10 Ways to Increase your Feed Subscribers in 2007

Believe it or not but a lot depends on your returning traffic. What happens if all of a sudden Google banishes all your pages to the Supplemental Index just like Shoemoney’s Blog? You can’t rely on Search Engine traffic therefore you need to make the most of the traffic you receive. What’s the bottom line?

Get those people to bookmark your RSS Feed into their reader

Once they’ve bookmarked your site you at least have their attention. This is your chance to shine! If you write good posts chances are you’ll stay there for quite some time. Maybe even get mentioned on many of the blog lists going around.

I think I’m up over 150 Subscribers now, not a HUGE feat but then I don’t think of myself as a mainstream blog. I don’t generally write about all the trends & copy the things I see on other blogs. Perhaps that’s the reason, however I am also happy that I’m building up a niche readership that hopefully enjoy what I’m doing.

With that in mind I’m going to look at some quick & easy tips to make sure you can get as many new subscribers as possible.

1. Have a dedicated subscribe page. This is a single page on your site with details about all the different ways to subscribe to your feeds & sites. Include things like Technorati’s Favourite Blog Adder, Your Rss Feed & Email Updates. You can visit my subscribe page here.
2. Ask people to subscribe, be blunt. Ask them whenever you can, I do it at the bottom of every post & it works quite well. You can see I ask a question “Like this Article? Then Subscribe….”
3. Sign up to Feedburner & redirect your feed through their system. This allows you to track exactly how many subscribers you have at any given moment in time & also track their movements / trends.
4. Redirect all your Wordpress Feed traffic automatically through Feedburner with this awesome little plugin.
5. Make sure your feed icon is visible on your blog by using the appropriate icons in the sidebar. The bigger the better usually! Feel free to nab the massive RSS Feed Icon in this post.
6. Offer original content that is worthy of people bookmarking your feed in their reader. If they find you interesting as a person also they’ll bookmark the site. Many blogs may not post “interesting” posts everyday but I still bookmark some because I find the blogger “intriguing.” This is another good reason to include an “About Page” it’ll help strike a common note with many readers.
7. Offer unique content or downloads for feed subscribers. Textlinkads offer a Feedvertising Plugin for Wordpress that allows you to run ads or even run your own “extra content” in the feed.
8. Include your RSS Feed in your Signature links in forums. Some forums like Digitalpoint allow you to add your RSS feed to your profile & have it displayed in every thread you write or participate in.
9. Include your RSS Feed in any articles you submit to other Web Sites. Let say for example you submit a Guest Blog Post on Eli’s Blue Hat SEO, ask him to include your RSS Feed at the bottom of the Guest Post.
10. Get on Technorati, this is a great place for people to find your blog & what you’re blogging about. If you blog about anything then try blogging about things in the “Top Searched List” this’ll bring in a slight increase in traffic & hopefully more subscribers everyday.

Best of luck increasing your Feed Subscribers, I know I’m trying to keep my content as original as possible! Let me know how you get on.