10 Ways to Increase your RSS Subscribers
How to increase your RSS subscriber numbers
Your RSS readers are your loyal readers. The readers who want to make sure they don’t miss your posts. They want the information you provide. They want it fed to them regularly and easily read through their feed reader . How do you increase your RSS subscriber count?
1) First you have to have good blog content, something the reader wants to read regularly. Your blog needs to have a definite focus. There are few blogs that are successful that have a wide variety of topics included in the blog. Most successful bloggers fine tune the subject of their blog. Readers come for that specific topic. Stick to that topic, with few or no off topic posts.
2) Post regularly. If the reader glances at your blog and sees your last post was a week and a half ago…or a month ago, why would they bother to subscribe?
3) Make sure you have a good sized orange RSS button on your site, obvious, and above the fold. Include some kind of text that says “click here to subscribe”. Not all readers are as tech savvy as bloggers. Make things easy for them. There are other colors you can make the button, but orange is the universally known color. You will have to decide if it’s better to match your site color, or keep it the universal orange color. (My opinion is the well known orange icon is best)
4) Put a link to your RSS feed at the end of your posts. When a reader gets done reading, this is a normal reaction time to think “Hey, I’ll subscribe. I liked this content.”
5) Offer RSS subscriptions by email. Feedburner provides you an easy way to do this. (are you using Feedburner for your feeds? I’ll discuss this in a future post). Not all readers know what a feed reader is, nor are they comfortable using one, but they will be familiar with email. Set up an easy way for them to subscribe to your new posts by email.
6) Create good headlines for your posts to encourage a reader to click on a link to your site. You need to get them to your site before you can get them to subscribe. Sometimes all you have is the title of your post to attract new readers. Use it well. (yes, I’ll do another article on writing titles of your posts).
7) Encourage new readers to subscribe. The What would Seth Godin Do plugin can be used in Wordpress. It will display a message to new visitors to your site the first few times they visit. You can edit the text, and customize the message to ask your viewers if they want to subscribe to your feed. One thing I see is this plugin being used at the beginning of posts. If it’s placed at the beginning of the post, there’s a good chance the excerpt of your post that shows up in a search engine will be the message from your plugin, instead of a hooky beginning to your post. So if you use this plugin, make sure to place it at the end of your posts.
8) Be active on forums or email lists, providing help to people who need it. If people on the forum get to know you, and see you as an authority on your topic, they are more likely to visit your blog and subscribe to your RSS feed. If the forum or email list allows you to have links with your signature, consider adding the link to your RSS feed as well as your website URL.
9) Write a post on your blog about what is RSS. Why it’s a convenience for your readers. In this post I describe what an RSS feed is and how to set up Google Reader.
10) Offer full feeds. This means your whole post is served up in your feed. It can annoy the readers of your feed if they have to click over to your site to read the full post. In Wordpress, if you use the more tag in your post, only the part of your post before the more tag will be fed to your feed. You can get around this by using the Full Text Feed plugin. This plugin will force your full post to be fed to your feed, even if you’ve used the more tag in your post.
The most important of all of these is number one. Blog content. Keep it focused. Keep it fresh. Post regularly. Make sure your content provides value to the reader.
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