Do I already have an RSS feed? Well, do I?

Believe it or not, this is actually a common question. Since most people blog using once of the major blog services like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress, chances are they already have an RSS feed inside their blog, but never even used it!

Did you know that submitting your RSS feed to the RSS search engines can dramatically increase readers to your blog, not to mention, to your web site too?

Well then, let's find out if your blog already has an RSS feed.

1. Using your web browser, navigate over to your blog.

2. In your web browser, click View->Source.

3. Search for the following text near the top of the source file:
link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
or
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

4. If you find a match for one of the above lines, then congratulations, your blog already contains an RSS feed! Now to find the URL to your RSS feed, just look for the URL at the end of the matching line. For example, if you follow the above steps on this very blog that you are reading, you will find a match with the following URL at the end: http://pingblogs.blogspot.com/atom.xml

What's that you say? Your blog doesn't contain an RSS feed? Well, not to worry. You can easily create one using a software tool such as FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com/ or various other RSS feed creators available. Now, how about putting that RSS feed to good use instead of letting it just sit there. See the next article about what to do with an RSS feed for promotion.

Tags:
rss feed
rss