I’ve always said that bloggers are addicted to their statistics and anyone I’ve ever talked to has confirmed this. One of my favourite statistics to look at is the number of subscribers to my feed. This number basically tells me how many people are reading my blog and how many people enjoy it.
A lot of people focus on the total number of visitors that they get to their blog but I feel that the number of feed subscribers is more important. It’s more important because people that subscribe to your feed will be constant readers. They’re the people that will return again and again. They’re the people that you want to write for and keep happy.
A challenge that I often have is increasing the number of subscribers that I have. I’ve compiled a list of tips that have helped me increase my numbers over the past few weeks.
Write Great Content
Most people would say that writing great content should be done anyways and I totally agree. The problem is that a lot of people don’t do this. If you’re just releasing filler posts people aren’t going to subscribe. They don’t care that you can regurgitate information thats already been written around the web.
Writing unique content is the number one way to increasing your feed subscribers. Keep the stuff interesting, unique and relevant to your blog.
Promote, Promote, Promote
If you don’t have any visitors you can’t expect to have many subscribers, easy as that. Promoting your blog will hopefully bring more visitors to your site, it’ll get you better known in the blogosphere and it can increase your readers. Promoting can take on many different forms. Maybe you like to “Stumble” your own articles. This will bring in a few visitors and hopefully you’re great content will be able to convert a few of these visitors to subscribers. If you don’t have content you shouldn’t bother to promote your blog. When people go to a site that doesn’t have anything there they tend to remember it and never return.
Display Your Feed
Displaying links to your feed(s) in a prominent area can help increase the number of subscribers. Most people don’t enjoy searching through a website to find what they want. If they want to subscribe to your feed but cannot find the link they’ll leave, plain and simple. This is the reason why I have my feed links above all else (I would even place them above advertising if I had any). Another thing you could do is at the end of each of your posts link to your feed. Try something like “If you’ve enjoyed reading this post how bout you subscribe to my feed so you don’t miss out on my other exciting stuff”, or something like that.
Provide Many Feed Options
For this site, I provide a post feed, a comment feed, and a email subscription. The reason why I provide so many different options is because people want different things. Some people don’t want tonnes of things going to their email inboxes whereas some people don’t have feed readers and want constant updates or your site to their email. Providing as many things as possible will let you please as many people as possible.
Submit Your Feed
This tip is from AdesBlog. Submitting your feed to feed directories is a great way to get people to see your feed. Basically these RSS aggregators let the masses see your feed. It’s a quick and easy way to get people to read your feed.
If you do these things I guarantee that the number of subscribers to your feed will increase. One important thing to keep in mind however, is that daily numbers really mean nothing. The number of subscribers to your feed is generally calculated by the number of people that poll your feed (view it). This means that if someone has subscribed to your feed but has not logged in to their favourite Feed viewer, they won’t be counted. Looking at the trends of your subscribers is more important. If the trend is upwards this means that on average more and more people are subscribing (which is a good thing).
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