Get More RSS Feed Subscribers!

Monday, August 27th, 2007 by Matt

RSS subscribers = repeat readers.

Whether they visit your actual blog every day, or just read your posts in their feed reader, RSS subscribers are an invaluable asset. They’re likely to be frequent commentors, and they’re most certainly loyal readers who will come back frequently. How do you make the numbers on your subscriber count go up?

Use full feeds. A lot of RSS-users prefer them, so they can read your posts quicker and not have to wait for your pages to load. I used to use summary feeds, but I recently switched and have seen an increase in subscribers (partly due to a StumbleUpon traffic spike, but I imagine they don’t mind the full feeds). You should be aware that Wordpress 2.1 and above cuts-off your feed content anywhere you place a <!–more–> tag. You can stop that “feature” by using the Full Text Feed plugin. If you don’t want to decide whether you should use full content feeds or not (there are plenty of arguements either way), then you could try out the DualFeeds plugin, which allows you to offer both full and summary feeds.
Place your RSS link prominently. You want your feed to be noticed. Put it above the fold if you can, and make sure it’s pretty visible, as you can see on this blog’s sidebar, as well as ProBlogger’s and Smashing Magazine’s.
Offer email subscriptions. Not everyone uses RSS. Luckily, FeedBurner has a service that allows you to offer email subscriptions to your feed. Subscribers to email updates will receive one email per day, but only on days that you post. It works well.
Put a subscription link at the bottoms of your posts. You have your RSS link above the fold, but don’t forget this useful trick! Okay, people are coming in from Digg, StumbleUpon, Google, and other traffic sources. They read down through your article. When they get to the bottom, they should optimally be offered a chance to subscribe to your feed. You’d be surprised how much your subscriber count can increase by doing this. Examples (scroll to bottoms of posts): Webmaster-Source, ProBlogger, Pro Blog Design.
Don’t forget AutoDiscovery! Make sure that you have a <link> tag (pointing to your feed) in your blog’s <head>. Some people prefer to use their browser’s AutoDiscovery feature to subscribe to feeds.
Have a “Subscribe” page. Add a page to your blog that offers subscription buttons, and explains what RSS is. Can’t explain RSS? Copyblogger.com lets you copy their “What the Heck is RSS?” page onto your blog. Then there’s a great video tutorial I found on ProBlogger.

Tags:

Michael from Pro Blog Design
12:21 pm on August 27th, 2007

Good advice Matthew! The subscribe page is one that I should look into adding on Pro Blog Design.

*Adds to to-do list*

I’m not sure if I should thank you, or hate you for that.

BeachBum
12:28 pm on August 27th, 2007

I did not know about the autodiscovery tip. Thanks for the info.

BeachBum

Matt
12:46 pm on August 27th, 2007

The default Wordpress theme has the autodiscovery link built-in, as do a lot of other prefab themes. If you make your own, though, then you may not have it (and would be advised to add it).

Marco
5:59 pm on August 27th, 2007

thanks for the hint, I just enabled the full feed part.

About that subscription page…I’m using AddThis.com instead. It is in my opinion really handy because it covers more RSS feed readers than you know…or at least as I knew before adding this neat button to my blog.

I believe they also update their list every now and then…not sure though.

Matt
6:37 pm on August 27th, 2007

AddThis.com generally works well, but it’s still a good idea to include a link to somewhere that RSS is. I like this video: http://www.videojug.com/film/rss-in-plain-english

Marco
11:16 am on August 28th, 2007

I also have a page on my blog where the RSS feature is describe. I now also added the video, for those being too lazy to read

Matt
8:34 am on August 29th, 2007

That video is great. Too bad it’s not on MetaCafe or Revver. The guy who made it would be making some money by now then.

Jake - MoreMerchant.com
11:03 am on August 31st, 2007

Lately I have been focusing more and more on my RSS subscribers or I suppose building this base up. I hate seen a nice jump by using many of the tips you have posted here.

James Mann
8:02 am on September 3rd, 2007

I thank for this post as RSS can be a tad confusing. Even though I have RSS set up on my blogs I really wasn’t sure how to explain it to my readers but now I do.

Excellent post and thanks

Matt
8:59 am on September 3rd, 2007

Even though I’m pretty experienced with RSS (I used to hand-code it), I still have a hard time explaining it to users. That video I found is the best way I’ve found to explain it to RSS newbies.