I wrote a post recently with 9 Tips For RSS Feed Marketing. The post drew some great questions from friends and readers who wanted to know more about implementing some of the tips. The most frequent question was about putting some interactivity into your feed so readers could share, bookmark, and learn what is happening with the post directly from their feed reader (such as Google Reader or Bloglines) - without having to click through to the site.

Let’s take a look at FeedBurner and their feature called FeedFlare. FeedFlare allows you to give your readers a way to email, share, and act on a post directly from their reader of choice. From your FeedBurner admin panel, click on the Optimize tab and then click on the FeedFlare option located on the left. It will look like this:

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Once here you’ll have a variety of different options that you can select to be placed at the bottom of your feed or even on your site if you choose. My feed looks like this:

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You’ll notice at the bottom of my post there are options to bookmark, email and check out the number of reader comments. Here are a few I think you should include:

  • Digg and StumbleUpon: We all know the viral effect that social media can have. Why not give your post the chance to ride the wave. Yes, we all like site visitors and pageviews, but making it easy for a reader to submit your work to either Digg or StumbleUpon can reap many rewards. It’s worth the risk of one person not coming to your site.
  • Del.icio.us: Bookmarked sites lead to people referencing your post down the road on their own site. Why not give readers the option to bookmark the url of your post right from their reader. The other option is hoping people click through and can easily and quickly locate the social bookmarking icons on your site (assuming you have them!). Make it easy and let them do it here.
  • AddThis: I throw AddThis in there just in case my readers have other preferences for bookmarking. Why not cover all of your bases. Yes, AddThis contains the above mentioned sites, but I like to keep those separate and obvious as people are not always familiar with the functionality of AddThis.
  • Email This: I like offering the option to have people email the post. You never know where it could go and what it could lead to.
  • Comments: I’ve added the option to show the number of comments. If readers see there are multiple comments on an item, they may be intrigued enough to click through and see what all the talk is about. Conversely, if they see there are no comments, they may be enticed to be the first one.

These options are a must in my opinion. They’re free with your FeedBurner account and offer your readers further opportunity to interact with you.

Here are some additional links on the topic:


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