To be honest, increasing my RSS feedburner subscription numbers is something that I have always put on the backburner. It’s stupid of me because I have done quite well in the past with ranking well in Technorati (Top 100 Most Favorite) and other areas. Today, the result of many errors in my judgment have resulted in a relatively high amount of daily traffic but low RSS subscriber numbers. I’ll get into details on that in a future post. For now, I want to share with you some of the things that I am now doing in attempt to increase my subscription numbers.

It’s one thing to rank well in search engines and land your link into a lot of blogrolls. There is no doubt that you can get tons of traffic this way… but the questions is this: “What can you do to convert the visitors into regular full time readers?” The answer is simple, and I overlooked it.

Before doing anything drastic, I needed to invest time into reading previous case studies. Darren Rowse conducted an excellent one in March. The result was an article titled, The Top 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog. The top 10 results were arrived from 194 reader opinions.

Ten Reason Why People Unsubscribe:

1. The author publishes too many posts. Readers can’t keep up and feel overwhelmed. - 37 opinions.
2. Inconsistent or infrequent posts. Readers don’t know when to expect your next post. - 29 opinions.
3. Author doesn’t broadcast the full RSS feed. This forces the reader to click and visit the blog, defeating the purpose of syndicating. - 25 opinions.
4. Author changes direction. People loose interest because the author talks about things that no longer interest them. -23 opinions.
5. Lack of original content. Author invests too much time into reporting old news found on other blogs. - 19 opinions.
6. No fire or spark in the content. The author is boring, negative and doesn’t make people feel good. - 16 opinions.
7. Content is irrelevant. Author writes about one topic while readers expect to see another. - 13 opinions.
8. Big Head Blog Syndrome. The author is over confident and comes across as being arrogant and goes overboard on self-promotion. - 11 opinions.
9. The articles suck. The articles are hard to follow and readers fail to understand or grasp the point. - 11 opinions.
10. The articles are novels. Aside from cost, there is a reason most commercials on TV are only 30 to 60 seconds in length. The length of your posts could kill your number of readers. - 10 opinions.

This list is something I will use to help build up my subscription levels. It’s simple, easy to follow and makes perfect sense. To be a successful blogger, you have to have balance and I believe that this Top 10 List will help people find that balance. Special thanks goes out to Darren and his readers for their hard work back in March with producing some amazing statistics.