If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email feed. Thanks for visiting!
Darren posted a great article on how to increase your blog’s RSS subscribers. In a nutshell (you should read the entire post over at Darren’s blog) they are:
- Promote your feed prominently (i.e., upfront and above the fold)
- Promote your feed with an image (e.g., using all those badges for the various readers out there like Bloglines)
- Use multiple methods to promote your feed (e.g., provide an email newsletter for those who can’t or refuse to subscribe by RSS)
- Educate your readers on how to use RSS (for those who don’t understand)
- Use RSS to email services that increase your RSS count as well as providing email to those who can’t or won’t view news through a newsreader
- Promote your feed through off-blog communications (e.g., in forum signature blocks)
- Make sure your feed is auto-discoverable by feedreaders
- Use full feeds (instead of snippets, summaries or excerpts)
- Give your readers a bonus only available through the RSS feed
- Promote your feed at key entry points (e.g., your blog’s most popular pages)
- Run an ad campaign
In addition, in the blog comments a number of readers contributed the following:
- Smart design placements will increase readership [Thanks Peter]
- Participating in blog discussions and using the name link to refer to your RSS feed [Thanks Maki]
- Participating in blog communities like MyBlogLog [Thanks again Maki!]
- Giving subscribers access to exclusive posts not available to the general blog readership [Thanks Jim]
And let me add one more:
- Don’t split your feeds among multiple RSS variations such as atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0–instead, go to Feedburner and “burn” all your feeds into a universal Feedburner feed. That way, you’ll be able to consolidate and track your readership from one RSS feed.
Why should you care about RSS readership besides having more traffic?
Answer: If you want to monetize your blog sometime in the future, you’ll have to provide advertisers some concrete numbers about visitors and subscribers for them to pay the big bucks. For example, ReviewMe uses RSS readership level to determine the price advertisers have to pay to have a review done on your blog.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
collis 02.28.07 at 10:47 pm
This is a bit of a silly addition to your list, but it helps to make sure all your feeds are through feedburner if you are planning on measuring them.
Yesterday I found out that some of my feed URLs were the Feedburner one and some were just the basic WordPress one, by consolidating them (with a WP Plugin) my subscriber base doubled overnight (or at least my measurements did!).