Tips for increasing RSS Subscribers on your Blog

One of the metrics you will use to measure how well your blog is doing is the number of readers subscribed. But how do you get people to subscribe to your feed? Mark over at 45n5.com started a conversation about Your best Tip to Increase RSS Subscribers so I thought I would continue the conversation.

So lets get on with the list of best tips to increase RSS Subscribers.

Write really good posts - I know someone would post this in the comments so I just wanted to spoil their fun. Of course it is true that the better your posts, the more likely people are to subscribe. I’m not just talking about good grammar and spelling either. Writing relevant, timely, thought provoking content is what people are looking for. Do this and watch your subscriber number soar.

Make it easy to subscribe - Put your subscription options toward the top and make it as easy as possible to subscribe to the RSS Feed. Take a look at the top of this page. Kevin has placed the subscription options in plain view at the top of the page in the header.

Display number of subscribers - If your using FeedBurner to track subscribers then you have the option to display a chicklet with your subscriber count. Once you have at least a couple hundred subscribers displaying the chicklet can help get even more subscribers. When someone sees that your blog has several hundred subscribers they feel compelled to subscribe since so many have already validated your blog as a source of information worth subscribing to.

Ask readers to subscribe - Sounds crazy right? But it can be as easy as closing out your posts asking reader to subscribe if they like this post or maybe even placing a line somewhere in the head or sidebar of your blog. Something like this works quit well. “If this is your first time visiting please consider subscribing to the RSS Feed”.

Write posts in a series - Writing a multi part series posts can also help gain subscribers. Letting people know that this post is Part 1 of a 3 part series on subject X will cause some to subscribe because they don’t want to miss the next installment. Of course your blog really is a multipart series of posts anyway. But we won’t get into hat right now.

Offer subscribers bonus content - If your goal in to increase your RSS Subscribers you could start a campaign and do some kind of gimmick such as offering them some kind of bonus that only subscribers will see in their news reader.

If you’d like to continue the conversations and list your tips and tricks for getting and keeping subscribers then feel free to leave our comments or write a post and ping back to this one.