One of the things that I know concerns all blog writing enthusiasts is how to get your blog out there. Feeds, sometimes known as RSS feeds, sometimes known as Atom Feeds describe software that and enable other systems to read your posts. In this way your posts can be read more conveniently by others – that may be more useful to potential readers and may help you extend your reach – so more readers will or could read your blog and comment.

The main suppliers of blog software provide a variety of feeds and so you will find the feeds themselves as standard. All someone has to do is enter your particular feed address into their system or browser to read your posts where they wish.

You can read feeds directly in browsers, some such as Safari for Apple detect the feed and present the feed in a very user friendly way, specifically designed for reading feeds. There is also a category of software dedicated to reading Feeds, called Readers, and another, feed enhancers. Feed enhancers add more services, information and enrich your feed for your and your readers benefit.

One well known reader is the Google Reader and this is accessed through your normal Google Account center. The value of these are that you can enter a number of feeds that you want to read and your Reader will display them all for you simultaneously. This saves you the trouble of entering them one at a time each time you want to view them. Of course you could just book mark your favourite blogs. Readers offer more though. They tend to identify which posts you have read and which are new, and they will often provide a feed search facility – another useful, added value feature of readers.

You can also choose from bloglines.com, newsgator.com and My Yahoo are also good places to find Feed Readers.

Feedburner.com is one of the long established feed enhancers. Feedburner can help you group your feeds, making multiple feeds easy to manage and provides visitor data, so you can view analytics on who has read what – which is very useful to tuning into user needs – and giving your readers more of what they want. Feedburner will also enhance your feed. Especially now as it is owned by Google, it can include Google Adwords advertising in the feed, and help to provide an income through blogging. Using Feedburner you can also promote your feeds and fix your feeds if something goes wrong.

All in all feeds provide an important service to blogs in promoting your posts around the net and potentially allow you to generate an income and learn more about how your feeds are used.