Leaving comments on other blogs is a great way of promoting your own site.  Did you know that you can use comments to promote your RSS feed?

The next time you leave a comment on a blog, substitute your website address with your RSS Feed address.

The ‘Feeding Frenzy’

At any given instant, there are hundreds of robots or “crawlers” navigating the web in attempts of finding fresh blogging content. Feed readers and directories like Onfolio, Bloglines, and Google Feedfetcher are constantly caching the latest blog content.

Due to the nature of RSS, crawlers tend to search for RSS feeds instead of HTML pages - it’s not called Really Simple Syndication for nothing!  HTML content is heavily bloated containing extra bells and whistles (unnecessary as far as feed readers are concerned).

RSS caching offers your site some great potential.  Not only will you see an increase in your RSS subscriber count, but you potentially set yourself up to receive free links to your blog.

Crawlers = RSS Subscribers

Believe it or not, crawlers are still counted as RSS subscribers.  The RSS standard does not offer the opportunity to differentiate between human and computer readers.  That works to our advantage…

Remember, some readers are more inclined to subscribe to those blogs which are displaying a subscriber count of more than 200 subscribers.  If you’re new to the blogosphere, you soon learn that reaching the 200 mark is easier said than done.

This is where the bots help you out. Bots exaggerate and/or bloat your subscriber count, but let us not forget, they also spread the word in addition to providing links, new readers, and a higher PageRank.

Word of Warning

If are protective over your work and like to have strict control over who caches your content, I suggest you disregard my advice.  With that said, if your blog becomes popular, spiders will find you sooner rather than later.