How can readers subscribe to a feed?
There are several ways visitors can subscribe to your feeds to get regularly notified of new Blog Posts, Sermons, or Articles.
Via RSS
By making your RSS feed available on your site, you are allowing readers to subscribe to your blog via RSS. The feed URL can be made available by including an RSS icon button (
), or a text URL.
Your RSS feed URL will look something like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/mediafiles/the-feed-name.xml
By itself, the page found at this link might just look like code in a web browser. But, placed in a feed reader application, this URL can be used to subscribe to the content.
Feed applications
There is a wide variety of ways RSS feeds can be used to subscribe to content. By copy + pasting the RSS feed into their application of choice, users will be notified when you have new content available.
Auto-discovery meta tag
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="MonkDev Blog" href="http://www.monkdevelopment.com/mediafiles/blog.xml" />
If an auto-discovery meta tag like the above is built into your site's blog template, users may not need to find your blog's feed URL to subscribe with their app of choice. With this tag implemented into the site HTML, the user's RSS application will likely know the feed source automatically. Thus, the blog's main URL would be the only thing users need to subscribe. To check your blog for this tag, right-click on an empty area of your blog page and click "View Page Source" or a similar option. If you do not see a similar tag in the HTML, contact us to get it.
User tutorials
Overall, it's helpful for users to have a breif tutorial about RSS available on your site in case they have any questions. See an example of our RSS tutorial.
Via Email
There are a few services available that will discover your new content via RSS and create an email from that. Google FeedBurner, MailChimp, and Campaign Monitor are some examples.
Other resources