Get more RSS subscribers in 5 easy steps
Irrespective of whether you intend to monetise your feed, having subscribers is a useful way of ensuring repeat visitors. One of the biggest problems I face with Seopher.com is the high level of traffic with a low return rate; whereas RSS subscribers are return visitors in many respects.
Another excellent reason for aspiring to have more subscribers is that they're likely to constitute part of your community and that's important too.
Tip #1: Promote your feed, lots.
At the bottom of each post it's worth having a standard link like "Did you enjoy this content? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?" This means once the user has finished reading your content; they can subscribe straight away without having to scroll back up the page.
Tip #2: Offer feed by Email
This is something I've just started doing - offer users the ability to receive article updates in their email - Feedburner offers this service. This means that you minimise the chance of users wanting to subscribe but not knowing what RSS is or how to use it. This leads me into...
Tip #3: Explain what RSS is
Unless you author a technical site with a tech-savvy demographic, it's likely that some of your users will have no idea what RSS is or why it's useful. Therefore it's worth having a "What is RSS?" link next to your feed explaining how people can use it. This should remove any technical boundaries between you and your users.
Tip #4: Use RSS orange and the orange square logo
The orange square logo has become the norm (see the top right of this site). If you put that logo on your site people will know what it means without having to read anything. Make it nice and clear and use the correct hue of orange and experienced users will understand.
Tip #5: Make it discoverable
Look at the address bar of this website, on the right hand side there should be a small orange RSS logo. This means that the feed has been discovered by the browser, meaning you can subscribe to it by clicking on that link.
In your template, add in the following code:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Seopher.com RSS Feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeopherRssFeed" />
Just replace my feed URL with yours and it will be discoverable by the browser. This will vastly increase the probability of your feed being picked up by users.
With these tips you should be able to increase the visibility of your RSS feed and ultimately get more subscribers. I'm currently trying to get over 500 feed readers so please subscribe using either the link below this article, the link on the top right of the page, in the address bar or submit your email address into the below form to stay updated.
Enjoy this article? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?
