How to Increase Your RSS Subscribers
A great way to increase interaction with visitors is to have an RSS feed for readers to subscribe to. The feed is similar to a newsletter in that you can push your content to the reader instead of relying on the visitor to come back to your site for updates. A lot of blogs also display the FeedBurner widget with the number of subscribers they have, so it's a badge of a blog's popularity. Let's take a look at a few simple steps to increase your RSS subscribers.
Make Your Signup Button Big and Obvious
The visitor needs to be able to quickly and easily find your RSS button. If I come across a great article and I want to be able to sign up for the blog's feed, I don't spend a long time looking around the site for the button or subscribe link. If I don't find it quickly then I move on thinking the site doesn't provide one.
Offer a Full Feed
Don't just offer short excerpts of all of your posts, but instead provide a full feed. Some people think if they offer only a short piece of a post with a read more link that will drive readers to the actual site where the advertisements are, but instead it just pisses people off enough to unsubscribe.
Subscriber Count
This is the cool little widget I was talking about from FeedBurner. People like to follow the herd, so if you have more than 50 readers, display this next to your RSS symbol and it can actually increase the chances of someone subscribing. If you don't have at least 50 readers already then do not post the number on your site. People will think, "Well since nobody else subscribes so I guess it's not worth it for me either."
Subscribe by Email
I have already talked about how much I like Aweber in my post on how to get more email subscribers, but here is another reason, Aweber counts all of your newsletter subscribers as RSS subscribers so you can build your number up quickly (remember the 50 limit mark before displaying the FeedBurner widget). The reason for Aweber including the newsletter subscribers as RSS readers is that they will send your RSS feed out to people via email, updating them of all the subscriber of all of the new posts. You can set the frequency to whatever you feel comfortable with, but I currently use once a week and the email comes in list format.
Do you have any other techniques that you use to increase your RSS subscribers? If so I would love to hear about them in the comments.