That Technology Magazine

Small businesses and entrepreneurs who write blogs can find themselves one leg up on their competitors simply by creating content on their area of expertise. Potential customers, partners, and suppliers would generally prefer to work with someone who “knows their stuff” as opposed to someone who just has a snazzy website. Your blog is where you can show what you know.

For example, when I was looking for a trademark attorney for one of my other ventures, I did a few Google searches and found numerous patent attorneys. I didn’t want to pick an attorney based on a Google search (or the phone book, for that matter). One attorney who specializes in intellectual property matters, Stephen Nipper, writes a wonderfully informative - and often entertaining blog called The Invent Blog. The blog contents made me want to contact, talk to, and hire Stephen. Chalk up a sale from your blog, Stephen (probably one of many)!

If you take the time to write and update your blog, make sure it’s easy for visitors to find your blog. By now, many bloggers already have RSS feeds available for their blog. Common blog platforms either automatically setup or can easily be configured to create an RSS feed. This enables your readers to read your blog the way they want to read their blog - for example, on a news aggregator software or website. If the reader does not want to visit your blog everyday in order to read it or receive the blog content by email, that’s fine. RSS makes it happen!

Before I proceed, here are a few related blog entries on RSS feeds and news aggregators:

• Promote your blog in 10 minutes
• Turn your blog volume up to 11
• News aggregator will empty your inbox (Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Reader, Bloglines, Technorati)
• Try a news aggregator (RSS reader): Google Reader, My Yahoo, RSSOwl

What you can do to promote yourself, your business, and your blog is to make it easy for website visitors to find and subscribe to your blog. Right now, it’s likely that you have an orange link to your RSS feed on your blog. You may even have your blog setup so visitors using browsers that auto-detect RSS feeds will see the orange RSS feed icon in their browser when they visit your blog. My recommendation for today is that you add the one line of code necessary for browsers to auto-detect your blog feed to every page on your company or personal website. If a website visitor is impressed by your company or you - based on any page of your website (not even your blog), this gives them the opportunity to learn about your blog and easily subscribe to it.

If you’re not sure whether how you setup your blog feed is important, take a look at what SmallBusinessHub blog wrote on this topic - Lessons From A Laggard: RedHerring Shows How To Irritate RSS Users.

This is the one line of code that you need to add to your website template, assuming you use FeedBurner for your RSS feeds, so that this code appears somewhere after the 1head2 tag on every page of your website - your actual head tag has a “<” instead of the “1” and a “>” instead of the “2” - but Blogger does not always like when I put actual HTML tags in my articles:

19999 rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“RSS 2.0″ href=“http://feeds.feedburner.com/mytroops”>

(Again, Blogger doesn’t like when certain HTML code is inserted into a blog. Replace “1” with “<” and “9999” with “href” when you put the code on your website.)

Once you’ve added this line to your website template, visitors will know you have a blog and easily be able to subscribe via RSS when visiting any page of your website, not just your blog itself. One additional benefit is that certain news aggregators, such as Google Reader, can add an RSS feed to your subscriptions from any web page that has this code. Visitors do not need to have the actual URL to your blog feed. That’s a nice trick, too.

Please drop me a comment with any questions or thoughts. And, I hope this helps you promote your blog.

All is well.