Sep
It’s About Freakin Time for More RSS Feed Subscribers
A while back I wrote about how people expect you to have new blog posts every single day. Well, I don’t have new posts every single day, but I’ve had new posts consistently every couple days for a while now. I also wrote about plugins that supposedly increase your RSS subscribers. And that stuff is on the blog now.
But where are the tens of thousands of feed subscribers?
Let’s see what I did and where it all went wrong…
Tell Everyone This Site Has an RSS Feed
The more links and buttons promoting your feed, the better. Gotta have at least one orange button at the top right of the page, where everyone seems to place their RSS buttons. (Need buttons?)
Mine must not be big enough. That’s OK though because I just got some emails telling me how to increase my size.
I also added a line at the end of each post saying “If you thought this post sucked, be sure to subscribe to our full feed.”
Hmm… Maybe it should have been “If you suck, don’t subscribe to our full feed.” Maybe reverse psychology works on internet marketers!
Giving My Full Feed
Feed subscribers should be happy, as they can read my entire blog through their feed reader. People just seem to like full feeds.
Maybe I should have taken away the full feed for a while, and then brought it back and made a big deal about it. Like one of those “grand re-opening” sales at the mall!
Faking The Feed Count
Just like they taught over at Net Business Blog, it’s still easy to get thousands of subscribers instantly.
This was to make it look like lots of people were reading my blog, which is just using a concept called “social proof.” If someone visits my blog and sees 1145 people subscribed, they’re much more likely to subscribe. “If 1145 other people read this, it must be good!” pops into their head.
Offer Email Subscriptions
Not everyone will have a feed reader, so have the option to subscribe via email. Feedburner lets you do this, so I went ahead and added that to my sidebar.
However, I might need to add the whole “enter your email here” deal instead of just a link.
Quality Content
Dang it, I knew I left something out!! Maybe I should write some quality content, too? 
Final Thoughts
Whenever I first started trying to get a few more subscribers, I remember having about 15 (at the most.) That’s gone up to about 200 now. That jump could have something to do with what I mentioned in this post, but most likely it is because I’ve been marketing this blog a lot more!
Just adding this stuff didn’t do anything. It wasn’t until I spent a lot of time and money on marketing efforts that I noticed an increase in traffic and feed subscribers.
That’s the lesson for today: You could spend a bunch of time trying to make your blog more “subscriber friendly” by taking the advice of all the experts out there… or you could market it to build traffic and let everything else fall into place.
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So, whatever one do, until won`t spend some money there ain`t gonna be results ?
Time or money, whichever you prefer. Although “time is money” as they say.
See, if I go to a blog I like and want to subscribe, I’ll find the feed URL no matter what kind of RSS buttons it has. And if I go to a blog that I don’t like, no number of subscription options will convince me to subscribe. The point is getting me there in the first place.
Dude, I really don’t think you oghta be giving advice about rss subscribers since your feed count is jacked from here:
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/
@Ash
LOL. I’ve talked about that a million times and the whole concept is explained in this post. Right there where it has “Faking The Feed Count” in bold. See it?