Five Ways to Get Read

Michael Gartenberg | November 30, 2006, 05:22 PM

One of the things I did when I was taking some time off was clean up my RSS feeds. Deleted a lot of stuff and put thing back to a more manageable and more enlightening set of content. Some of my guidelines.

1. I want original stuff. If all you do is link to Engadget or post vendor press releases without any value on top of it, you’re just taking up space in my aggregator. It’s going to be hard to get my attention if you’re doing a gadget blog right now, since Peter, Ryan and company do it really well. (doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done better) But a real good blog devoted only to QWERTY Smartphones, however, is something I’d subscribe to in a minute. Find your passion and start writing.

2. In general, calling me a clueless idiot doesn’t usually work well for endearing me to read you (much less link to you.) Feel free to argue any point I make without getting personal. I may well indeed be a clueless idiot, BTW.

3. Best way of anyone finding out about you is if you’re consistently interesting. Eventually you will get noticed. I’d read JK on the Run a few times over the years but it’s gotten to the point where I’d keep clicking to read something on the site that I subscribed. It’s a great mobile site by the way.

4. Post early and Often. If you’re not writing on a regular basis, I’ve pretty much dropped you. Writing is hard, everyone in the world has a blog post or two in them. I try to spend at least one hour each day just writing. It might be for a report, column blog post or whatever. It’s a great exercise and the best way to get over writers block is to just sit down and write.

5. The NY Times and CNET can get away with not having full texts in their feeds. Most other folks can’t. I almost never read stuff that isn’t coming into my RSS flow and often, directly clicking into a site doesn’t work well from a mobile device. I don’t care if there are ads in the feed or not.