Rss feeds and Auto Discovery

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Just imagine. Every time someone visits your website, there
browser notifies them of your RSS feed. No, it’s not as
interruptive and no where near as annoying as popup
subscription boxes but still a good chance to get people to
subscribe to something you have to offer. In a nutshell,
that’s how auto discovery works. There ’s usually a small
flag somewhere in the browser telling people your feed is
available for them and if the visitor is interested in
subscribing, they will simply click subscribe - much like
bookmarking a page.

Now you know how it works, why is it so important? For one,
many feed readers and browsers already support auto
discovery RSS feeds. But perhaps what’s more important,
Microsoft is incorporating this starting with Internet
Explorer 7. Internet Explorer still commands a good chunk
of browser share out there, especially those who are new to
the Internet or non technical Internet users. If your RSS
feeds are not auto discovery enabled, it’s a good chance
you’ll lose out on a bunch of subscribers.

As it is today, browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari can
auto discover feeds. Many use this to subscribe because it’s
just so much easier. While this group may not be that large
but why should you not take advantage? If just making your
feeds auto discovery friendly you get an extra subscriber,
even if it’s only one it would be worth it because it costs
nothing but maybe 2 minutes of your time.

So how do you find out if your feeds are auto discovery
friendly? The good news is, if you’re using a blog to
manage your content, many have this feature built in. But
it doesn’t hurt to just check it anyway. If you don’t use a
blog, chances are, your feed is not auto discovery enabled.
For step-by-step instructions how to check if your page has
auto discovery, visit
http://www.techbasedmarketing.com/auto-discovery-step-by-step.html

Before I go, here are two little tips that would help your
RSS distribution and subscription using auto discovery.
1. Put the auto discovery tag in other web pages too. Just
because it’s not a blog doesn’t mean you can’t have an RSS
feed on it. Take advantage of that, put your feed in your
main website’s template. Now you have two opportunities to
get in touch with people. When you update your website and
when you update your blog.
2. If you use a service like FeedBurner to track your
subscriptions, remember to update the feed URL in your blog
or website template. This way, you’re capturing all your
feed traffic statistics.

What’s next? Go make your RSS feeds auto discovery friendly
right now. Because RSS is not always visible to us, don’t
run the risk of forgetting this.

Lynette Chandler helps entreprenuers leverage readily
available technology for their marketing. Watch a 3 Minute
Video Tutorial How Auto Discovery Works
http://www.techbasedmarketing.com/videos/autodiscovery.html