Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net has a simple but incredibly useful tip that you may not have even considered - subscribe to your own RSS feed!.

That might strike you as a bit of a strange thing to do. After all, you’re probably the one who wrote the posts in the first place… and it’s likely you see your web site more than any other person.

But RSS feeds are particularly sensitive. One small change and your feed can stop working completely. And you can end up losing most of your readers and never even noticing.

I’ve been blogging for years, yet that’s exactly what happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I had edited a Wordpress plugin - something completely unrelated to RSS, and hadn’t noticed that my feed had stopped working.

In the end, a friend let me know the RSS feed wasn’t working and I tracked down the problem fairly quickly. But had I been paying attention to my own feed, I would have noticed much sooner and not left my subscribers without any new posts for two days!

So today’s tip is to subscribe to your own RSS feed, then keep an eye on it!