Managing Your RSS Subscribers

When someone likes your blog, they can often be enticed to sign up for updates via an RSS feed reader such as Feedburner or Google Reader.

Don’t hesitate to ask people to subscribe! And, don’t be afraid to offer an incentive to get them to do so (a free e-book, free course, ballot into a draw, etcetera can work wonders).

Once you’ve got more than a hundred RSS Subscribers, it’s smart to list your number of subscribers on your website. When people see that a blog is popular, that will often be enough to entice them to subscribe. People don’t want to miss anything! Consider making certain content exclusive to RSS Subscribers only.

Once you have a captive audience, it’s important to remember that you have regular readers that have expectations of you. It’s much nicer to have a list of people reading your blog regularly than to post and hope, when you hit the ‘publish’ key, that someone somewhere will read your works.

Once you have some readers, it’s important to keep them. Here are some tips to help you do that:

• Titles are important. Some of your readers might get your updates via email. If that’s the case, the subject line is what will either entice them to open it or make them skip over it and delete without reading.

• Your first paragraph is even more vital in a feed reader than directly on your blog. People viewing your latest entry in their Google Reader see a preview of the entry on their home page and how interesting your first paragraph is to them can impact whether or not they open your message.

• Provide value in your blog posts. If you want readers to keep reading, to give you the nod on social sites by bookmarking your posts, and to stay subscribed, you want to give them what they came for. Don’t go for quantity over quality.

• Make it easy for people to see how to subscribe. A big RSS button above the fold is a good idea. Making people look and / or scroll to subscribe reduces the chances of them doing so. Making things as easy as possible for your audience will increase your audience.

How Do You Keep Subscribers?

It’s a good idea to watch your subscriber numbers to see if they’re climbing, plateauing, or … dropping so you can take action.

The most important thing you can do once you have RSS subscribers is to update your blog frequently (but with quality posts). A lot of people do regular housekeeping of their subscriptions and keep only the blogs that interest them.

Even if they love you, if you’re only posting once a month, you might lose them. Not just that but if you’re frequently updating, you’ll have more chances of being read. You’ll also want to stay on topic. People subscribe for a specific reason and if you regularly go ‘off’ on a tangent, you risk losing your RSS Subscribers.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketing
www.AussieSEO.com 2010

 

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