Attracting RSS and Email Subscribers

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Writing my task list the night before has increased my productivity, one of the things I wanted to do for a while was add an email subscription option to both here and CG. That was added to my list last night and done today, so if you want to receive a daily email from us containing the day’s post(s) simply fill in the form on the right hand side.

One thing I thought that would be interesting is to learn how our readers prefer to follow sites. So if you can spare 5 seconds please give us your vote here (email and RSS subscribers will have to visit the site).

How do you follow sites that you read regularly.
  • Add an Answer
View Results


Having a good feed count makes your traffic a lot more stable so promoting your feed is important for blogs and any other site with regular new content. To get started:

  • Publish a full feed
    This may mean less visitors to your site but overall you’ll have more readers which is what you want long term
  • Provide Email and RSS Options
    Not everybody knows about or uses RSS, however we all have an email account
  • Promote your feed in your posts
    Look for reasons to include a link to your feed in your posts, if you’re doing a multi part post advise subscribing to read the next installment
  • Mutually beneficial feed adverts
    Network with other similar themed bloggers and see if they want to swap feed adverts, they advertise their feed in your feed and vice versa. If you have over a thousand subscribers and a similar themed blog to SMM get in touch and we’ll see what we can arrange.
  • Contests purely for subscribers
    Run contests on your site purely for subscribers

I will be doing a follow up post with the poll results and other ways to promote your feed so if you thank there is any methods that we should add please let us know via a comment and full credit will be given in the next part (if you want the next part delivered to your machine don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email 🙂 ).

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. We had the discussion of Feed Reader Usage on some Danish blogs last week and nobody can find stats to tell us what the situation really is. It would great to know what percentage of normal surfers (not readers of SEO/SEM/Internet tech blogs)really use RSS. Is it almost all or almost none?

    • That would be an interesting stat to find out. I believe a good % of my readers are other bloggers looking for content. However, when you see the huge 70K+ readers of coolest gadgets I wonder what the % breakdown is.

  2. I’m all about RSS. I occassionally do the actual site visit too. 🙂

  3. I’ve been heavily using RSS recently because I broke my laptop (spilt tea on it!) so relied on my ipod touch to keep me on the net, and google reader is nice and easy to use on the touch. That said, I do prefer going to an actual site if the article is interesting.

  4. I use RSS to read other sites.

    On my site, I have a page which explains what RSS is to people and offer them the opportunity to subscribe via RSS, email, social bookmarking, etc.

    Lane of VeganBits.com

  5. I generally go direct to the site, although I only have a couple of sites I regularly visit.

  6. Never really got on with RSS readers, maybe I just didn’t use the right one. I just organise my bookmarks in firefox and check my favourite sites daily. Just seems easier for me that way. Might give RSS readers another go though, any recommendations? I don’t really want any more emails each day 🙂 (he says clicking the follow up by email option)

  7. My major problem is that I just don’t have the time to write enough to continue to keep my subscribers

  8. I really do dislike sites that do not publish full feeds. As far as I am concerned it almost makes the feed worthless. All it is doing at this point is letting you know there is a new post to read. If all you send is a headline and short blurb then email is better than rss.

  9. I prefer going directly to the site whenever I have a little time to read the new posts. Otherwise, I run the risk of getting distracted too much if I receive an email I am interested in when I am working on something else. I prefer to go to the site & read whenever I am in the mood and have the time of doing so.

  10. Feed readers are something I try to avoid as it means scanning through hundreds of updates whereas I’d prefer to just browse and find new content myself.

    I known from experience that you can become obsessed with keeping up to date with everything that’s going on but then the constant checking gets in the way of working and being productive.. and building more sites that make money!!

  11. Personally, I prefer to use RSS to quickly browse sites then go off and read the full article on site. I’m currently in the process of planning a bingo site where getting email subscribers will be key to targeting those people who are more than likely to be regular paying players.

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