Comments on: How To Increase Your RSS Subscriber Numbers

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:11:33 +0000

I just happened to stmble across this blog posts through alltop.com while looking for interesting articles to tweet about. I am glad I saw this one. I am new to the blogging world and was looking at ways to drive traffic to my blog and increase subscribers. Thank you for the useful information.

By: Octavio Corral

Octavio Corral — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:29:11 +0000

Great Advice! One thing I would like to add though that I think should be the icing on the cake to make it all work is: Design your blog so it is easy to subscribe. For example, a subscribe by e-mail field. or how you have it, clearly defined icons. I am guilty of not doing this on my own blog. I need to re-tweak the sidebar of my own site.

http://thenetsetter.com/blog/ provides a great example of easy to subscribe icons

A few months back Darren Hoyt wrote a great post on successfully advertising an RSS feed and how many people still have no clue what it is.

http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2008/12/04/effectively-advertising-an-rss-feed/

By: Callum Chapman

Callum Chapman — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:32:09 +0000

Hey Brian, this is the first time I’ve been on your blog, found it through DesignBump (another great way to get targeted traffic, been working really well for me lately!). I agree with everything you’ve said, I recently did my first web round-up, called 30 Top Design Blogs for Great Tutorials & Inspiration, and so far it’s been promoted on Design Bump, and got about 150 visits, which isn’t bad considering my blog is new.

Thanks for the great tips though, you have a new subscriber!

By: Deanacus

Deanacus — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:37:00 +0000

I would like to echo the comments above with a mention of excerpt feeds. The ONLY excerpt feed that I put up with was Zeldman’s, however if I’m not mistaken he has changed that in the last few days. It just reeks of someone who wants more click-thru traffic, whether to make their hit counts increase, or to improve ad revenue, it doesn’t matter. Give me the choice, and more often than not, I’ll end up reading the post on your site anyway.

That’s my 5 cents worth (inflation hits everything eventually). Nice post

By: shravan

shravan — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:21:12 +0000

Quite informative post but moreover I just love your blog design. Very elegant and beautiful.
In future I ever think of redesigning by blog I would love to work with you to redesign it.

By: Brian Yerkes

Brian Yerkes — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:11:42 +0000

Thanks everyone for your comments.

Tracey, Under the “Share This” icon at the end of the post you can share this post on twitter….but I think it may be too hidden. I will probably try out that retweet button I have been seeing around the place.

By: Tracey Grady

Tracey Grady — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:01:29 +0000

There are a lot of other ways you can get thousands of rss subscribers, like asking your mum to create thousands of Google reader accounts

Oh no! My secret’s out now (just kidding). All good pieces of advice, including those in the comments.
I would include that you should link to your twitter account from your blog, and consider adding a plugin which allows people to easily and quickly tweet your blog posts.
This is one aspect of twitter that I particularly enjoy: that I get an extra level of interaction with people who have subscribed to my blog!

By: Jonathan@365icon

Jonathan@365icon — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:15:13 +0000

i enjoyed reading this post. i highly agree that the content should be of quality and thought out. that is huge. i also agree that commenting is a great way to not only get additional site recognition, but to communicate with others in the design community altogether. Great post.

By: Jonze

Jonze — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:42:49 +0000

I have to agree with the comment above, if the feed doesn’t have most of the content of the posts I unsubscribe!

I like it when posts have a retweet button. A few blogs I subscribe to have started using the button, it’s really handy. I like the idea of people being able to tweet my blog posts easily when I start to get a few readers. At least, I hope they’ll do it!!!

http://tweetmeme.com/

I really enjoyed this article! I just started a blog so it’s really handy

By: Martin McCool

Martin McCool — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:44:17 +0000

I just had to add: make sure your RSS feed is set up to deliver full posts, not just headlines.
Any time I subscribe to a blogger’s RSS and I find I am just receiving a list of headlines, or headlines plus the first sentence of the article, there is a very high chance I will unsubscribe immediately. That one extra click to the content is a real turn off to me. Luckily your feed is set up right so I’ll stay tuned for now and you can count +1.
An even more elegant option is to have 2 RSS links offering either headlines or full articles (possibly extra coding/research required).
As for me, I don’t have any shameless self-promotion on my agenda tonight, so I’ll just indulge in some link-free holier-than-thou posturing to finish off this comment. Et voilà!