How To Promote Your RSS Feed - And Get More Feed Readers

Posted on April 21st, 2007 by Jon - SmartWealthyRich

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Seeing the increasing number of RSS feed subscribers on Smart Wealthy Rich, i thought it would be a good idea to share some tips and tricks that i’ve collected on my blogging journey, with you guyz and galz, to help you increase the number of feed subscribers to your blog.

First, i have to say i don’t have 3000 RSS subscribers, not even 1000, but i sure hope it will get to that number eventually! And i hope my tips and tricks will help you do the same ;)

Those are simply some of the things I do, and as usual, what works for one, may not work for everyone, so take what you think might work for you, and leave the rest behind, and of course, you can add to the list, by leaving a comment on this post, share your thoughts and your own tips and tricks!

There are many ways you can increase your RSS numbers, i will try to give some “real life” examples that, either have worked for me, or i think might be worth trying. I’ve came across many blogs, where i would’ve liked to subscribe to their feed, but couldn’t… why you ask?

Let’s start by listing some mistakes many blog owners make when it comes to RSS Feeds

No RSS button or RSS link at all

Broken feed link (leading to a 404 or some strange page)

No real benefit for subscribing (what’s in for me?)

RSS link or button hard to find or at the bottom of the page

You’d be amazed how many blog owners do one (or more) of the above, probably without realizing it. (reason for this post!)

Ok, now if you haven’t noticed yet, take a look at my sidebar. See this orange “subscribe” button there? If you click it, it’ll open my rss feed, so you can grab the url and enter it in a feed reader of your choice (like google reader or netvibes). And right below this orange button, there’s a feedburner subscription form, you can enter your e-mail there, and you’ll receive e-mail updates from SmartWealthyRich.com in your inbox, delivered by feedburner! How cool is that? (well it’s a post about RSS Feeds, so why not promote mine?)

So how can you promote your RSS Feed and increase your numbers?

Here’s my little list:

Join feedburner (yep!) and have your feed run through there, so you have access to stats, and you can see how many people subscribed to your rss feed, how many subscribed to the “update by e-mail” thing.

Make sure your Feed is compatible with most feed readers (feedburner has a nice little feature that takes care of that called “smartfeed”)

Always Use “full feed” - if you run wordpress, make sure you selected “full text” in your options page, and there’s also this nice plugin that you can use that will keep your rss feed “full” even if you use the “read more” feature in wordpress. I know some prefer to show only partial feeds, so it’s up to you, but give me one good reason i should subscribe to your rss feed if i have to visit your site to read the full posts? I might as well just bookmark your blog. But thing is… i might forget to visit… so full feed is the way to go!

Let your readers know they can subscribe (easily), you can add a short sentence at the end of each post that says something like “You enjoyed this post? Please consider subscribing to my feed!” - i’ve yet to do that on my blog, but i know it works really well, and i’ll definitely give that a try real soon.

Gift, bonus, free stuff - Chris Garret wrote an ebook, titled “killer flagship content“, which you can download when you subscribe to his RSS Feed. Chris saw a nice increase in his feedburner stats when he put that ebook online ;)

Don’t bury your rss link or have it only in your footer (no one looks there), make sure it’s easy to find and preferably close to the top of your page (again, see this orange “subscribe” button in my sidebar?)

When posting in forums, in your signature, write something like “Here’s my blog, check it out, i offer this and that, and feel free to subscribe to my feed” with the link to both your blog, and your feed (or a page/post explaining what is a RSS feed, and how to subscribe)

Now What?

Well, of course, you gotta ask yourself a question: Do you actually want people to subscribe to your feed? If you answered “yes“, awesome! If you answered “no“, please leave a comment and tell us why.

Hope this little “how to” will be helpful to some of you, if you know other ways to promote your feed, please leave a comment and feel the pleasure of sharing your experiences and knowledge!

By the way, see that orange subscribe button in my sidebar? :P
Take care!

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Tags: Blogging, Internet, Online Business, Optimization //

If you enjoyed this post you might want to consider subscribing to my RSS Feed, and you can also receive updates in your e-mail, so you'll always be up to date. Thanks! ;)

19 Responses to “How To Promote Your RSS Feed - And Get More Feed Readers”

Robin Bal // Apr 21, 2007 at 2:45 pm

Do I actually want people to subscribe to your feed? The answer is yes yes yes, but I do not have a RSS button or link at all.

Why? simply because I don’t know how to fix it, I have tried a few times and tried to follow the so called simple steps but failed, its a miracle I am able to run a blog in first place.

I subscribe to your feed and I would like people to subscribe to mine. I am not unduly worried because I know you are going to help me fix that cute little orange button on my site : wink : .

Hope to catch you on skype soon mate.

Take care and cheers
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 21, 2007 at 3:30 pm

Hey Robin! I sure will help you out with that buddy! :) We have really different timezones, so i’ll try to be online tomorrow for a good part of the day, so we can fix this thing. Take care!
Glenn Hawkins // Apr 21, 2007 at 5:07 pm

I only have 6 readers as of right now, I think I got my feed to work all the time now by installing the plugin, but as for the comments feed…That’s another story, because it works about 1/3 of the time, going to the 404 page the other 2/3 of the time.
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 21, 2007 at 5:21 pm

Glenn, you installed the ‘full text feed’ plugin?
I noticed that on your blog, you have, at the top of your sidebar this feed button, that leads to your feedburner url, but in your latest posts section in your sidebar you have this little rss button to the right that leads to .com/feed/ , maybe a good move would be to chage this to link to your feedburner url, and also change the links in your footer to go to feedburner. If you need help hit me up bro! ;)
Jag // Apr 21, 2007 at 10:37 pm

Hi Jon,

Nice tips. I actually am doing some of the tips you pointed out already such as adding in a line at the end of every post to remind everyone to subscribe. This is can be easily and 1 time, by just adding the line into the single.php file. Will be hands off afterwards.

I also noticed that big eye catching RSS feeds icon attracts clicks pretty well.

One thing about feedburner which I’m not sure. Maybe you can help me answer.

I get an average of 12 subscribers a day at my site based on Feedburner stats, but I don’t know how much of it are actually bots. I only see the kind of feed aggregators used to collect my feed. A bit lost here when it comes to interpreting the stats. Any clue?

Thanks!

Cheers,
Jag
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 21, 2007 at 11:29 pm

Hi Jag, one quick note about the feed button, i believe that if the first thing a new visitor sees when he/she visits a blog is the RSS button, it’s maybe not a good thing. Say you have a imensely huge rss button, sure people will click, but a lot of people have no clue what RSS is, so they might get confused a little, so i think it’s good to have a RSS button and the “e-mail updates” thing, but if it distracts the readers maybe it’s too big.

As for how to interpret the stats, most of my rss readers are using either google reader of recieving updates via e-mail. I think it’s kinda hard to interpret the stats, since one can take the feed and enter it in the feed reader he/she wants. One thing to keep in mind is the number of feed hits vs the number of actual subscribers. I read that on feedburners’ help section, when someone clicks on your feed link or loads it in a feed readers, those are counted as hits, but not necessarly as subscribers. I do have a couple of hits from google bot and sphere bot, but not a lot.
Dave // Apr 22, 2007 at 1:26 am

Jon, the other day, Daniel at dailyblogtips.com suggested that we not run our feeds through feedburner. I haven’t changed mine but he did offer some really good reasons. :grin:
Jag // Apr 22, 2007 at 3:00 am

Hi Jon,

Yes you may be right about this. That’s why I still keep both the big icon and the normall RSS feed button, just for testing sake. Similarly, I keep the ‘update by email’ button. However it seems more people are subscribing to via feed much more that via email.

For feedburners, the stats give the value by number of subscribers, which is for me, an average of 12 daily over the period of April. I’m not quite sure if it is that high. Have to check a bit more on this.

Thanks anyway!

Cheers,
Jag
Glenn Hawkins // Apr 22, 2007 at 12:38 pm

Jon, Thanks for the help offer, But I will be changing themes soon once I figure out a little more stuff about the sidebar ;)
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 22, 2007 at 2:54 pm

Hey Dave! interesting post over at at dailybloggingtips.com, i’ve thought about this, but reading Daniels’ post makes me wonder a lot about feedburner, i’ll definitely try to redirect, i kinda like to have control over my stuff! Thanx a bunch for telling me about this Dave! :)
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 22, 2007 at 2:59 pm

Jag, same here, most of my subscribers are reading the feed in a feed reader, instead of subscribing to the e-mail updates thing.

Dave mentionned a post over at dailyblogtips about rss, i think it’s really worth reading.

You can also check in you feedburner stats, and see how many of those 12 are bots, there’s a section in “analyze->feed stats->subscribers” where you can see how many of your “subscribers” are bots.

:)
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 22, 2007 at 2:59 pm

Glenn, you could try out the iSmart 1.0 theme! hehe
David Airey :: Creative Design :: // Apr 25, 2007 at 4:10 am

Feedburner is a great tool for RSS. For email subscriptions I use Feedblitz, mainly because I started with it before subscribing to Feedburner. It does a good job though.

Thanks for stopping over at my design blog.
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 25, 2007 at 10:16 am

Hi David, thanx for stopping by SWR, please make yourself at home, hope you find stuff of interest to you on here! ;)

I haven’t really looked into feedblitz, probably cause i’ve heard of feedburner sooner, might be interesting to check it out anyway.

Take care
Aniela // Apr 25, 2007 at 6:59 pm

Good tips. I’ve tried some of them in the past and they definitely work. The more subscribers, the better :)
tanguy // Apr 25, 2007 at 7:45 pm

Hi,
the shortcome could be less comments and interactivity on your blog, when ppl get used to your feed, and this is pretty sad.
But the more suscribers , the more credential you get from the blog community.. that’s for sure.
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 25, 2007 at 8:11 pm

Hi Aniela! Howz it going?
Absolutely, the more subscribers the better, it’s like a vote of confidence from your readers when they subscribe to your feed. feels good to see those numbers go up :)
Jonathan-C. Phillips // Apr 25, 2007 at 8:15 pm

Tanguy, first welcome to SWR, make yourself at home! It’s a trade-off for sure, we all want people to keep commenting on our blog(s). (and thanx a lot for doing so :) ). On the other hand, i removed the nofollow attribute in the comments section, so it entices people to actually leave their feed readers, visit my blog and leave a comment, win-win. Commenters get a linkback from my blog by leaving a comment, but if they don’t feel like leaving a comment, if the post isn’t interesting to them, or don’t want to add to the discussions, it’s fine also, and hopefully the next day i’ll write a post that’ll make them wanna comment.
Lais Edward // Sep 2, 2007 at 3:26 am

Can u help me out in increasing my site on Fox Prison Break…just bcoz this is such a great tv show…that all can creave for it if they see it atleast once!!!