  Get out there and talk to people!]

I’m a big believer in honesty, but there’s nothing wrong with letting the truth that shines through on your blog be one that makes people want to be a part of the community you’re trying to establish.

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Recently I told you that I had seen a metablogger offer the “blogwork” (read:homework) to his readers to write 20 blog comments that day.

I decided to take up the challenge.

I felt that this would indicate 20 per day per blog. Otherwise it would be watered down linkage-wise. So my goal was 20 for About Blogging, and 20 for Bitter Women.

Also, when I first started, I wanted to make this 20 NEW blogs, so leaving comments on places I had commented before wouldn’t count.

RESULTS

1. No freaking way do I have the time/energy to leave 20 comments per blog per day. (I’m now up to 3 blogs, so this would be 60. It’s a nice idea, but I just couldn’t do it.

Monday: I did very well… I left 23 for About Blogging and 13 for Bitter Women.
Tuesday: I felt ready to slit my throat after 20 for About Blogging and 10 for Bitter Women. I’d also abandoned the rule about it having to be places I’d never been before. That takes SO much time to find new, quality, relevant blogs!
Wedneday: I kept pushing on, with 10 for About Blogging and 20 for Bitter Women.
Thursday: I did squat because I was creating The Naked Celebrity .
Friday: Exhausted. Still working on The Naked Celebrity layout, but decided to push myself and wrote 13 comments for each blog.

2. I DID notice an increase in traffic. But not one so substantial that it was worth killing myself over it. This week my traffic increased by about 50% over the previous week, however this was largely due to some serious stumbleupon traffic (thanks to people simply taking a shine to some of my stories), and did not come from comments I’d left. I also noticed an increase in subscribers. Actually, the About Blogging subscribership doubled. (But don’t get too excited. We’re a new blog, so I’m talking going from 11 subscribers to 22. I’m glad to have you, by the way!)

3. The biggest happy result was my own blogs got a boost in comments received.  In ONE WEEK the comments posted made up 20% of all comments on Bitter Women and 40% of all comments on About Blogging.

The most important thing I learned this week was:

4. Keeping Track of How Many Comments I Wrote Inspired Me To Do More. I had thought I commented more than I did. So far today, for example, I have a feeling that I’ve visited lots of blogs. But when I look at my tally, I’ve only actually left 5 comments. I’m doing a lot of post-writing today, so today may not be the day to go out and leave 20 comments elsewhere, however at least I’m not fooling myself into thinking I’m doing more than I actually am.

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I wish that I had found CoComments a month ago. TheCaymanHost turned me on to this, and it’s going to save my bacon. I can tell already.

In the past week I have posted twice saying “I can’t remember where I saw this, but blah blah blah.” (Referring to a place that I commented, but didn’t bookmark.) My bookmarks are cluttered enough, and now I’m on a commenting rampage, and I can’t bookmark every single site I visit.

CoComment uses an unobtrusive Firefox plugin to keep track of the blogs you visit and the comments you leave. You can also delete references to places you know you don’t want to return to or to track.

*EDIT* You do not have to use Firefox, but I think it’s by far the easiest. Non-Firefox users have an option called Bookmarklet as explained on the CoComment website. *END EDIT*

I’ve only just started using it, and I tell ya, I think it’s the niftiest thing since RSS readers. If you join up, drop me a friend invite! My username is Jayne .

Oh and why am I such a comment ditz these days? Because I ran across a blog (umm, I can’t remember where…. see what I mean?) where someone was giving blog advice and he gave some “blogwork” to all his readers to leave 20 comments on other blogs per day. (I took this to mean NEW blogs… not ones already on your own blogroll or that you regularly visit.)

So I decided to keep track of how many comments I leave, and to try to leave 20 per day per blog I run (which thankfully at this point is just two).

Holy guacamole. It’s harder than I thought! I really thought I was already leaving that many, but it turns out I couldn’t possibly have been. I was probably reading 40 blogs, but only commenting on 3-4 of them.

The experiment I’m running is to do this for a week and see if it raises the traffic I get and the amount of comments my own posts get. So I’ll keep at it and let you know the results next week.

And now, in the meantime, I’ve got a little helper to remind me where I leave all these comments, and the many worthwhile blogs out there.

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Be A Community Builder…. And by this I don’t mean be “the guy that fixes everyone’s plumbing”, although if you want to be one of those, I hear the pay is good.

About Blogging is adding two new things to promote a sense of community. One is Lucia’s Linky Love . It’s a dofollow wordpress plugin that will enable commenters to get linkbacks to their own sites. (Currently, if you leave a comment on a blog, you do not get link “credit” for it in Google/Technorati with relation to their rankings. This plugin fixes that.) However, to prevent “human comment spammers leaving insipid, irrelevant comments just to get link-juice”, I’m setting this plugin to reward only users who comment 3 times. This way if you’re a regular participant, you get some linky love! (Adding later today! Post first… fiddle with Wordpress second… one of my self-discipline blogging rules. )

Another idea is one I’ve seen in the blogoshere called “IReply”. This is just a pledge that many bloggers choose to make saying “If you comment on my blog, I will reply.” Sometimes that can be difficult, depending on what people say, but over at DayJobNuker.com , he took the idea one step further, and I think it’s great, and very workable!

I’ve made a couple of changes for practicality, and added one point…

…for every new person who leaves a comment on my blog for the first time. I will:

1) Visit your blog or website
2) Visit Several Pages
3) Leave a comment on a post if have something to say
4) If I like your articles/posts, I will bookmark them in Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or other appropriate Social Network.
5) If you tell me that you have subscribed to my RSS feed then I will subscribe to yours as well.

Jaynes Note: It is against Google’s (and probably others) TOS to ask for or promise to click-throughs on ads, therefore I’ve modified the “pledge” a bit.

These are fantastic, and I’m going to start doing all of these things right away!

If you’re willing to take the Community Builder pledge(ish), saying that you’re willing to make an effort to do these things for your readers, then why not make a post or put up an icon saying so? I’ve created four icons… two black and two white (one set is smaller to fit on a sidebar). If you ask me, I will also gladly send you the layered png files so you can recolor or rework them for your own site. (My email address is on the header image.)

If you do that and link to this post, I will also add a link to your post/blog here!

Here are the other images I created … use them freely!

Other “Community Builder” blogs:

• Blogging for Bitter Women
• DayJobNuker

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