Building Access – Feeds & Link-sharing

Last week we looked at the basic features that a blog must have. Once the blog is up and running, the most important question is how to build readership. Grabbing interest is a tricky subject and one that nobody has a concrete answer to, since it all depends on the quality of your content. However, making that content accessible goes a long way in building your readership. Let’s examine some tools that can make your blog content more accessible.

Feeds

A feed is the most crucial way to distribute a blog’s content. Remember the times of yore? People built their dwellings and families. Then they started to communicate with each other. They probably went over to each other’s houses for news and discussion. The online equivalent of that is visiting blogs by typing in their URLs. Then postal services were set up, that allowed people to receive communication at their doorstep. Email of course, is the internet’s answer to that. Remember P.O. boxes that allowed you to receive communication at a designated box at the post office where you could pick up your mail when you liked? A feed-reader is the online equivalent of just that.

People use the internet in different ways. If you have a blog, you’ve already established an address online where people can drop in to read your posts. A feed allows you to also deliver the posts to email addresses or to a feedreader. Most of the free blogging service providers like Blogger and WordPress already provide you with feeds for the URLs that you register. You can also ‘burn’ a feed at Feedburner which, incidentally, is a Google product so you can login with your account. Feeds also allow other sites/blogs to display updates of your site, which can only be good for the extra visibility.

Feed-readers

Here’s how a feed-reader works. You enter the URL that you wish to track. The feedreader will search for all the available feeds relating to that site and come back with a list of options. You can then subscribe to the feed. After that, all new posts will be visible on your feedreader once they’re published.

There are a number of feed-readers available. Bloglines is one of the older services but it often faces downtime. Google Reader is one of the most popular feedreaders. Being a Google product, it is automatically available to all users of a Google product. It also allows you to share recommendations with other people in your address book.

Other sharing options

Facebook Notes feature also allows you to subscribe to a feed and publish the posts there.

Feedburner or Quick Subscribe allow your visitors to have your new posts delivered to their mailboxes as soon as they’re published.

Friendfeed lets you collate all your online content (multiple blogs, videos, photographs, tweets) into a one-subscription stop for your readers.

Viralling

After accessibility, allowing quick sharing is the next step. Make it easy for your visitors to not just receive your content but also share it. The internet is the information superhighway after all, making it very easy to pass a link, a picture or text along. In such an age, many bloggers lose out simply because sharing their link is too tedious a process. How can you make it as simple as one click?

Twitter, the hottest trend on social media allows you to share a link each time you post, thus reminding all your followers to drop into your blog.

Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious are some of the popular link-sharing services.

Tell a Friend allows you to add a toolbar to your blog that gives readers a wide variety of options with which to share a post link with their friends. Light Social is a plug-in that does the same thing for WordPress blogs.

Wibiya adds a toolbar to the bottom of your blog and lets you track the times your blog’s links are shared, pull content from other sites and collate your tweets.

Make your blog friendly & accessible. Happy posting and happy sharing! I’ll see you around on the blogosphere!

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“IdeaSmith is the online avatar of Ramya, an ex-business analyst on sabbatical. She loves stationery but she bid a fond goodbye to office spaces a year ago. Now she alternates between sampling panipuris, winning Monopoly games and airing her grievances on the Twitterverse.

She is currently working on her first novel. Her verbal performances air at The Idea-smithy and The XX Factor.”