Are you subscribed to your own feeds? I'm often surprised how many bloggers have no idea what their posts look like through a news aggregator, let alone actually keep track of their feeds, making sure each post appears as it should, every time they publish something new.
I can think of three reasons off the top of my head why it's important to subscribe to your own blog(s):
Know that everything is working correctly, or when it isn't.
This is the most important reason for which I recommend that all bloggers subscribe to their own feeds. You just never know when there are going to be some technical problems that you may have to fix yourself, or if you're using a service like FeedBurner, you may want to wait for it to be fixed before posting too heavily to your blog for a short while.
Having problems with your feed can (and probably will) result in less visitors to your blog; and obviously, no one will be able to read your posts in their feed readers, or by email.
Make your posts more appealing to your subscribers.
Another benefit of subscribing is the fact that this allows you to see what your posts look like through a feed reader. Often they look much different than what you see on your blog, and this is a good way to make note of the things you can do to make them more visually appealing- separate large paragraphs into smaller, easy to digest pieces, use bold font to emphasize important points, make lists, do whatever you need to do to make your writing scannable and simple for your subscribers to read because, after all, they are the ones who subscribed in the first place and you should be concerned about making them happy to have done so.
Analyze your headlines, and strive to write better.
Subscribing to your own feed(s) also allows you look at your headlines, one after another, as many of your subscribers do. What can you say about them? Do they demand attention or do they just blend in a way that doesn't attract the eye? Do too many of your headlines contain the same words? When analyzing your posts, take a few moments to consider your titles and look for ways you can improve them, because when reading a blog through a news aggregator, many people tend to choose only the headlines that appeal to them, and leave the rest. There is a sort of art to crafting 'catchy' headlines, and it's something you learn through practice.
Are you subscribed to your own feed(s)? Can you think of any other reasons why bloggers should do this?
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Great suggestion. I never thought of that.
So You Want To Be a Banquet Manager
Posted by: banquet manager | September 14, 2008 at 02:49 PM
It is a good thing to do to test out any items beyond text & images. I subscribed to my RSS feed, just to discover my lightbox images do not turn out as intended.
Posted by: Kristi | September 15, 2008 at 06:08 PM