It’s not a matter of copying from them, but you don’t want to miss a new trend and be left behind. It is necessary to know what’s going on in your field and you cannot afford not knowing what your visitors read when they go to your competiors. I the industry it’s called “Strategic foresight“.

And you may even find reasons to link to them or to extend one of their posts with your own rant.

Most blogging softwares give you the choice between RSS feeds providing the full contents of your posts or some sort of limited extract. While big time bloggers may wish to avoid loosing readers to their feed, most of us normal people should merely help our most technically-inclined visitors get the maximum from the RSS feed.

So, make sure that you publish full feeds. And if, later, you perceive some small loss, think about the fact that those visitors are the most influential ones (bringing a lot of other ones). Then, maybe, you will want to include a low level of advertising with the help of something like Feedburner and Google Adsense.

The feeds to your blog are a great way to keep visitors coming back to your site. Make sure that your RSS feed button is placed prominently: I suggest 2 strategic locations, one at the top of the editorial section, one in the footer of the page (they will be easy, but out of the way). To that, add another link/button just after the last words of each individual article (to catch the eye of the reader before he/she leaves).

In any case, always use the standard logo, since readers will be looking for it, and it catches the eye.

Also, make sure that the HTML headers of your pages point to your site RSS feed: It ensures that RSS-aware browsers like Opera or Firefox will find/recognize it.

Here is the example extracted from this real web site:

Easy to follow to get the following RSS orange icon in the address bar of your visitors browser.