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 prin­ci­pal of Dal­ton Pub­lish­ing and Social Media Power and founder of the new social media Web­site ser­vice Plumb Social. Ms. Hay’s grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion in com­puter sci­ence, applied math­e­mat­ics and psy­chol­ogy led her nat­u­rally to social media con­sult­ing. Her crit­i­cally acclaimed book A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion can be found or requested any­where books are sold. Con­tact her or leave a com­ment below.