Help Me Increase My Feed Subscribers
I’ve decided that one of my blogging goals next week is to improve the promotion of my RSS feed subscription, to try and improve the number of subscribers I have. If you have any tips that have worked for you or if you see any areas of my design that are hampering my desire to increase the number of subscribers, then can you please share these with me and other readers via a comment.
According to Feedburner, at the time of posting I have 727 RSS subscribers. When you consider that according to Google Analytics I’ve had approximately 800k unique visits since last March, my conversion rate is pitiful at just under 0.1%. It’s even worse when you consider the fact that I’ve been blogging for nearly two years, although obviously my traffic wasn’t as high as it is now in the early months and it’s also reasonable to assume that some of my early subscribers will have churned by now. It’d be interesting if you could tell me how long you’ve been reading my feed so I can get an idea of the average tenure of my subscribers. Have any of you been with me since virtually Day 1?
Currently I’m getting around 5-6K unique visitors a day and 85% of these have never visited my site before, so there’s a huge opportunity for me to increase my current 727 feed subscribers, if any of your tips work.
What changes did you make that helped to increase the number of RSS subscribers you have on your blog?
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Comment by Thilak on 10 February 2007:
You can’t trust Feedburner, as I’m sure you have more than 700, that’s because some feedreaders don’t report these counts.
At one point three month ago, I had 500 readers.. not it has dipped to around 300. I think visual factor plays a important role in feed readers count. I have seen a marginal increase in readers after I switched over to a new theme. I’m not sure if this is just a coincidence.
Yet another thing, I’ve learn’t from my previous mistakes are always provide email subscription box. I manged to lure 50 subscribers in 3 days. Can you believe that?
Comment by Ashish Mohta on 10 February 2007:
If you want to target more of russian and other countries get into whats happening there.Do some analysis.Soon u will have readers from there.
The best way to increase ur rss reader is write good content and encourage ppl to subscribe and tell what are the benifits
Comment by Enblogopedia on 10 February 2007:
Why not using a static positioned (cool) feed icon placed in the top left corner of ur blog..that will move whenever the user scroll down and up!
Also try to put the Feedburner Headline Animator above your content
Which means:
in front page…replace the 480*60 ad unit with a 480*60 “Headline Animator” and Put “Headline Animator” above the posts title
I believe this will improve your feed subscriptions!
Comment by Everton on 10 February 2007:
#1
very true about missing important counts. Lets just hope I’ve got thousands of yahoo readers!
#3
I like the idea of somehow creating a persistent subscribe button - I’m going to think more on this one.
The banner idea is a difficult one as I’d have to weigh up rev loss impact Vs more readers
One thing I am going to work on is reducing the ‘noise’ under my posts. The tabbed navigation was supposed to do that, but over time I’ve just used the tabs as an excuse to load more stuff!
Comment by Thilak on 10 February 2007:
Hey.. One more idea popped into my mind. Why don’t you provide your RSS feeds in other languages?
Maybe, you can use the existing translation plugin as a base and write a plugin for that.
Comment by Everton on 10 February 2007:
I’m in for international RSS if anyone can work out how to do it.
Comment by Ajay on 13 February 2007:
Let me know about the same… but its gotta be really less stressful on the server!
I too need to work on getting my feed readers up, especially on Techtites.com