How you can find New RSS Subscribers for your blog

Well, over the 6 months period, I have seen Balkhis (my baby) grow. The growth has surprised many along with myself. Why? Because the site is doing very good. Revenue, subscirbers, traffic and everything is increasing. I kinda analyzed a few of my tricks and look for some on other blogs as well. Than I decided to write this article because I know some bloggers take RSS Subscribers as a motivation, and if they don’t get alot of success, they tend to quit or pay less attention to their blog.

Personally, I don’t let any opportunity pass by. I will try to get as many subscribers as I can. Thats how most bloggers are, but how many are successful? Not all…

So read on this post and you might find some of my tips helpful because I will answer the question how can you find New RSS Subscribers for your blog.

If you haven’t noticed in your stats, you should see that you are getting a decent amount of traffic, but your RSS Subscribers are not increasing, so your first place to find your new RSS Subscribers for your blog is inside your own blog.

First thing you should do on your blog is make your RSS icons more noticeable. I am not saying make it 500 x 500px. Just place it towards the top, preferably on the first fold. I see so many bloggers who have their RSS Feeds toward the bottom of the blog. Even worst, they don’t even have a button. They just have a link in their meta box. So they might get 5000 unique visitors a month and still only have 25 subscribers. You should make your RSS Button attractive. Give it its own style. Check out some of the Best Design Practices for RSS and Free RSS Icon collection. The reason why I say that you should make your RSS link a button is because images catches more attention. They stand out among the rest of the blog because blogs are mostly text. If you have your RSS Button a link, it won’t be as noticeable, so you are losing the subscribers that you can possibly have. So by just making this simple change to your blog design, you can find New RSS Subscribers.

Second thing you can do is have more than one option. What do I mean by that? Well I see alot of blogs are offering RSS Feeds. Some bloggers just don’t want to take an initiative of joining a new service therefore they just use the default wordpress feeds. Which looks something like the image below:

Plain, and Boring. You only have one option to subscribe. Not so good. Whereas if you use feedburner you have so many other options. You give your users a way to subscribe via Google feeds, Newsvine, Email, Yahoo and more…

The bottom line is that you give your users more options. What that does is before your reader would have to check your blog via XML Feeds, but now he/she can subscribe via his favorite service (the one he/she uses the most). Or even by email. You just need to have those options available, because the more options you have available, the better your chances gets. So consider joining Feedburner and have all the options available. Like I have on Balkhis. I can assure you that alot of your readers who were reading your blogs and weren’t subscribed will start to subscribe to your blog, and you will get New RSS Subscribers. Even new readers who visit your blog will see the options available and take the time out to subscribe to your feed through their favorite RSS reader.

Another thing you should do is make sure that your feeds are discoverable. Basically all websites that have feeds like sites run by wordpress and other scripts have this feature built in the design, but sometimes designers accidently remove it.

Basically in your browser you will see a rss icon next to your url. Alot of people use that to subscribe to your blog, but if your blog don’t have it you might be losing subscribers. So make sure you check on that.

Change your RSS feeds to Full RSS Feeds – I have had my argument on this issue on this post, but over the past I have seen that full RSS feeds tend to do better. Because people subscribe more if they get the entire thing because it saves them time. Readers don’t want to read half of your post via rss than the other half on your blog. So if you have full rss feeds available then you increase your chances of getting New RSS Subscribers.

A key thing that I notice that works is that you give special bonus to RSS Subscribers. Some people do random contests every month, some people give away ebooks. You know what I give away. I give away one customized wordpress design every month to my lucky RSS Readers. This program is called Pimp My Blog if you wish to read up on it. When you do this, people tend to subscribe. I get so many new subscribers because they want to win the Pimp My Blog. I know I subscribed to some blogs just to get their ebooks. Why? Because I read the person’s blog, and I like their content. So I want to see what else they know. Therefore I subscribe to get an ebook. Now if I am doing it, and I am a normal reader, so there are other people who are doing it too.

Promote your RSS Feeds. Can it get any more simple? Just promote it. No one said you only have to put your rss feed link on your blog only once. No put it whereever you like. Heck I will put one right here just so you can subscribe to Balkhis. Well if you notice, I try to put my feed URL in alot of places. First it is in the first fold. Then it is below every post. Then it is in Comment Relish Plugin. It is in alot of other places as well. Sometimes it is in some of my posts that recieve alot of traffic.

But don’t limit yourself just for your own blog. Be creative. Sometimes people put their feed url as their url when they comment on other blogs. I remember one of my top commentators once had it. Also when you are writing guest posts on other blogs, you can ask the blogger if you can include your feed url. If you are writing articles on ezinearticles or somewhere you can include your feed url. Like I said, successful blogger needs to have an open mind and must be creative. So be creative.

This last option is only for people who run a blog that targets other than webmaster audience. I never had this issue because most of my readers know what RSS is, but I will write a RSS educating article in the near future. You need to Educate your Readers. Some of you who target non-tech savvy people can potentially be losing alot of RSS Subscribers because your readers don’t know what RSS is. So educate them. Write a breif article explaining what RSS is and how it is beneficial for them, and you will get New RSS Subscribers. Now I always like people to be original and creative, but sometimes it gets tough on people when they are trying to write a guide article. Use Wikipedia, or some other site.

Well these are the ways that I found that helped me getting new RSS Subscribers. Ofcourse I will use my own advice and add my RSS Link. Subscribe to Balkhis RSS feeds, they are full feed and you should know by know that I hate spam.