How to Promote Your Website for FREE

There are many services to have your feed broadcast. Today we are going to talk about Follow, which is a part of Blogger blogs, and Feedburner and some of the benefits of both of them.  If I had to choose between one or the other for reader retention Feedburner would win hands down.  I think Follow does have several advantages of it’s own. So, let’s discuss both.

I’m sure by now in your surfing the web you have run across the Follow button on Blogger, or blogspot, blogs with the great little pictures under it.  I have to admit it is exciting to see the number of followers increase on your blog.  I believe though that Follow gives us a false sense of who is really keeping up with our postings and how many people are actually tuned into your blog.  You see with Follow they will only see your blog by logging into their dashboard at the Blogger site and scrolling down to the bottom to see sites they follow.  The other way they could see your blog is if they take the extra steps at the dashboard page after they push the Follow button to have it published elsewhere like their homepage or receive it through email.  Most people will not take those extra steps, one because they don’t realize they are there and two because it’s a hassle.

I wouldn’t delete it from your site though.  It does serve it’s purpose and like I said some reader retention is going to come of it, just don’t expect it to be a big percentage.

One thing we really like about Follow though is the fact that every blog you personally click the Follow button and sign up for leaves a little avatar with the link to your blogger profile and in turn a link to your blogs.  This is great not only because a physical person could click on it but the itsy bitsy Google spider is also going to see more and more of you as you “Follow” other blogs.  It’s zero hassle backlinking!!! Gotta love that.

Now onto Feedburner.  Feedburner is just another service that Google has aquired so you can use the same account you use for Blogger, Adsense, and the like, for Feedburner.  You can see my Feedburner in the upper right hand corner of this blog where it says Subscribe Via Email. I believe this service is the best for a high percentage of reader retention because they are receiving your posts via their email. But wait it gets better!!! (Now I feel like the Sham Wow guy!) Really though it is exciting that you can monetize your feeds so that every email that is delivered to your readers contains Google Adsense, if you want them to.  So, not only do you have a chance to make money on your site itself, you have the chance to profit from one of your subscribers right there in their email inbox. And as an added bonus! Your post could be so great they might even foward it to a friend or two… or maybe their whole darn email list.  There goes your blog post being passed around via email with the link to your site and your Google Adsense embedded.  Pretty cool stuff!

To sum it up if you have a blog hosted at Blogger I strongly recommend you use both Follow and Feedburner for the best possible results.

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