You may be losing out on opportunities to improve the reach of your RSS feed or blog.

These optimization tips can help:

• Burn your feed to Feedburner.com. Take advantage of the optimization and analytics features they offer.

• Offer alternate ways for readers to subscribe to your feed. Use FeedBurner tools like email subscriptions and subscription buttons like the ones on AddtoAny.com to offer more choices for your readers.

• Add your feed to as many feed directories as you can. Don't assume that just because a service is being pinged (notified) about your posts, that your feed is listed in their directory. Start by claiming your blog at Technorati.com. Then use the toprankblog blog directory list to find more.

• Import your feed into your social networking sites. Facebook allows you to import RSS feeds into your profile and offers applications for you to import feeds into Facebook pages. LinkedIn offers an application to include your feed in your profile. And you can use a tool like HootSuite.com to import your feed into your Twitter account.

• Create a lifestream or social page. Start an account with a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed or create a page on a social site like Squidoo. Import your feed into your new accounts along with relevant information from your other social Web accounts.

Though these tips will help improve the reach of your RSS feed or blog, the best way to get more subscribers is to regularly generate as much quality and on-topic content as you can.

Previously in this series

• Survival Guide Chapter 7: Do you have a strategy for social bookmarking and crowdsourcing?
• Survival Guide Chapter 6: How to advertise your business on Facebook
• Survival Guide Chapter 5: Podcasts, vidcasts and Webcasts
• Survival Guide Chapter 4: Building a WordPress-powered website
• Survival Guide Chapter 3: RSS feeds & blogs
• Survival Guide Chapter 2: Preparing content for the social Web
• Survival Guide Chapter 1: Cre­at­ing your social media strategy

Deltina Hay is the author of The Bootstrapper's Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. She is a veteran developer and programmer with over 25 years experience. She also blogs at Social Media Power and at Mobile Web Slinger. Deltina offers consulting for search, social, semantic, and mobile optimization at PLUMB Web Solutions, and teaches the graduate level social media certificate course for Drury University. You may also enjoy her video tutorials on YouTube. Contact her or leave a comment below.