Podcasts and RSS News Feeds

This is an interesting tidbit of information for today. Did you know that only 7% of the Web market is actually reading news via RSS news feeds, but 9% of the market is listening to and downloading podcasts?

I found it interesting that RSS still has so little acceptance in the wider market. Personally I watch blogs that I am interested in with a My Live portal page and then if I am interested I click in to read the full post. I find it easy and practical to be able to scan large amounts of content at a glance and cherry pick the items for the day that warrant my attention. It is surprising to me that more simply have not embraced the true power of RSS and continue to manage large bookmark files and click in to every blog that they watch.

Why do I like My Live as my RSS news aggregate? Well I used to use My Yahoo, but now with My Live I have a cleaner interface without ads. I think that it looks less cluttered.

Feedburner Tips

If you are not running your feed through Feedburner, you are missing out on great information to help you cater your content to your audience.

I used to be a big advocate of not using Feedburner when RSS news feeds first became important several years ago. I did not want to lose my domain branding on my feed by having it be wrapped by Feedburner.

But now, I recommend that you use Feedburner as feed stats at the PRO level are free now that Feedburner has been purchased by Google. It's easy to create a free account. You simply enter in the URL for your blog in Feedburner and it creates a new feed URL for you. If you are using Blogger, you enter this new feed address in the feed tab of the settings. For WordPress users it is more complicated. Typically I will hard code the feed into the meta tags, but you may actually now be able to find a plug-in that will allow you to install the Feedburner feed automatically from one of my last plug-in searches. I haven't checked it out yet, so if you have, leave me a comment.

I monitor my Feedburner stats to see what is happening in regards to broad subscribership. Remember however, Feedburner only provides stats on your RSS or Atom feed. It does not provide page views when people visit your blog using their browser or a link from your website. So, you will still need to review stats like Google Analytics or Urchin for the full picture of the popularity of your blog.

It is important to understand that according to industry reports that still only 7% of all readers are reading blogs via feeds so your real traffic will still be coming in via a browser. So make sure you have regular web stats enabled for your blog to track all of your traffic.

Get Started Fast With News Feeds

For those of you who are logging into my blog to read the news, I am here to tell you, my content can be delivered to you at your My Yahoo, My AOL, My Live Page, or My Google page. Just click the post title to view our 12 page visual PDF presentation on how to get going with RSS/XML feeds and never have to log into my blog again to see my content.

Oh, I will miss you :0) but if you are not actively reviewing news feeds and blogs online using a portal, you are missing the efficiency that they afford to read a lot of news in small bites and then only click in to a site when you want to.

Here is the direct link to the visual guide: http://www.mccordweb.com/pdfs/feed-lesson.pdf.

In this PDF you will see visually how to set up a My Yahoo account, auto-subscribe to a feed using a one-click icon, how to subscribe to a feed by grabbing the feed URL and where to enter this on My Yahoo. I think it will make it easy for you to get going fast.

As for me, I have made it easy for you to subscribe, just click the link in the right bar and you can choose to auto subscribe or snatch the feed address. Either way, I may never see you here again, but I'll see you on your My Yahoo page!