Boost Your Subscriber Count With Two Feedburner Tools

Many bloggers pay more heed to their daily subscriber count than they do their daily uniques. For them, subscriber numbers are a key indicator of success, yet these numbers are also a variable no blogger can directly control. Often the most we can do is put our feed icon above the fold and hope for the best.

This is where Feedburner earns its stripes. The service provides two useful tools we can utilize to boost our subscriber numbers. In this post, I want to describe how bloggers can make the most of them.

Chase up unconfirmed email subscriptions

Make a date with yourself each month to go through the list of email subscribers to your blog. You can access this list by clicking on ‘Subscribers’ under ‘Feed Stats’ on the ‘Analyze’ page for your feed. Scroll down and expand the ‘Feedburner Email Subscriptions’ link, then click ‘Manage Your Email Subscriber List’.

Each subscriber’s status will be set to ‘Active’, meaning they’re happily receiving your updates, or ‘Unconfirmed’, meaning they’ve not clicked the activation link to start receiving emails from your blog. These unconfirmed subscribers are not currently being counted towards your subscriber numbers, but it may be easy to change that.

Take the time to send unconfirmed subscribers a group email indicating that they’ve expressed interest in receiving updates from your blog but did not complete the final step required in the process. Suggest that they could search for the verification email or resubscribe if they’re still interested in receiving updates. Do the courteous thing and offer them a link to your sign-up page.

Utilize the FeedFlare API

There are a number of ways FeedFlares can be used to boost subscriber numbers and reward existing subscribers.

The FeedFlare section can be accessed under the ‘Optimize’ tab in the control panel for your blog’s feed, under ‘Services’. A FeedFlare is a custom script inserted at the bottom of each post as it appears in a feed reader. You can use this script to insert text or a link only feed subscribers will see.

FeedFlares are files in the .xml format. You can download a basic FeedFlare template here (right click and save). Right click on the downloaded .xml template and click ‘Edit’. You can then customize the flare as you see below.

If you want to include only text then remove the Link href element. If you want text followed by a link then write between an additional set of <Text></Text> tags inserted just before those that come with the FeedFlare template. Feedburner provides a number of tutorials on writing FeedFlares, all accessible via the tool you should be using to compose and test them: the FeedFlare Scratchpad.

What could I put in a FeedFlare?

There are a number of ways FeedFlares can be used to help reward existing feed subscribers and, most importantly, encourage new ones.

1. Bonus content. Create a page on your blog which can’t be reached through navigation. This means entering the URL of the page is the only way it can be reached. We’re going to provide this link in your FeedFlare. You can use the page to offer an eBook download or a series of posts not available on your main blog.
2. Subscribers only newsletter. You could include a link to a subscribers only email list in your FeedFlare. You could offer bonus content, links or other rewards in a monthly subscriber newsletter.
3. Competitions. There are a number of ways you can run competitions to boost your subscriber count. You could inform readers that a codeword will appear at the bottom of your feeds between now and a later date, and that the first person to email you the codeword will win your chosen prize. You could also add a daily or weekly puzzle to your FeedFlare and reward the first person who solves it with a link from your site or equivalent reward depending on the topic of your blog. These are just a couple of ideas, I’m sure there are a dozen more.

How do I add the FeedFlare to my feed?

Upload the .xml file to your site and paste the URL into the ‘Add New Flare’ form on the FeedFlares page. Once you’ve added it, select your FeedFlare on the list and click ‘Activate’ at the bottom of the page. Head over to your reader of choice and view your site’s feed to see if the Flare is displaying as you wanted it to.

If you’re unhappy with how it came out you can edit your FeedFlare, upload it again and repeat the process to add the edited FeedFlare to your feed. Refresh your reader of choice to view the results of your edit.

Promoting your subscriber incentive

Make sure to promote your FeedFlare reward on your blog. Make a note of what readers will get when they subscribe to your feed right next to your subscribe button. You can see this strategy in action over at ChrisG.com: Chris Garrett offers a free eBook to each new subscriber.

I’d also recommended making a post about the changes you’ve made to your feed. This will attract the interest of those who haven’t yet subscribed while explaining the changes to existing feed subscribers.

Over to you

• What has your best strategy been to increase feed subscribers?
• Have you experimented with FeedFlare incentives before?
• How many unverified email subscribers do you have?