How To Increase Your RSS Subscribers

Jan 24, 2007

Your RSS subscribers are the best indication of how popular your blog is. If your visitors like what you publish, then they obviously want to keep track of what you publish next. And getting email notifications is quite bothersome. Subscribing to RSS feeds is the most popular way of reading multiple blogs in an organized manner. For instance, in my Bloglines account I have over 120 blog RSS subscriptions.

Providing RSS feeds is a great way of not only getting repeat traffic, but also gauging the success of your blog. The more people subscribe to your RSS feeds, the greater is the popularity your blog enjoys.

But how do you encourage more people to subscribe to your RSS feed?

Display your RSS-subscription link prominently.
Publish content worth subscribing to.

In fact you don’t have to do something extraordinarily special to increase your RSS subscriptions: just publish great posts, consistently.

Leon Ho has published a blog post titled 0 to 12,000 RSS Subscribers: Ways to Attract More Subscriptions. The post refers to the success of Lifehack that gained 12,000 RSS subscribers in 1.5 years. The broad points Leon has discussed are:

Provide full feeds instead of partial feeds. I’m not sure how it matters if you publish great content — people will read it even if they have to orchestrate an extra click — but it has been a general experience that subscriptions do increase when you start providing full feeds. As a side note, how do you provide full feeds? I explored my Feedburner account but somehow couldn’t figure it out.
Make it easy to subscribe. As I mentioned above, prominently display the RSS subscription link on your blog. Don’t harass your visitors by such a Brobdingnagian button but make it easy to find the link or the button.
Content is still the content. Quality content is the biggest reason why people will subscribe to your RSS feed.

Technorati Tags: rss feeds, rss subscriptions, rss subscribers