Promoting RSS Feeds

Hi I don't know a great deal about RSS but i've added RSS to http://www.allbuyart.com/art-news.asp, hope you don't mind answering the following:

- Have I set the feed up correctly?
- How do I know if people are subscribing to the feed?
- How can I promote the feed (i.e. get other websites to add the feed to their sites)?

Cheers

Mike

well, i have some tips to share, hope it will help
RSS feeds can be summaries or they can be full text. I strongly encourage you to offer full text feeds rather than summary feeds. You might think, “Well, I want the reader to have to click into my site to get the complete article,” however, you are robbing the feed of valuable keyword-rich, link-containing content with a summary-only feed.
Most RSS feeds include just the last 10 items published. I would suggest having at least 20. The more content in your feed for RSS search engines to sink their teeth into, the more things you are putting in front of bloggers and customers.
I also encourage you to have multiple feeds on your site, not just one. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can't scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it's one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Each of your product categories could have its own RSS feed. Have a RSS feed of your best sellers, another for your clearance items, another for your new products, and another for your coupons and discounts. Someone may be only interested in one particular category of products that you sell; so give them the option of subscribing to an RSS feed of just those products.
good luck