How to Use RSS Feeds with WordPress Blogs
RSS feeds with WordPress provide easy access to your blog content for your audience. A growing number of mobile phones have nowadays also a built in RSS feed reader.
As soon as the feed subscriber accesses his RSS reader or personalized Google homepage, he will find a list of the newest blog headlines. If he clicks on a symbol next to the headline, he gets your content in a text format. The headline acts also as link to the original content on your blog. This video gives a short demo showing ow to use the RSS feed:
Why to Use It
Why would you want to allow your readers to access your content as feed outside of the carefully crafted blog environment? The simple answer is: It is always a good idea to make it easy for your customer to access your message. And if a part of your message needs other formats like audio or video, which are not available via RSS feeds, there is still the link to the original blog post. In this case the text acts as a teaser to visit the blog and watch the video or to listen to the audio content.
And why would a reader of your blog add your content as feed to his RSS reader? Feeds are a very effective method to stay on top of a topic without browsing the web for hours to check favorite websites for changes and fresh information. This saves him a lot of time, and at places where he pays for bandwidth it saves him also a lot of money.
How to Use It
RSS feeds with WordPress provide easy access to your content. And the beauty is: It is already incorporated in your standard blogging software. WordPress automatically produces feeds with your posts, and then also a feed from the comments on every single post. Modern browsers show an icon listing the feeds in the address bar or on top of the webpage display window. But to make it easy for your readers you should add a link to your feeds to the sidebar of your blog.
Add More Features
I suggest you go one step further and use Google’s Feedburner service. This allows you to offer one single feed working with all feed readers. Feedburner gives you also statistics which allow you to gauge how many people read your feeds, and a feature to offer feeds via email to your audience.
In short:
RSS feeds with WordPress are a foolproof way to make your content easily accessible to your audience on a wide variety of platforms. It is already part of the standard WordPress blogging software. To make it easy to use, you should take care that your blog theme contains a link to the feeds. If you want to get stats about the use of your feeds and additional features, Feedburner is a good choice. It is free, makes your feed even more accessible and provides a simple set of stats about the use of your feed.

