The Almighty Feed is very helpful to build a loyal community around your blog. Imagine this case, a visitor came to your website through search engine found something interesting, made a couple of comments and he disappeared for ever. If you have promoted the feed in right way, he would have subscribed to the feed and might be reading your posts daily.

Make it visible

Don’t expect your visitors to search for your feed on the sidebar of your wordpress blog. Make it obvious to them!

1. Make your RSS feed more visible. (a bad example is my own blog, I should have a bigger icon)
2. Don’t show the number of subscribers until you have something in 3 digits.

Use a Single Feed

It is very important to promote a single feed. I recommend using FeedBurner to manage your feeds. Feeburner will take all the /feed/atom etc URLs and make them into one smartfeed.

Promote your Feed

It is very important to promote your feed in places OUTSIDE of your blog.

Use other blogs to promote your feed, in the comment area of blog, instead of your blog url enter your feed url. The chances of them subscribing to your feed increases as they are just a click away.

Promote your feed url in Forum signature, the conversion will be very high as the person in blog is related to your niche. vBForum software based forums (DigitalPoint is good for this) lets to add your feeds directly in your user panel, so it appears every time you post. Post more often on forums to make your feeds visible to larger audience.

If you are using wordpress there is a wonderful plugin which will remind users to subscribe to your feed. It uses cookies, to find out how many times the visitor has visited your blog. You can choose the number of visits for the reminder after which it will no longer bother them. The plugin is called What Would Seth Godin Do.

Submit Your Feed to Feed Directories

I offer a free tool

In summary of promotion:

1. Promote your Feed in Comment Box of other Blogs.
2. Promote your Feed Via Forum Signatures.
3. Promote your Feed by posting more often in forums.
4. Promote your Feed Via Messenger Status.
5. Promote your Feed Via Social Networking.
6. Get the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin for wordpress.
7. Promote your Feed Via E-mail Signatures.

and finally Some Do’s and Don’t

• Do offer full feed subscription, don’t expect them to check your blog to read the rest of the entry.
• Do write some kind of tutorial to make them understand how the feed works.
• Do shameless promotion of your feed. It doesn’t matter if you beg them to subscribe.
• Do maintain your posting schedule. Irregular bloggers can loose subscribers.
• Don’t change your feed url once you have choose it, it would spell disaster.