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:
- The author publishes too many posts. Readers can’t keep up and feel overwhelmed. – 37 opinions.
- Inconsistent or infrequent posts. Readers don’t know when to expect your next post. – 29 opinions.
- 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.
- Author changes direction. People loose interest because the author talks about things that no longer interest them. -23 opinions.
- Lack of original content. Author invests too much time into reporting old news found on other blogs. – 19 opinions.
- No fire or spark in the content. The author is boring, negative and doesn’t make people feel good. – 16 opinions.
- Content is irrelevant. Author writes about one topic while readers expect to see another. – 13 opinions.
- Big Head Blog Syndrome. The author is over confident and comes across as being arrogant and goes overboard on self-promotion. – 11 opinions.
- The articles suck. The articles are hard to follow and readers fail to understand or grasp the point. – 11 opinions.
- 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.

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Date/Time: 10-8-2007 15:22:26 Comment #5623
Great post Gary, thanks. If I had known earlier, I would have listed it as a summary article to my “Ultimate Resource List” about RSS subscriptions.
Date/Time: 10-8-2007 15:23:10 Comment #5624
Sorry, I missed an ‘r’ in your name. Shame on me.
Date/Time: 10-8-2007 15:38:24 Comment #5625
Hey Marco,
No problem on the missed “R”… happens all the time! And the great things about blog posts is that they can be edited and additional info can be added.
Date/Time: 10-8-2007 16:35:23 Comment #5626
Garry,
I´d rather tend to spend an extra post on this in the future.
Cheers
Marco
Date/Time: 10-8-2007 16:55:56 Comment #5627
Sounds like a plan.
Glad you enjoyed the post.
Talk to you soon,
Garry
Date/Time: 10-8-2007 19:39:09 Comment #5632
Well other then a few area’s I see I don’t think I am very far off that list and dont do to much that should turn people off. Still low numbers but I have decided not to broadcast the amount of readers I have. I think that might suck and I al also going to post about the outline of my blog and what posts are going to be where so people can see for them selves. Wait I will make it a page they can view. That should work! And I have to go to bed now I have been blogging all day my eyes hurt.
Date/Time: 10-8-2007 19:59:23 Comment #5633
My numbers are low but its clearly my fault. I have quite a few RSS readers pulling from my direct blog feed url. It got much worse to, because I felt I wanted to give people more options and provides links to my RSS .92, RSS 2.0, ATOM as well as Feedburner URL. My mistake and I am moving forward. I have ONE feed URL and that is the only URL I use for content syndication now.
Date/Time: 10-12-2007 11:33:46 Comment #5734
Are there any specific RSS directories which can fetch you more subscribers?
Date/Time: 10-22-2007 23:46:16 Comment #5989
Wow ! This is a great reason list. Fine, apart from the above lists, are there any specific suggesstions for your readers to increase their feeds?
Date/Time: 12-21-2007 03:04:50 Comment #7692
great post Garry! you always know how to educate your readers! keep this good job up G!
Date/Time: 4-27-2008 02:45:21 Comment #13758
Hey great work buddy, very interesting post. what should be the average no. of posts blogger must write per week inorder to avoid unsubscription?
Date/Time: 9-17-2008 23:42:56 Comment #22631
Thank you very much for the great post… I’m looking to popularize my blog and found many things here.. So from here on I have to careful..
Check out TechnoSamrat’s last blog post..Apple iPhone Business Applications from Oracle, Sybase, SAP, Salesforce and Zoho
Date/Time: 12-6-2008 11:48:35 Comment #27657
The first reason is so obvious but I never gave it much thought and it really makes sense. Thanks for that.
Date/Time: 1-8-2009 16:58:03 Comment #29072
Great post and a great analysis of the reader’s mindset .
Keep the good work up.