Savvy Affiliate

Day 21 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

I recently posted on How To Publish an RSS feed, and the wrong way to get people to subscribe to it.   Now for the right way.

Getting more subscribers to your RSS isn’t that hard, if you do it right.  There are several things that you need to do to get RSS subscribers.  Do them, and you’ll see your count start to rise

1) Prominently display a button - Don’t make people look for how to subscribe, because they probably won’t.  But if they can do it in one click, the chance that they subscribe will improve greatly.  Having an unusual RSS button helps, and so does anything that draws attention to it.  Don’t be afraid to go big.   More or less as long as there is still text, you’re ok

2) Put a help button under Your RSS - You are probably amazingly familiar with RSS.  You use it everyday.  You fret over your numbers, read a dozen blogs.  But believe it or not there are people who have never heard of it, but might be interested if they knew what it was.  Make it easy for them.  Add a button explaining how to subscribe to your blog, where the best readers are, and why they should be interested.

3) As Your Readers To Sign Up - Believe it or not, a lot more people will read your blog feed if you simply ask them to.   You can do this by simply putting a suggestion at the bottom of your feeds, or even better, use the What would Seth Godin Do Plugin - it keeps track of who visits your site, and if they have visited less than 3 times, it asks them to subscribe to your feed.   Speaking of, why not take this time to subscribe to Savvy Affiliate?

4) Use Multiple Methods To Promote Your RSS - Sure you have an RSS button, but there is no rule that that is all you can have.  Try creating an RSS page and linking to it along your top bar.  Put in a button specifically for bloglines or Google reader.  Who knows what your readers will use?

5) Use Full Feeds - There is nothing I find more annoying about a feed than when it has a “Read More Here” link.   If I wanted to go to a site and read all of their posts on their page, I would do that.  I want to use my feed reader.  Don’t make it difficult.   In all actuality though, not too many blogs publish a summary feed.  But that statistic is just made up on the spot, guessing from the number in my feeds who publish a summary.  Also, my statistician friends may question its accuracy since I delete any feeds who publish a summary.  I’m just saying you might want to take it with a grain of salt.

6) Offer A Bonus - Offer a bonus for signing up on your feed that your readers can’t get just by coming to your site.  Make it an e-book, an entry into a contest, a backlink to their site.  It doesn’t have to be expensive, just something to give them the extra push.

So how are your subscribers looking?  What’s your plan to kick them up to the next level?