Convert Your Visitors To Subscribers Now Or Die

February 18th, 2007 · 6 Comments

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email feed. Thanks for visiting!

There is still an intense focus on search engine results pages (”SERPs”) for all sites, including blogs, and not enough focus, in my opinion, on converting casual visitors (e.g., visitors from search engine referrals) into repeat and loyal RSS and/or email subscribers. I, for one, have become intensely focussed on converting casual visitors. I really believe that those websites with the most loyal subscribers/repeat customers will be the only ones left standing when the search engines decide that there isn’t enough room in their indices for everyone.

Only a fool can reasonably believe that things will continue the way they are now–that search engines will have eternal and unlimited capacity to index every web page ever to be created. At some point, if we haven’t already reached it, Google and friends will decide to only index certain pages and not index a much greater majority.

How are the search engines going to decide who gets on the first, second, third pages? After all, there are only 10 positions per page and billions of web pages to rank. While I don’t think they are doing it yet, at some point I believe the search engines will start to incorporate feed data into their ranking algorithms.

What could be a more natural vote of confidence in an authority website than to have thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of subscribers? RSS subscriber count is arguably even more robust than link quantity and Page Rank in defending against black-hat search engine optimization techniques such as link spamming bots, made-for-Adsense pages and page/directory generators.

Having a loyal roster of subscribers also makes your site less dependent or even completely independent of search engines. Your site is no longer at the whim of re-ranking algorithms that have devastated web businesses (e.g., the “Florida Update” of November 2003) in years past. After all, with a roster of subscribers, you can communicate directly with them.

Converting casual visitors into repeat subscribers will be a big focus of this blog and I invite you all to join me in this discussion.

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Tags: Opinion · SEO

6 responses so far ↓

1 Peter Flaschner // Feb 21, 2007 at 8:10 am

Philip - this is a very good point, and one I’ve been thinking about recently too. I recently made some changes to my site that seem to be having a pretty significant impact on the conversion rate.

In short, most of the traffic to my site comes directly to the home page. I made two minor changes to the home page that have made a big difference. First, I recorded a short video introducing the site and literally asking people to subscribe to the feed. To date, it’s been very effective.

Secondly, I added a subscribe by email feature (from FeedBurner) for those readers unfamiliar with RSS. I’ve been picking up approximately 1 new subscriber per day this way. Sure, 1 subscriber isn’t a lot, but at the end of the year I’d rather have 365 new subscribers than not!
2 Philip Liu // Feb 21, 2007 at 8:49 am

That’s a great point about feeds by email. I’m really surprised when I look at my stats and see how many visitors come to my site from their email accounts–at least a third and as much as half.

I guess a lot of people like getting email instead of subscribing with an RSS reader. I would have guessed the RSS reader would have been an easier choice for everyone. I guess I was wrong on that.

By the way, I liked your video! It was well done, especially the pointing to the ceiling and the floor!
3 Robert Irizarry // Mar 7, 2007 at 8:54 pm

It’s an interesting perspective on the future of ranking and I thank you for it. However, it does concerns me. Even now, RSS feeds represent a certain level of technical prowess that many readers still lack. While RSS may be appropriate for subjects like technology, SEO and marketing I can think of a few subjects where readers may not be up on its use. For example, my niche is related to guitar building and design and while I’m picking up email subscribers since making these available, my impression is that many readers still aren’t all that comfortable with RSS. I imagine that the same can be said for a great many other subjects and niches. I’d love to hear your take.
4 Philip Liu // Mar 7, 2007 at 11:57 pm

Hi Robert, welcome!

I think you don’t have anything to worry about. Here’s my take: Google and the other search engines will compare your site to the other guitar sites out there.

If RSS subscribers aren’t that many on the other sites in the same niche, you don’t have to worry about your RSS subscribers being low either. They’re not comparing you to CNN.com. They are ranking you with other guitar sites.

However, if you did have a lot of RSS subscribers and your competitors didn’t, then you would win! Vice-versa also applies, so watch out.
5 Robert Irizarry // Mar 10, 2007 at 2:30 pm

Philip - thanks for the feedback and that makes a lot of sense. I guess we all have a lot of work in order to prepare for this possible new twist in SEO.
6 santosh // Feb 23, 2008 at 5:53 pm

Now, that’s the million dollar question! How to really convert the visitor! You need SEO first, then a great landing page, great keywords, great content, great product, great sequential autoresponder and scripts, and then many other things without spending much time and money…. You need to “master” Google first.