Do You Deliver? Part Two

Yesterday I began a post on two of the best innovations I have seen in the Internet over the last decade. Believe me, there are plenty more, but these two have had a big impact on how I use the Internet and how others follow the sites I develop. I spent a little time talking about what ‘push’ technology and syndication is. If you haven’t read the first post yet, it’s a good place to start.

Today I wanted to suggest a basic “Delivery Check” that you can do for yourself/your sites to see how well you’re utilizing these innovations to get your message out.

Start at the Beginning: Offering RSS Feeds
At the heart of syndication are what are called RSS feeds (stands for “Really Simple Syndication”). RSS feeds allow you to offer a way for people to subscribe to your site/blog and receive automatic updates whenever you add anything new. To me, this is a must-have. If you don’t do anything else I suggest below, you need to make sure you are using RSS and have it set-up correctly.

Check out the video I posted yesterday, “RSS in Plain English” for a quick starter synopsis on how it all works. Then head over to Feedburner and set-up a free account to get you going. There are other RSS services out there, probably some that are even better. But for just starting out, Feedburner will offer you exactly what you need.

Check out this post from ChurchCrunch to get you going on a good set of Feedburner Settings to use: “Feedburner Settings - Optimize for Maximum Effectiveness and Awesomeness”

BTW - you can subscribe to this blog in several ways:

• Enter your email at the top of any page where it says “Subscribe Via Email”
• Use the RSS icon next to that box to grab my RSS feed (Hint: Use Google Reader to manage your feeds)
• You can do both of the above at the bottom of every post here as well.
• Click the Feedburner count box in the top right.

Pushing to Social Media Sites
The web has become a social web. Social networking sites are the fastest growing sites, and with billions of websites out there (and more coming online everyday) that’s saying something. The point of push technology is bringing your message to people where they are, instead of making them come to where you are.

Facebook makes it easy to publish your blog/site RSS feed as “Notes.” Go to your profile and scroll down to “Notes” on the left. The instructions for importing your RSS feed should be in a box to the right on this screen.

You can check out my imported notes here. I run a shortened feed for my Facebook notes for two reasons: 1) because my notes can be lengthy at times, and 2) because I like having people come to my site to leave comments instead of just leaving them on Facebook. You can run a full feed on Facebook, though.

Twitter is a little more involved. Head over to TwitterFeed.com and sign-up for a free account. Here’s how my TwitterFeed settings are configured:

A quick rundown:

• I have TwitterFeed check every 30 minutes and post up to 5 new updates to Twitter each time (I never come close to this limit, BTW)
• I only post the title of my blog post, but you can post a short summary automatically as well
• I include a link to the article (very important) and use tr.im to shorten it. Tr.im is great as it also tracks clickthroughs of people who click the link to read the blog post.
• I prefix every tweet with “Just wrote on ” (with a space on the end)

There are many, many more you could utilize, but this is a good starting point. The point is - you need to provide easy ways for people to get your posts where and when they want to get them; not restrict them to having to constantly check to see if you’ve added anything new. Push your feed out to 1) the sites you are on and use on a consistent basis, 2) the sites where people who follow you (or who you want to follow you) are spending time.

Posted 05.24.2009

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