Many bloggers already currently optimize their RSS feed to encourage feed discovery, post reading, or click-throughs back to site. But contextual feed readers like BlogRovr open up completely new possibilities for feed reader optimization.
What is Contextual Feed Reader Optimization?
I would define contextual feed reader optimization as optimizing your blog, RSS feed, and blog posts, so that your blog posts display to BlogRovr users when they browse contextually-relevant web pages.
Just to recap, BlogRovr is a feed reader that analyzes the webpage you are currently viewing, and then displays a list of relevant blog posts from feeds that you already subscribe to.
Basically, two conditions must be met in order for your blog posts to display contextually to BlogRovr users.
- Your feed available to the BlogRovr user
- Your post must be relevant to the current webpage being viewed.
First, how to make your feed available for BlogRovr users
It seems that there are two different ways to get your post available to BlogRovr users:
- The most obvious way to make your feed available is to get the BlogRovr user subscribed to your RSS feed.
Since BlogRovr draws posts from the user’s current RSS subscriptions, most direct way to get your posts contextually displayed is to get BlogRovr users to subscribe to your feed. BlogRovr users tend to subscribe to more feeds than the typical RSS subscriber, because contextual feed reading eliminates over-subscription problems like inbox clutter or information overload. Since I’ve started using BlogRovr, I’ve adopted a “subscribe first, ask questions later” type of policy. I’m sure other BlogRovr users have increased their feed subscription too (If you user BlogRovr, let me know if this is true for you or not.)I suppose a more aggressive tactic would be to actually convert your site visitors into BlogRovr users by writing about or linking to it. Currently, I think this would only make sense for bloggers who are trying to get their posts contextually displayed on ecommerce pages in order to siphon customers to their own site by presenting a contextually more attractive offer. (thoughts on this?)
- The second way to make your feed available is to get your feed included in one of the BlogRovr bundles.
Honestly, I have done any research into how RSS feeds are chosen to be included in bundles. From what I’ve seen, feeds in BlogRovr bundles generally already have a large current RSS subscriber base and are considered authoritative in their field. But the potential payoff is much greater than just getting a single user to subscribe. Obviously if your feed is really just a SPAM pipe, please don’t submit it to BlogRovr or any other contextual feed readers. Or ANY feed directories for that matter… But if you know something about the bundled feed selection process, I’d love to hear about it!
I’m just begun exploring this topic, so please feel free to add your experiences or thoughts about optimizing for contextual feed readers.
Is your feed contextually relevant?
Now that your feed is available to a BlogRovr user(s), you must make your posts relevant to other webpages.
At this point, it appears that BlogRovr considers post relevant if they mention the webpage and link to that page from your post. It seems like another good reason to generally reference webpages that you post about, right?
Add your own contextual feed reader optimization tips in the comments.
