Blogging Truth #3 - 10 Working Ways To Increase Number Of Your RSS Feed Subscribers
December 12, 2007 – 3:00 pmIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our Full RSS Feeds to get our posts without visiting us.
Here is 3rd post on blogging truths series I’ll explain the ways the great bloggers have more feed subscribers subscribed to their blog’s RSS Feeds. Actually these are put as blogging truths because I write what ever truth I’ve observed in most other blogs. Before starting to blog I was a good observer. Also frankly I’ve not applied all of these tips to my blog & would do after my ongoing college exams are over. In these 3 months of existence of this blog I’ve about 70 subscribers & you can checkout few reasons Why should you have a good number of RSS Feed Subscribers.
Content Is The King All of us should abide by the quote “content is the king” so unless you don’t put a lot of content to your blog at a faster rate nobody would like to subscribe to your feeds. Let’s see how can you get more subscribers by optimizing your post frequency & quality of posts too.
Highest Possible Blog Posting Frequency In The Growth Period : - An useful observation shows that when most bloggers start marketing their websites (i.e. start making them popular),they just post with a very high post frequency say minimum 5 posts/day so that all their visitors are converted to feed subscribers. Visitors see a lot of contents/posts coming regularly they start loving your blog if most of these contents are informative to them & after they find it difficult to catch up latest content regularly by visiting your blog daily most of them subscribe to feeds to get all updated contents in feed readers or inbox regularly. In this time when your post frequency is very high you can get a lot of subscribers with a condition that you promote well. And once you get a good number of feed subscribers you can relax a bit and dip posting frequency to 1 posts per day but high quality ones. All those who have subscribed would never retract/unsubscribe. Even one of my blog which is of-line since long has all the feed subscribers intact because i forgot to delete the feed from Feedburner account.
But how to maintain a high post frequency if you have other works/studies or are a part time blogger - Either you select a specific month when you are free for this blog growth period or when you have time write all the posts & set them to automatically post in future using time stamp method of wordpress. This second method is widely followed to have such high frequency. I’ve seen many bloggers doing it. Also some people outsource this task to writers which has proven profitable to them.
Summary - In the growth period of your blog i.e. the time when you plan to market to boost your traffic & feed readers, set a very high post frequency & after you get too many subscribers you can reduce posting frequency to normal extent.
Few Super Posts Can Make All Of Them Subscribe : - If you can have at few of the great authority posts/super posts then your blog would be so popular & generally people can’t leave without subscribing because they give a high authority to your blogging style & content. A super post can be a huge link bait or a completely unique type of thing say a tutorial which they would find no where else.Take for example a recent post on search engine optimization benefits of dofollow commenting made this blog rank atop Google search & become popular tough not that popular because it’s the beginning. Also this blog ranks high(1st now) in SEs(Google) for dofollow comment or related keywords. So a great well researched unique post may make your blog too popular. Also Andy beard has a brilliant post regarding dofollow plugins & dofollow blogs which made him too popular as that was a unique thing then. But never forget to submit such type of post to StumbleUpon & other social sites.
This may be considered as authority blogging style as mentioned by Court in his post to increase feed subscribers.I completely agree that you should never repeat & report posts by blog leaders like John Chow but write authority posts/unique posts. But reporting / criticizing holes in their posts may not give you too much authority but unique posts can help.
Feed Marketing (Reach Out): - If your feeds would be visible to all the blog readers of your niche in this internet then surely there is a chance of getting a big number of subscribers. Tough that’s impossible you never get a single feed reader if you don’t spread/promote your feed link to different users of diff. blogs,search engines, directories etc even tough you post nicely. So you need to market & promote your rss feed links.
Let me explain a few ways how you can market your rss feed.
- Submit To RSS Directories You should submit your RSS Feeds to all the good RSS Feed Directories because those are the place where subscribers & others look for feeds. Also doing so your feeds would be visible in search engines like Google. Checkout list of well known RSS Feed Directories - here & here. You can hire someone to submit your feeds there.
- Write Guest Posts When you write guest posts in other blogs of your niche, you would be allowed to place 3 links (usually 3) to your domains there never forget to have your RSS feed link & also ask users to subscribe using words like “subscribe to his RSS feeds to get posts like this regularly delivered to you” If you want to write a guest post here use the contact me link above & send me info & after that I’ll ask for content.(you can have a paragraph like this is a guest post by…& include 3linkss there). This part will appear on header of posts.
- Advertise In Other Blogs Yes you can advertise asking for users of other blogs to subscribe. This is handy because all the users of a blog are well versed with feed subscription. I recommend to choose the advertisements appear in footer of RSS feeds of other blogs because they will be seen by pro feed readers.
- Traffic More the traffic to your blog the more will be feed subscriber count. So try to drive a good traffic to the blog by doing SEO & using PPC like Adwords.(you can create a $50 adwords campaign free using $50 free adwords coupon)
Feed Subscription Links & Buttons:- If the eyes of users won’t catch the feed subscribe link/button then he might not be interested to subscribe because blog readers would have some other works & always want to finish reading & get away from your blog. So make the feed subscription button/icon readily visible either by placing in most visible place of the blog e.g. top of sidebar or use a catchy style button/image for RSS Feeds. Never forget to include either link for email subscription or the email subscription box.
Include a special feed subscription link with some text as message to readers to subscribe bellow every post by editing the template. Just after reading a satisfying post he/she would be looking to subscribe.
Regular Incentive For Feed Subscribers : - You can make some part of every post say footer part invisible to general readers so that only your subscribers can see them. And there include any content for them like a free download link worth some $$(give them e-books or others worth some dollars free as prize/bonus). As example all the feed subscribers of our blog get a link to download a ebook on getting viral traffic from Youtube worth $30 for free as incentive. Since long i’ve not changed the bonus which I’ll do after my ongoing college exams are over. Another incentive is to make certain posts only visible to feed readers & no one else.
Prizes To Feed Readers - Feed Subscriber Contest :- Starting a contest or prize giveaway to your feed subscribers has proven to be one of the best way to have 1000s of subscribers. I completely agree with the Boost Feed Subscribers By Giving Something Away concept of Blog About Your Blog (BAYB) because most of the blogs with 1000’s of feed readers used it successfully & running frequent contests phase by phase boosts the feed count. Generally prizes like cash or e-books, services, credits (TNX points) are given to one or more lucky feed subscribers in a lucky-draw basis. More is the worth of the prize in dollars it would get you higher number of feed subscribers.$500 cash is a enough to get 250-500 more feed readers but that may help you get 1000s if you promote successfully. You can change the $500 cash to a iPhone or something related to your niche. New gadgets/services/e-books as prize generally attracts more & more users.
Quality vs Quantity (What Content Do Feed Subscribers Like) :- Even tough I mentioned above to post highest quantity during the growth period of your blog but not writing quality is a defect & if your posts are not on par no one would like to subscribe. In the growth period you need to maintain a high frequency to start with but later onwards focus towards quality of posts & maintain a balance between quality & quantity. 3 high quality posts per week is too good & every one would anticipate well.
Lets see few things that a normal feed subscribers would like to read
- All tips & other things regarding your blog’s niche (you should cover all your categories)
- Latest news & event regarding your niche (also includes discounts/sales/promos at any related sites) Be the first to inform your subscribers.
- Tutorial & Technical infos.
- Reviews of all sort of services,new web sites (family friendly only),new type of service for example take my reviews of smorty.com , widgetbucks etc.
- Share all information you have among your feed readers. Never keep them in dark. Inform about new advertisement programs,make money programs etc.
- Also you may post any unrelated but valid news if you like.
- Post picnic pics., Youtube videos etc.
Do Your Users Know What Are Feeds! Educate Them About Benefits of Subscribing To Your Feeds: - You may get newbie users who are not well versed with blogging stuff so you should educate what is RSS Feed & what benefits would they get after subscribing to your feeds. Here including email subscription form is handy as most newbie subscribe via email.
Offer Full Feeds: - If you have full feeds for your blogs users would get entire post contents in feed reader regularly without visiting your blog again & again.So this helps the feed readers better read when they like. Full feeds would surely boost your subscriber count.By the way our RSS Feeds are also full feeds.(you may subscribe)
Show Current Subscriber Count : - Once you have a good number of subscribers say greater than 100 (also 50-70 will do) you should show that to your users using feedburner feed count chicklet. That would encourage others to subscribe because they see a good number of people are subscribed & why they would miss something that 100 people like. But if you show 15 subscribers that will discourage others to subscribe.
Subscriber Count Grows With Your Blogs Age : - As your blog become old & old you would have more traffic & feed subscribers. We can not do any thing regarding this context but goon writing.
You can checkout top wordpress plugins for optimizing your feeds & making any changes to them like adding a footer to every feeds.