How to increase subscribers to your Blog’s RSS Feed
Before going through the steps to increase subscribers to your Blog’s RSS Feed, let us first figure out why one needs to spend time increasing the subscriber base. Here are my reasons:
Now, don’t you dare turn around and ask me “Jammy, if you know so much about how to increase RSS Feed subscribers…why do you only have 850+ readers subscribed to your feed?”
Anyway, let us get down to business now. Step by step.
Readers subscribe to your RSS feed in two ways – by clicking on the RSS icon / Chicklet you have displayed on your blog or by using the auto-discovering icon the browsers show.
Ensure auto-discovery of your RSS feed
You definitely have no control over where the browser will show the auto-discovery icon but you can ensure that your RSS Feed is auto-discoverable for the browser. For this you will need to add this code on your entry pages:
The code that’s given above is known as the “Link tag” and needs to be added inside the Head tag of your page HTML. Obviously, you will be giving your RSS feed url and not mine. If your feed is an ATOM feed, you will need to change the type to “application/atom+xml”.
If like me, you have multiple feeds (I have one for comments, though nobody subscribes!) just add multiple link tags.
Once you have added this code, when you open your blog on Firefox you will see this icon on the address bar. (See Pic Below)
The above icon on Firefox means, your RSS feeds are auto-discoverable.
In Internet Explorer, your discoverable RSS feeds will be shown as in the pic below.
Position your RSS feed icon / chicklet at the TOP
Wouldn’t it be criminal if your reader is not able to find the RSS Feed icon where he/she has to click and subscribe?
Most blog design templates place the RSS links at the Footer or sometimes at the bottom of the sidebar. You should invest time and ensure the RSS Feed link/icon is right at the top. If need be, even go for a design template change – it is worth it.
It is even better if you create an account for yourself on Feedburner and use a Feed Chicklet which besides prompting the reader to click on it and subscribe to your RSS Feed also tells him/her many other readers have subscribed for your blog’s RSS Feed.
If your blog’s RSS Feed already has a lot of subscribers, it will trigger into motion an effect known as ‘Leader Feeder Effect.’ This means, many will subscribe to your feed and push the count higher, just because it has already been subscribed by many others.
On Ouchmytoe.com, the RSS Feed Chicklet is at the top – on par with the Blog’s title (see pic below).
If you have been promoting your non-Feedburner Blog feed all these days and have only recently converted (or are going to convert) to Feedburner and thus are worried about the implications, here is a nice Wordpress Press plugin called FeedSmith which will help you in two things:
Educate your readers about RSS
This is something ProBlogger had suggested long time back. Visitors to different blogs have different profiles. Blogs like http://labnol.blogspot.com attract techies, blogs like http://rupya.com attract Finance guys (some of whom could be techies too) and blogs like http://ouchmytoe.com attract everybody – from housewives to techies to finance guys to giggling girls from colleges.
If your site doesn’t attract techies, you should try and educate your readers about RSS and its benefits. ProBlogger does it elegantly on his sidebar (see accompanying pic), though I think visitors to his blog don’t need to be educated about RSS Feeds.
Cater to those that don’t believe in RSS Feeds
However hard you educate, some just want life simple and easy. And why not?
For such users, you need to create an account in Feedblitz or user Feedburner’s RSS in an e-mail service so that people can just enter their email ID and subscribe to your blog’s feed. Any update of yours will reach them in their email, and your RSS Feed count subscribers will continue to grow.
On Ouchmytoe.com, for example…you can choose your options from the Subscription page. If you are only interested in a mail alert, just enter your mail ID and be done with it (see pic below).
Persuade the new visitor to subscribe to your Blog’s RSS Feed
If you are a well SEO-ed site, 70% of your traffic will be from the search engines …which means every new visit from the search engine is a new person seeing your site. With so many potential regular readers at hand, you should try and capitalize on them first. If your blog is on Wordpress, you should straight away install a Wordpress plugin called “What Would Seth Godin Do”. This plugin is cookie based and if anybody new visits your blog (or Ouchmytoe.com for that matter), it displays him/her the message shown below. If the first time visitor likes your content, he/she will subscribe to it right away.
If your blog isn’t on Wordpress, but still gets up to 70% of its traffic from the search engines…just go ahead and ensure you have a similar message (as shown in pic below) at the end of every post. Your regular readers will develop a blind spot…but who cares as long as at least 1% of the new readers are converting?
Set up traps in your traffic heavy pages
If you have Google Analytics installed (the importance of Google Analytics is detailed here) you probably know which are your traffic heavy pages.
For example on Ouchmytoe.com, the top page is:
Funny wallpaper for download (Image search for ‘Funny Wallpaper’ throws up this post)
Since, I get a considerable amount of traffic on this page I have set up traps for the unsuspecting visitor. Visit the page and see them for yourself.
Identify your top five traffic heavy pages and place these three links at the bottom of the blog post:
If you do all of these, you can definitely more than double your subscribers in the first month itself. No guarantees though. They say internet is a bitch!
Next Article:
OK you have got a lot of subscribers for your Blog RSS Feed. Now what?
(This article will be written only if you express your genuine interest in the comments section)
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10 Comments
Ouch! My woe. Where are the comments. Never mind, the first dharma of blogging is to keep writing
Jammy,
What Would Seth Godin Do: You can have a message either after or before a post, not both right?
Suggest a plugin that can do both?
-Nikhil
Jammy, have you stopped this series looking at the comments? oh no!
I have a small question? Can one host a forum on a blog ?
Thanks, S
content is god…
Nikhil Narayanan: There is no plugin that will place it above the post & below the post…but you can do the tweak yourself. All you need to do is…place the code that pulls in the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin above and below the post.
Frankly though, it would be an overkill
Thanks for those tips to increase subscriptions.
I have been trying different things to increase subscribers.
One more way to attract them would be to have attractive ‘SUSBSCRIBE’ icons.
Many such attractive icons can be found for free on the internet.
thank for your help, I’ll try it on mi blog
now
Some great advice here. Thanks for sharing.
hey hi.. am a new reader to ur blog.. and the above information was very useful.. thankz for sharing
good job!!
Hi Guys
Great piece of advice but I’m having problems with me RSS feeds, especially in Chrome. Can a chrome user please go to Funny Videos and Funny Pictures and see if the same jumbled text appears..
Thx