RSS and Sharing for Dummies—and Lazies

Y’all know how I’ve preached that if you can’t say anything nice, then shut the hell up? Well, I’m about to break that rule. Kind of. Constructively, of course.

You’re lazy.

You didn’t now this about yourself, did you? But I do. And you’re not alone.

All Internet users are lazy.  It’s just a fact of life. I’m a lazy, too. Like me, I know you skim content. I know you rarely read every. Single. Word. I know you’d rather click a button to share a post than go out to bit.ly and get a shortened URL and share it that way. I know if a page doesn’t load fast enough, you just close it down. I know that if you can’t find what you’re looking for…and on the double…you give up and try something else.

Sound familiar? Uh huh. Don’t feel bad. It’s just the way we’re built. Many people were blessed with the virtue of patience, but that patience almost never extends to the Internet. So what’s my point? You have to make reading and sharing your blog content easy for all the lazies in the world!

As they say at Sexy Bookmarks, sharing is sexy!

So you have your Bloglovin’, Disqus, Twitter links, buttons, etc. But do your POSTS have a SHARE mechanism? Are you offering social bookmarking for your content? Oddly, in the last few weeks, I’ve wanted to share a post I’ve read through Twitter…only to discover that the blog I was on did not have this functionality. GAH!

No good, y’all. I know it’s a total oversight, but it is actually quite common. So do yourselves (and me) a favor, and make it supereasy for others to share your fabulous posts with the world. How to do this? In WordPress, I use Topsy and Sexy Bookmarks plugins. But there are a plethora of options, for all blogging platforms. Here are some resources:

• Top 35 Plugins of WordPress to Share Your Blog Post
• 30+ Plugins to Make Your WordPress Blog More Social
• 25 Great Blogger Widgets
• Adding Social Bookmarking Buttons To Blogger Posts : COMPLETE GUIDE

RSS: Really Serious Stuff!

While we’re on the subject of sharing blog content, if there are any of you who have not RSS-enabled your blog, get on it pronto! RSS (which actually stands for Really Simple Syndication) enables readers to have your content pushed to the reader of their choice, whether it’s Bloglovin’, Google Reader, Blog Catalog, or something else.

Avid blog readers use aggregators—it’s that simple. Not enabling RSS forces your readers to get to your blog some other (more labor-intensive) way, and when all their other favorite blogs are coming to them in a reader and you are not, you will not get the same level of visitation, simply because you’re off the radar.

So go ahead. Enable RSS. It’s a cinch! Then tell your readers you did so they can follow you in Bloglovin’ or whatever.

• How do you enable RSS feed on a blogger blog?
• Blogger Feed URLs
• WordPress.org Feeds
• WordPress.com Feeds

PS: Are you addicted to blogging?

You might be. My latest post on IFB covers symptoms of blogging compulsion and addiction, plus tips for balancing blogging and your real life.

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