How to gain RSS subscribers

Getting more subscribers to your blog is something that will occur if you are successful with all aspects of what are considered good blogging practice. If you have good content, and you get a lot of traffic, you are going to get more subscribers. However, here are a few tips that will help you improve your conversion rate:

• Have an RSS button, and place it in an obvious location “above the scroll”.

• Always offer a full feed, excerpts are annoying.

• Use a subscriber count only if you have over 100 subscribers. A feed burner subscriber counter is a great way to show the visitors how many or how few readers you have.

• Avoid putting in too many buttons, it may become annoying. Make sure it is obvious, but don’t rub it in your reader’s face.

• Offer bonuses to only feed subscribers. Have a link to something free at the bottom of your feed, that users have to subscribe to, to receive.

• Educate your readers, this is particularly important if your blog in an un-technical niche. Make sure your readers know what an RSS feed is, how to use it, and the advantages it offers.

• Create a dedicated landing page designed to promote your feed, then drive traffic to it with advertising campaigns.

How to lose RSS subscribers

There is no surefire way to ditch rss subscribers, I stopped blogging on an old Wordpress blog 5 months ago and it still has 10 of the 15 subscribers which I had gained during the 2 months of tenancy on the blog. However, here are some things that you may want to avoid if you want to keep those subscribers happy:

• Don’t offer a full feed.

• Publish too much content, especially if it isn’t good. I don’t want your rubbish filling my inbox.

• Post infrequently, I may be guilty of this, but you should try and keep a steady stream of posts coming in or you may fall out of your reader’s memory. For me steady is two to three good posts a week, for others steady may be one post a day.

• Post about inconsistent topics, you should keep on topic so your readers get what they signed up for.

• Don’t write original content, and only do paid reviews.

• Write content that is too long and not organized in a format that is scannable. By all means if you are Andy Beard write 10,000 word articles if you have 10,000 words worthy of sharing, but you need to consider how easy it is to follow. Use paragraph breaks, sub headings, bullet points and lists where necessary. Scannable doesn’t mean brief and short, it just means presented in a manner that makes it easy to look over.

This article is part of a Internet Marketers Group Writing Project at: CourtneyTuttle.com