Feedly can be an effective tool to help bring in repetitive traffic to a blog. Like many network options, it is rather simple to connect a blog to Feedly. It begins by visiting the Feedly Factory where you can create easy coding that gets copied and pasted into your blog. Just select the button that you want, include the URL of your feed, and then copy and embed the HTML code snipped that is received.
Make sure to check the button that appears on your blog to make sure that it opens your feed directly into Feedly. If you prefer a better button than what is available from the standard options, then a button kit is available for download so that a custom button can be created.
What Are the Benefits of Connecting to Feedly?
Connecting to Feedly gives your blog access to an entire community of potential readers who are interesting in your niche expertise. Your blog will receive automatic recommendations based on the subscriptions that Feedly users have created for themselves. Although the dashboard for the site is very cluttered from a visual perspective, the overall concept of consuming information from multiple sources at once works pretty well.
Feedly also helps people keep track of the content that they’ve already read so they don’t get frustrated with duplicated content. Using the full articles mode, users will see that the blog reader will automatically mark posts from your blog as read once they’ve consumed the information. If readers want to save it for another read later on, they can also mark it as being “unread” and your blog will gain additional hits.
Your blog also benefits from the potentially viral nature that has been incorporated into the Feedly experience. Users are integrated into Facebook and Twitter with their Feedly reader and can easily share content they loved with others. This gives your blog a unique way to reach out to fringe readers within your targeted demographics and build a more consistent audience.
Feedly also has an app that allows your blog readers to access content wherever they happen to be, even if your blog isn’t 100% optimized for mobile readership at this very moment.
What Are the Disadvantages of Feedly?
The one primary disadvantage of using Feedly is that your content might actually be on the site already. There are some free blogging platforms and RSS readers that come to this reader which contain content from your blog. This not only means you’ll be duplicating the content already on Feedly, but the content could be seen as being “scraped” by search engines. The incorporation of Feedly could create a duplication penalty, so check to see if your blog is available already first. If it is, then request that Feedly remove it.
The blogs that are available through Feedly are not available in alphabetical order. The system seems almost randomized and the search box attempts to auto-fill blog titles for readers who might be searching for you.
If users don’t mark the content they read through Feedly as favorite content, then there is a good chance that your blog won’t show up in their feed as a featured post. This means your unique visitor counts are somewhat dependent on each Feedly user following through with all of the tasks that are necessary to stay up-to-date with your content.
Blog comments that are made through Feedly don’t always show up on your blog as well. This may be because of the generalized settings of your blogging platform, but could be a coding issue from the user end as well. Any experience that is unexpected will be seen as negative for you blog, even if those circumstances are outside of your control.
Is Linking to Feedly a Good Idea?
Most blogs are going to benefit from the extra exposure and readership that Feedly is able to offer. The disadvantages of using this reader are generally outweighed by the benefits that can be provided. Although it isn’t an all-in-one solution and should be used with social sharing and bookmarking, it can provide a needed boost of traffic rather quickly.
Place your Feedly button in a prominent place next to your content or within it at some point. Make the connection process as simple as process. If all it takes is a single click for a subscription, then it will become a lot easier to build consistent traffic levels with each post. Keep the value of your content high and a Feedly connection could very well lead you to success.
