A lot of you guys have started blogging and that's great. Blogging increases your exposure in many ways. First blogs turn up on search engines. Blogs make your sites larger which search engines like (makes you look more authoritative), and it gives your clients and agents something to read and a way to know more about who you are.

One thing about blogging is that it's important to get your blog out there. Depending on how your blogging, your blog might be publishing a RSS Feed that others can subscribe to. People can add your RSS Feed so that when they open up their Google, Yahoo, etc home page, your latest blog entry comes up. More importantly you can tell search engines about your blog and they'll start scanning your site.

I'm going to use two examples here. The first is Active Rain. Everyone who blogs on Active Rain is actually producing an RSS News Feed. You'll see the RSS image which is an orange box with several white arcs inside it when InterNACHI Message Board - Post New Threadyou're on a page with a feed. The location in Firefox is in your address bar, in other browsers its on the status bar at the bottom of the browser.

So on Active Rain, my blog PAGE is: http://activerain.com/blogs/homeinspectionsoftware . When you go to the page, find the orange feed button (by the way NACHI has one up top too), and right click on it and click view feed, or subscribe to feed (depends on the browser), and you get shown this: http://activerain.com/blogs/homeinspectionsoftware/rss
This link IS the feed. Now, what can you do with this feed? You can use Tip 11,12 below to add the feed in to your website. If you host your site with us, or possibly other hosts, you can add this feed to your News Feed area.

You can also submit your feed to RSS Feed directories which will then get your blogs on out the web. The biggest one of these is called technorati. You can create an account on technorati, then submit your blog feeds from differents places you post blogs (your website, active rain, etc) and then they'll be indexed. When people search for info you'll come up, people can comment on your blogs and more. There's many other directories, just do a search on the web for rss feed directory or news feed directory and get your feeds listed.

The second example I'm going to use is from Brian Doles site as he's done a lot of blogging on his own site for Atlanta Home Inspectors . If you visit the page you'll see his first blog with arrows to view more, but you'll also see the RSS feed button towards the bottom which is http://www.homeinspectoratlanta.com/blog/20/feed . That feed can now be taken and added to directories to increase exposure, increase rankings, and increase business.

Silly me...  I just found the rss feed for my AR blog site.  Even a blind pig sometimes ... well, never mind.  So I copy the bar across the top of the page, which includes the rss in it, onto my News Feed page exactly how?  Thanks Dom.

xxoo   The Blind Pig

oh...

P.s.  Since beginning the blogging, what, eight days (?), and apparently the RSS feed from the AR site, my site has moved from 3.2 million on Alexa to 2.4 million!  Doesn't sound like much, but that is a big jump!

Alexa installed.  I am looking at your number - 289,426.  Not bad!

Dominic,

I went to claim my blog at Technorati and they flagged it.  In other words, I was not able to set up my ActiveRain blog there.  It is as follows:

http://activerain.com/blogs/hspinnler

Any suggestions?

Thanks for the reply.  It's annoying since there's no specific reason provided for the rejection.