Most bloggers love their RSS readers. Not only that, but they also love to make new RSS readers. It is such a joy when you wake up one day and see that Feedburner number jumped to 200 or 300, right?
Those days are pretty rare, though, and most people seem to have a hard time getting even a small number of new RSS subscribers constantly.
Is there anything I can do about it? One way to efficiently get more RSS subscribers?
Sure there is. Many people have written about this topic before, but I wanted to give my opinion on the matter too. I wrote those 50 ideas were coming to my head, as briefly as possible. Enjoy.
1. Have a great icon RSS. People are lazy. You must always keep this fact in mind. If you are using a small RSS icon, visitors may have a problem finding it. Most of these will just give up after a couple of seconds, so make sure the RSS icon is large and easily recognizable.
2. Display the RSS icon above the fold. In addition to using a big RSS icon, you must ensure that you receive above the fold. This is where most blogs have one, and that is where people are accustomed to look for when they want to sign up, so go with the flow.
3. Display the RSS icon on each page of your blog. When I started blogging I have made this mistake. Only my homepage used to have an RSS icon .... As soon as I added to every single page of the blog, the number of subscribers jumped.
4. Use words. Depending on the audience, using only the RSS icon may not be effective. If you are not tech savvy, they may not know what that little orange thing is. In these cases, you can write a short message explaining that the subscription will enable them to keep up to date with your posts and so on.
5. Write a post to ask people to sign up. Ever heard the saying "Ask and you will receive"? This principle works on most areas of our lives. Blogging is no exception. If you want people to subscribe to your feed, ask them! Write a post about it, give them some reasons and you will see how they respond.
6. Use the plugin FeedSmith. Unless you hand code a lot of redirects on your blog, readers will still be able to subscribe to different RSS feeds provided by WordPress. This plugin will make sure that all of your subscribers will be forwarded to the Feedburner feed, so that you can keep track of them and check how your feed is formatted.
7. Offer email subscriptions. Like it or not, only a small percentage of Internet users know about or use RSS feed. Studies confirm that this number is lower than 10% all over the world. Why do you want to lose the other 90% of the pie? If you use Feedburner, you just go on the "Publicize" to activate your e-mail subscriptions.
8. Use an application form e-mail. For most bloggers, an application form will convert better than a simple email link "Subscribe by email". This is because Internet users are accustomed to seeing those shapes around, and typing in your e-mail address is not intuitive enough. The upper part of the sidebar is a good place to position one.
9. Encourage readers to sign up at the bottom of each post. In addition to having the RSS icon and email subscription form above the fold, it is also important to put them in every single post. Why? Why do people end up immediately after reading your articles, you are looking for something to do next, and subscribing to your blog is a good option. In addition, if the item you just read was really good, will be on the right mentality to subscribe and receive most of your articles in the future.
10. As few steps as possible. People are lazy (I know I mentioned it before, but it is worthwhile to re-emphasize). The minimum number of steps required for them to subscribe to your blog, the better. If you can reduce the number of clicks needed, so do it!
11. Use the icons for subscription offer on the most popular RSS readers. One practical thing that you can do to reduce the number of steps required to subscribe to the feed is to use an RSS reader specific icons (for example, "Add to Google Reader" or "Subscribe in Bloglines"). Just parse RSS readers more common among your subscribers and add those icons to the sidebar.
12. Having clear focus on your blog. If you write about 10 different topics, it will be difficult to get people to subscribe to your blog. Could you write your articles on technology, but would hate to get those cleaning the house .... Having a clear focus is one of the most effective ways to attract subscribers.
13. Publish new posts frequently and consistently. Frequently intend to publish many posts a week or even a day, and always intend to stick with that frequency religiously. These two factors communicate to visitors that your blog is active, and that by subscribing to the RSS feed might be the best way to keep up to date with it indeed.
14. Do not overdo it. When writing many posts per week or per day, it is usually a good thing, there is a limit to it. Many people report that if a certain blog starts overwhelming them with dozens of new places daily, they will just unsubscribe. The exceptions to this rule are blogs in niches fast pace as gadget news.
15. Write valuable content. The only people to subscribe to your RSS feed if there is any value that may result from it. This value may come from several different factors depending on your audience: it can come from the latest news that you offer, deep analysis that you write, or the funny things you say and so on, but there must be.
16. Write unique content. The content may be valuable, but if people can not find anywhere else, they will have no reason to subscribe to your RSS feed. For example, suppose you copy all of the post of a popular blog on your niche, say Lifehacker. The content would still be valid, but it would not be unique, and most people would subscribe to the original source.
17. Do not ramble or go off topic. If your blog has a clear goal, as we suggested earlier, readers will subscribe for a very specific reason. If you then start to write about off topic stuff, it will annoy a large part of them. Suffice it to say that a bad post or stranger is worse than no message at all, since it might make some of your readers actually unsubscribe.
18. Use the link for the RSS feed by commenting on other blogs. Many bloggers have a habit of commenting on other people's blogs. Some do it simply to join the conversation. Others because they want to promote their blogs and generate some traffic. In both cases, you can leave your RSS feed link instead of the site to encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed (if you use Feedburner, they will be able to see your content anyway).
19. Run a contest. The competitions are very popular on the blogosphere. If you have a blog a little 'popular, in fact, it is not difficult to increase some premiums and create one. Taking subscribe to your RSS feed obligation to participate, you could quickly increase the number of subscribers you have. If you want to control who is going to take this action, use the email subscription.
20. Offer random prizes to your subscribers. If you're not a fan of contests and prizes, you can always entice people to subscribe to your RSS feed, giving random prizes. For example, if some company comes close to donate some free copies of its product, it could in turn donate it to your subscribers
21. Write guest posts. Guest posts are a very effective technique to generate both brand awareness and traffic. If you guest blog on a popular blog on your same niche, there's also a good chance that a good percentage of this incoming traffic will end up subscribing to your feed.
22. Welcome to new readers. Every time you manage to land a guest post on a very popular blog, or when you get sued on a website or big mainstream site, it might be a good idea to write a post specifically to accommodate those readers. Use that post to describe your blog briefly, to talk a bit 'about you, and to encourage them to subscribe.
23. Go on popular social bookmarking sites. Some say that the quality of traffic from social bookmarking sites (such as Digg and StumbleUpon) is very low. This is true in part because the visitors rarely click on anything on your page (including the link subscribe). Due to the huge amount of traffic that you can get on these sites, however, even a very small conversion rate could easily mean 200 or 300 new subscribers in just 24 hours.
24. Explain to your readers what is RSS. As we mentioned before, it is estimated that less than 10% of people know about or use RSS feed. You can do something about this? Sure you can! Write a post to teach your readers what RSS is, he is good, and how they can start using it. It works especially well on blogs that do not have a tech-savvy audience.
25. Have a special page "Sign up" with all the information and links there. In addition to writing a post specifically to teach your readers about RSS, you can also create a special page "Sign up" on your blog where you explain briefly how to use RSS feeds, and put all the links of subscription, badges, and forms of mail. You can then create a link to that page from the sidebar, with a link that would say "Subscription Options" or "how to apply".
26. Create a landing page on your blog to convert visitors into subscribers. If you plan to buy some banners or other type of advertising, you are strongly advised to create a landing page to get the visitors on the best possible way. Use this page to describe your blog to highlight the best content, and to ask them to sign up. When you do guest blogging, you can use this page as a link right as well.
27. Send traffic to that page using PPC. Pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords is one of the cheapest ways to send targeted traffic to your site. Depending on the quality score you get (this is calculated from the AdWords side), you might start getting visitors from $ 0.01 each. That is, with $ 100, you can send up to 10,000 visitors to your landing page. With a conversion rate of 1%, that would mean 100 new subscribers.
28. Write an ebook and ask people to sign up to download. Whether you like it or not, books are a part of internet. Many people write them, many others to download and read. If the content and promotion are well structured, there are thousands of people who want to read yours. What then if you require people to register before you can download? This would bring a lot of new subscribers devil.
29. Start a newsletter with Aweber. An email newsletter can be used to integrate the content most blogs. It sends a weekly email to those subscribers with your opinions of the experts in your niche, with some extra tips, tools and so on. If you then choose Aweber for your newsletter, you can use the "Blog Broadcast" function to turn those newsletter subscribers in RSS readers too (they will get a weekly summary from your feed).
30. Offer a full feed. If your goal is to have the largest number of students possible, thus offering a full RSS feed is the only way to go. Many people are annoyed by partial feed, and although this does not discourage them from sign at first, might make them unsubscribe shortly after.
31. Clutter your website with ads. This point is a funny / strange addition to the list, and I do not recommend anyone to do it. I did not invent this, though, and I've seen some people talk about it in the past. The idea is simple: if you clutter your website with a lot of flashy ads and intrusive, but offer higher quality content, in any case, some people may have a desire to subscribe to your RSS feed just to avoid clutter on the site. ...
32. Do not clutter your RSS feeds with ads. Just as too many ads on your site can scare visitors away, too many ads or badges or link to your RSS feed can be unsubscribe. Keep your RSS feeds as clean as possible. This is what people expect to have when they subscribe to an XML file, after all.
33. Use social proof. Ever walked into a restaurant because the place was full of people, or do not get why it was empty? This is social proof in action. If you have a good number of RSS subscribers already (I would say more than 500), you can display on your website using the Feedburner feed count widget. This could motivate people to give your RSS feed it a shot.
34. Offer breaking news. RSS feeds are one of the most effective ways to keep up with sites that are updated frequently with information that interest you. If you can break some news, or to provide frequent updates on popular topics (such as alerts bag), people would have a strong motivation to sign up.
35. Mention that subscribe to your blog is free. It may seem strange, but many people actually get confused with the terminology "Subscribe". I received dozens of e-mails over the past year from people who wanted to know if there was any cost associated with subscribing to my RSS feed! To avoid any confusion, it might be worth mentioning that subscribe to your blog is free, so instead of "Subscribe to my RSS feed" you could use "Get our updates free of charge."
36. Use the pop-up to encourage subscription to the newsletter. Darren was able to increase its conversion rate by over 700% through pop-ups. Sure, they're pushy, but they work like nothing else. If you already have an established and loyal following, perhaps using this technique would not be bad traffic. We also did a recent survey on the subject.
37. Please use an animated icon RSS feed to get attention. Animated ads get a much higher click-through rate, because they move around and attract people's attention. You can use the same technique with your RSS feed icon, and make an animated GIF to draw the attention of visitors.
38. Use the directory power. Do not expect to receive hundreds of new subscribers, using this technique, but every little bit helps right? Some people use the feed directory to find new content and RSS feeds to subscribe to, so if you have some free time you can submit yours on those sites. Here is a list of almost 20 feed directories.
39. Email first time commentators encouraging them to subscribe. Sending a personal email to your first time commentators is a kind gesture, and many will thank you for it. You can use this opportunity to remind them that they can stay up to date with your blog via the RSS feed. There are also a plugin called Comment Relish can automate this process, even if it becomes less personal.
40. Make sure that the auto-detection function of supply is working. Most modern browsers have a function of self-discovery that has sought to identify whether the site you are visiting is a valid RSS feed. If they do, the browser will present a small RSS icon on the right side of the address bar. So make sure that your able to see the icon while visiting your blog, and click on it to see if your RSS feeds pop. In WordPress, you can change this part of the header.php file.
41. Offer a comments feed. If you have an active community of readers who often engage in discussions on the comments section of your blog, you might consider offering an RSS feed of the comments.
42. Category of supply powers. If you have many categories on your blog, you could offer an RSS feed for each of them individually. This would allow visitors who are only interested in specific topics to subscribe to them and not to the whole blog. At the same time, this granularity could increase the total number of RSS subscribers you have.
43. Perform regular checks on your feed. It is not uncommon to find blogs around the web with a broken RSS feed. Click on your feed occasionally to make sure the link is working, the power is in operation, and that it is a valid XML document.
44. Recover email subscribers unverified. You will notice that a good percentage of your subscribers e-mail will never confirm their subscription. Some are lazy, some just do not understand the process. This percentage can be increased up to 30%, so you could end up losing a lot of potential subscribers there. Fortunately, you can send your subscribers unverified and remind them of the problem. It works for some.
45. Leverage existing public or a blog. If you already have a blog, newsletter, forum, and so on popular Twitter account, you could leverage that presence to get new subscribers. The people who already follow you somewhere will have a higher chance of signing new blog to you, especially if they like your work or person.
46. Use the promotion of cross feed. Find some related blogs that have a similar RSS subscriber base, and propose the blogger to use a cross promotion deal of feed. That is, it promotes your blog on your feed footer, and promotes your blog on your feed footer.
47. Use testimonials on the "Subscribe". You have probably seen as most of the sales pages of products for the testimony of web usage, right? This is because a personal recommendation from a third goes a long way in convincing a prospect. If this is the case, why not use testimonials to get people to subscribe to your RSS feed?
48. Get friends to recommend your site and RSS feeds on their blog. Even harder to have a testimonial on the "Subscribe" is to have someone that you may want on your blog or website. Many of his readers will pay attention to the message and head over to your blog to see what the fuzz is about.
49. Do something funny or weird asking people to sign up. People love blogs with a sense of humor. If you can make people laugh, you took them halfway through subscription. A few months ago I published theHuge RSS Icon Experiment, and gained 300 new subscribers in 3 days.
50. Began a long series so people subscribe to keep updated with it. Long series of structured and places are not just magnets traffic, but also RSS readers magnets. If a casual visitor will discover that you are publishing a series on a topic that interests you on, think about subscribing in order not to lose the series of future posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks