Nerve Endings Firing Away

I have emphasized the importance of RSS feed subscribers earlier and if you are a serious and regular blogger, I must reiterate treating your feed subscribers well. They are quite different from the ocassional reader who chance upon your blog through search engines. Usually they are tech savvy and hungry for information. Technorati currently tracks 73.3 million blogs and if you add the hundreds of news websites like NY Times and CNN, there is a plethora of options for the average online reader. This post isn’t about attracting RSS feed subscribers because that is an exhaustive topic by itself but in fact, this post is about making the RSS subscription process easier for interested readers.

Although I’ve been planning this post for some days, John Chow, the dot com mogul and making money online advisor beat me to it by a few hours. So while reiterating his points, I’ll dwell on some that have worked for me. My feed subscribers nearly doubled after I implemented some of these simple changes.

Why go the RSS way?

As John mentions, increasing your RSS subscriber base is contrary to increasing the revenue earning capability of your blog. But then, not everything is about money, right? RSS subscribers are a finicky lot. If you don’t provide easy access to your feed, they’ll dump you in an instant and go elsewhere. But you rather prefer they read you, right? You might be lucky to land on the Digg/Reddit/Del.ico.us front page but it might just bring hordes of visitors on 1-2 days. You rather have a gradually increasing and sustained readership than a mere spike, right?

Some of my loyal readers (and frequent commenters) access this blog solely through feeds. I would be doing a great disservice if I make them come to my website. Trust me and don’t take it personally but they won’t! Also, your regular feed subscribers are least likely to click on your ads, so why make them come to your site? If you have a theme change or new plugin you want to show off, write about it and they’ll drop by.

So considering that the reader chances upon your blog, reads your content, and now wants to subscribe, here are a few tips that make it easier:

Offer full feeds

Again, do not try to trick your feed subscribers by offering partial content. Like I said, no matter how catch your title or excerpt is, they are not going to click through every time. RSS feed subscribers are busy people and often have dozens of feeds they have to get through before they can sleep peacefully. They’ll tolerate your stinginess for a while and then hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button. If you like to use the <more> tag in WordPress, then use the Full Feed Plugin so that your posts aren’t truncated in the feed.

Make sure your feeds work

Nothing turns off wannabe subscribers when they pop in your blog URL in their feed readers and see no default feeds offered. If you are using WordPress, your feeds are offered in a variety of formats by default (although RSS2.0 is preferred) and is accessible at http://<yourdomain.com>/feed/. You can use Feedburner (and the Feedburner Replacement Plugin) to feeds manage your feeds. I suggest subscribing to your own blog’s feed so you can make sure that your feeds are working fine. I faced this problem while setting up Baradwaj Rangan’s blog at DesiPundit but replacing the core WordPress feed files with the original ones did the trick.

Don’t display your RSS count button

…if your subscriber base is less than 100. Just because you are offered stats chicklets doesn’t mean you crowd your sidebar. John mentions this too and bases this on herd mentality. People often like to read what other people are reading and a small subscriber count may turn them off or might seem as if your content isn’t worth subscribing. When you have a large enough (subjective) subscriber base, feel free to flaunt it around. considering that this is a personal blog, a subscriber base of 300+ is pretty impressive but still I don’t think it is that useful to display it permanently.

Makes your RSS Subscription buttons easily visible

Although popping in your blog URL often pulls up your feed, some readers like to lay their hands on the actual feed URL. They may be aware of the /feed option but clicking a ‘subscribe’ link is much easier. So where should you put your buttons? Experts suggest that the best place is at the top of the sidebar or better still, in your header image. But I like to use this prime property to flaunt other goodies like my Flickr photos or Recently Watched Movies. But I still put the ‘subscribe to my feed’ links in my sidebar because that is the first place an average blog reader will look.

‘Asking’ your readers to subscribe

Instead, I ‘ask my readers’ to subscribe within the content of my post. I do so at two places. One, at the bottom of every post i.e. after they are done reading the post, they might be more inclined to subscribing to my feed (if they like it, of course.) I edited single.php file in my template and added the following code after the content code and before the comments code:

<p>If you enjoyed this post, please <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/NerveEndingsFiringAway”>subscribe to my blog</a> by using <insert code for popular feed chicklets like Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, etc here>.

You can get the code for the feed chicklets from the Publicize > Chicklet Chooser in your Feedburner account. Look at the statistics on your subscriber list to see what feed readers are most popular and use those chicklets. On my blog, the above code looks like this:

Alternatively, if readers find your blog through search engines, you want to catch their attention earlier on as well and offer them subscription options. The interestingly name ‘What would Seth Godin do’ plugin comes in handy. This plugin uses cookies to detect if the reader is a new visitor and displays a custom message at the top of your post. Ideally, you can customize this message to include your feed URL. You may have seen this plugin in action if you are new to this blog. If not, here is how it looks:

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!

You can also put this message at the bottom of the post and skip the first options. But I like to use them both to make sure the visitor sees it.

Email Subscription

One of the most underrated RSS feed offerings is the email subscription. Some readers are constantly in touch with their email and prefer to read even RSS feeds in their email. Services like Feedblitz and Feedburner offer such services which are easy to implement. I use Feedburner on this blog and Feedblitz on DesiPundit (note: DesiPundit has more than 50 email subscribers.) in Feedburner, go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions and simply copy and paste the code wherever you like (most prefer the sidebar.) Visitors simply enter their email address and voila! they are subscribed. It looks like this:

Alternatively, you can also offer a simple link URL that visitors click to visit the Feedburner’s site to enter their email address. Again, this blog has 9 email subscribers. The number may seem small but think of it this way, if it weren’t for the email option then it is possible that those people wouldn’t be reading my blog at all.

Content is King

Last but not the least, this advice is almost mandatory in all blog advice posts. Regardless of how simple it is to subscribe to your blog, visitors will not subscribe to your blog if your content isn’t interesting. So go ahead, implement these changes and get back to writing your blog. Feel free to drop any suggestions or tips that have worked for you.