Just the FAQs loves good tools that make life easier. On Social Media Examiner, Elijah Young posts Three Free Social Monitoring Tools Worth Exploration

There are over 22 million folks who surf the internet on a mobile device. The folks at Duct Tape Marketing ask Is Your Blog iPad Worthy? They even give you a link that allows you to see how your site looks on an iPad.

One of the best things you can include on your blog to increase site traffic is an opt-in list. Marketing stats show that you can effectively increase the sign up rate by offering a free giveaway to subscribers; however, doing so may return unexpected and alarming results in the short-term. Read Dave’s guest post on DailyBlogTips about How a Subscriber Incentive Affected My Blog so you don’t panic at the mixed outcome.

Marketing research trends show that over 22 million people a day are receiving info from the Internet while on the go via their mobile devices. That includes traditional info from website and blog posts, as well as a growing preference for info delivered by video and podcast. So, how do you format your content to look good on both a laptop screen and a cell phone? Easy, you use RSS feeds.

Although the term RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication, it is also used as a generic term for the feed from any website, regardless of format. A feed allows you to conveniently distribute content from your site, including blog posts, podcasts, and videos, to a variety of sources.

Feeds come in two main formats

The two most popular formats are Atom and RSS. Although the RSS format came first, Google embraced its alternative, Atom, in an attempt to set a worldwide standard. However, RSS rallied back with what are known as enclosures, which led directly to podcasting.

Today, RSS feeds are leading the way by offering reformatting on the fly, dependant on the app the viewer is using to read the feed, and the type of media the feed contains. For instance, an RSS feed can reformat a blog post to load quickly and look good on a cell phone, or it could apply the specific enclosures necessary for a podcast listing on iTunes.

To make a feed from your site available for subscription or syndication, you will want to use a feed service like FeedBurner, which offers multiple options for formatting, publicizing, and even monetizing your feed.

Here’s the Rub

The FeedBurner option for reformatting your feed on the fly to suit the reader’s app is called SmartFeed. The option for including the enclosures for a podcast is called SmartCast. If you use SmartCast, the SmartFeed conversion service is nullified and your feeds can only be delivered in RSS 2.0 format.

Here are the Fixes

Most mobile device users install their own app to convert any standard RSS 2.0 feed into something they can read on their device. On the other side of the server, some top blog owners use a paid feed service like FeedBlitz that, among other options, converts a traditional blog into a mobile-friendly feed. Some also offer a separate mobile version of their blog, which is mainly a stripped-down, text-only version of their original posts.

If your site is one that appeals to viewers using mobile devices, you may want to consider a site makeover. If you are on WordPress, you can use a plugin called WordPress Mobile Pack that will suggest the necessary theme changes, or totally new themes, that are mobile-friendly. It also offers mobile analytics and more. Another plugin called MobilePress does much the same thing.

What’s Coming Next

When Google purchased FeedBurner, it improved the service significantly by adding things like podcast enclosures optimized for iTunes, but has added very little else in the last couple of years. What they have added outside of FeedBurner is a Google Mobile Feed Reader app to make up the difference, and that was mainly due to the popularity of Google Maps. In 2009, Google launched a protocol called PubSubHubbub, which instantly notifies your RSS feed subscribers that you’ve made a post. Unfortunately, it’s only gained minimum support.

Perhaps Google will eventually catch on to the notion that if subscribers desire that sort of instant access to info, they are probably viewing it on a mobile device. Maybe then they will update the FeedBurner service to include options for reformatting posts, podcasts, and videos in a ways that don’t conflict with each other.

A great way to increase interest and traffic is with an online survey that you advertise through social media. You can include them directly in your blog, in both posts and in your sidebar. You can do the same thing with polls. On Social Media Examiner, Amy Porterfield shows you How to Supercharge Your Social Media Presence With Online Surveys

Every marketing guru tells you to keep track of your stats, or metrics on your site. But what do all of those graphs and number mean? On UX Booth, Andrew Maier, provides the Complete Beginner’s Guide to Web Analytics and Measurement

Marketing stats confirm that you only have a few seconds to engage your site visitors before they click to go elsewhere. One sure fire way to loose your readers is with a slow-loading site. On DailyBlogTips, Daniel Scocco gives you Another Cool Tool To Optimize Your Site Loading Speed