Last week Louise and I delivered a workshop to some arts organizations on online marketing (which we really enjoyed and it went very well!). Part of the day was on blogs so beforehand I had researched blogs in their field e.g museums, galleries, cathedrals, theatres etc. One thing that surprised me was that few of these blogs made it easy for visitors to subscribe to the posts.
When you set up a blog and start blogging on a regular basis, one of the first things you want to do is make sure people can keep up with your posts. The best way of doing this is making sure visitors can easily subscribe to them. There are 2 main ways to do this, either by email (alerts are sent by email each time the blog is updated), or by a ‘feed’. When I mentioned ‘feeds’ at the workshop, it did cause a little confusion!
A ‘feed’ is a way visitors can keep up with blogs they like by subscribing to them in a feed reader (some software you can use for free on your computer either in a browser or via a download). This means visitors won’t get the updates by email, but through the feed reader of their choice. There are plenty out there (see Wikipedia ), but the one I use is Google Reader. It’s quite easy to set up – firstly create a Google account if you don’t have one, then when you’ve set it up, you can add the blogs you want to subscribe to, to your new reader account. The one thing I like about Google Reader is that you can add the reader to your personal Google home page (or iGoogle page) and get your latest blog posts each time you log on.
As a publisher of a blog, I want to encourage people to keep up with my posts through their reader of choice. Most blogs have an orange ‘feed’ logo (see image above), which alerts visitors to the fact that they can subscribe to the blog via a feed. You need to ensure this feed is prominently placed on your blog, ideally near the top of the page. On Savvy Marketers, we have the orange logo on the right with some words ‘Subscribe to Savvy Marketers blog posts in a reader’. Below this we have another link ‘Subscribe to Savvy Marketers blog posts by email’. It’s important to include both as some people still prefer to receive blog post alerts by email and not everyone is technically savvy or has used a reader – don’t neglect these visitors, make it easy for everyone to subscribe!
For further explanation on ‘feeds’ and ‘readers’, the BBC website has a good article which you can read here.
