Five Tips on How To Increase FeedBurner Subscribers
Here is a free style article that offers some pure insight and suggestion on how you can increase your FeedBurner RSS subscribers.
- Don’t refer to this as “Increasing Your FeedBurner RSS Subscription numbers. These are real people, with real feeling, thoughts and emotions. They are not to be associated with numbers. If I want to be associated with a number, I’ll go sit in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.
- Consider the fact that many of the people visiting your site for the first time are not really bloggers. They are people who landed on a post page within your blog who are simply searching for information. The information they seek happens to be written on your blog. Invite these people to visit often and explain to them how the best way to do that is. Provide a written paragraph at the bottom of your pages briefly explaining about your RSS feed and how it can benefit the users who stumbled on one of your posts from a search engine.
- Stay on topic. People typically read your blog because they are interested in your expertise in the topic you blog about. They too share a common interest and will tend to link to you numerous times from their own blog. For the people that link to you on many occasions, you should contact them and thank them and also ask if they wouldn’t mind mentioning about your RSS feed next time they plan on writing about you.
- Word of Mouth Marketing: Very important! I am sure that most of us have a decent sized email address list. However, within that list, there may only be a handful of people that we’re really close to. That is absolutely perfect for tip #4, which again is, Word of Mouth Marketing is Powerful. Take 10 people, your most closest email buddies and send them an individual email and ask them if they wouldn’t mind taking a moment to send an email to a few of their closets friends explaining about your blog. For example, If I received an email from David Cooley, Mark Sierra, Christine Senter or Joel Comm telling me about a personal favorite blog that they like to read, I would definitely check it out and I am very sure that I would subscribe to it. Why? Because a close friend sent me an email with a recommendation. I truth my friend’s judgment. Word of mouth marketing is very powerful. Send an email to ten trusted and well known friends and ask them to help spread the word about you.
- How has monetizing been working for you? Not too good… that’s ok! Ask yourself if you would be more successful winning clicks into your RSS subscription form or more clicks into Google Adsense. If you think that you would get more clicks into your RSS subscription form compared to monetizing campaign clicks, then lose the monetization and self promote your RSS feed instead.
After reading this post, what else can you think of? What I have written is a great start, but I am sure there are tons of more tips. What can you think of? It doesn’t matter how big or small or even how stupid it might seem. A tip is a tip and I would love for you to share yours. Drop me a comment and help me expand on this topic. How else can a blogger increase their Feedburner Subscribers?
| 3.1 |
12 Comments! Join The Discussion by Leaving Your Comment.
What do you have to say about this post? Leave a comment!
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 05:12:27 Comment #11853
Great article Garry,
My favorite way is to send a message to every MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog or Bumpzee visitor thanking them for their visit and asking them to subscribe to your feed.
Regards,
Fred
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 08:12:42 Comment #11862
Hey Garry,
I particularly like the reminder to think of subscribers as people, not just an increase (or decrease) in some statistic. It’s too easy to get wrapped up in the stats.
Thanks,
Terry
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 09:04:11 Comment #11868
“Take 10 people, your most closest email buddies and send them an individual email and ask them if they wouldn’t mind taking a moment to send an email”
This is exactly what I put in my newsletter this week,
Thanks , Don
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 09:04:46 Comment #11869
Gary, I know that I am in the minority among all you super bloggers, but I am having second thoughts about soliciting subscribers, and here is why. It seems as though whether the subscriber reads your post in an email reader or an RSS news reader, then they lose some of what your total package has to offer. They do not get to appreciate the theme that you worked so hard to develop. They also do not see what is in your margins, your adsense, your affiliates, your list of most popular posts, your Blogroll, and so on.
I’m thinking that someone should come up with a way to encourage readers to COME HOME TO THE BLOG PAGE! Maybe it is just me, but when I have a Blog that I like to read, such as this one, I go out of my way to always click the title and visit the author’s own Blog site. It seems to me to offer an overall better enjoyment of just what the writer is attempting to convey.
Do subscribers really help stats or hurt them? If there was a way to send just the first few lines of a posting, and when the reader could click the link to take them to the site to read the rest, seems to me would be better.
If anyone can convince me that I am wrong I would love to hear about it.
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 10:00:16 Comment #11871
I loved the suggestion about explaining RSS - bloggers and other tech savvy folks tend to forget that the majority of the population isn’t quite up to speed on tools that we are very familiar with. Taking a few sentences to describe what your communication methods are may help readers to develop an interest in your site. I’ll be using this tip for future projects!
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 10:11:16 Comment #11872
Good stuff, of course for me just knowing that you trust me made my day !
@Dick, you refer to just sending a few lines of the post. This is actually done a lot, but most bloggers have learned that using Full Feeds works better than just Summary Feeds. I personally read (browse) a couple hundred feeds daily, when something really hits me, I go to the site. But if I was forced to visit each of those sites I would simply have to unsubscribe from some of them due to time constraints.
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 14:57:37 Comment #11882
Thanks Garry. I am trying to oncrease my subscribers to 50 right now and have at present done nothing about it.
I think I like the idea of emailing my friends. Sadly a lot of people who are not bloggers really don’t understand the RSS idea so I know it’s important that I get an email my feed option for all of those.
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 18:34:50 Comment #11887
@ David,
Sometimes I am not a very bright individual…
@ Forest,
I understand where you’re coming from about web based readers not knowing what RSS is. It would then be your job as the author to educate and inform them of why it can benefit them. Also, like you said, most readers who don’t know what RSS is do know what an email newsletter is.
Email newsletters are very old school (in fact something I still prefer). I have a few sites such as Airplane Blog that really only actively promote the email notification service.
There are a few reasons why I do that, one of which is the fact that I know my audience are mainly people who are more familiar and comfortable with email newsletters rather than RSS subscriptions. It’s a balance, because also too the people who do know about RSS somewhat automatically know that when they see the FeedBurner Chicklet and the RSS Icon in their browser, the RSS subscription option is there.
@ Laura,
I am very happy that you find that tip helpful. Welcome to my blog, I hope that I have captured your interest enough to gain you subscribing to my feed.
Date/Time: 2-25-2008 22:07:08 Comment #11890
I use number of medias to promote my blog, mailing list is one of them, because mailing list is the place where mass people are hang out everyday. thus it’s a potential place to introduce mine to dozens or hundreds eyes and i gain big success with it
Date/Time: 2-26-2008 02:04:53 Comment #11897
Out of all those great tips, I think I should follow #4. Although it seems easy, I think having your friends refer others might be a bit difficult.
-Mike
Date/Time: 9-25-2008 16:46:36 Comment #23161
Nice article and good tips, keep up the good work
Check out David’s last blog post..SQL Injection in EasyRealtorPRO 2008