How to maximize your feeds – WP Tip #008

People say money makes the world go round, but the reality is that in the web, feeds make the world go round. Feeds is the name of a special type of website that is used to publish information for syndication. Generally, feeds are used to syndicate a source of news, or in our case, a blog by other websites or applications. You can read all about feeds at Wikipedia to get a better understanding.

The reason why feeds are important to you and your blog is that they help your blogposts get out there, people use your website feeds to read your blogposts in Google Reader, in their phone, by email with Mailchimp or Feedburner.

WordPress does an amazing job at providing RSS feeds and you can leverage these to attract the right visitors to your website. For example, you could present an option for someone to subscribe to a single category on your blog instead of all your blogposts.

Maybe you blog everyday or you blog about a dozen different topics, some guests would like to read your updates about photography, but not about your pets. In this case, you could ad a link to the feeds for your photography blogposts and a separate link for your blogposts about your pets. It's rather simple actually.

Simply take the address of the category you want to provide, for example:

http://example.com/category/photography/

And add the word “feed” to the end of that, so that it looks like this:

http://example.com/category/photography/feed/

WordPress will then make that link go to the feed for the blogposts with the category of photography only.

This method is useful also when you want to submit your blog to a catalog or automatic syndication, but the catalog wants a specific topic. You can do this for almost any type of structure that WordPress provides, e.g. Author, Tags, Comments, or even the comments for a specific tag or category.