All bloggers want more subscribers, agreed?
Many of us would love to just wave a magic want and have a six-figure feed count. Unfortunately while there are tried and true methods for increasing your readership, they don’t tend to work over night.
Having said that there are a great many bloggers who are actually holding their own subscriber count back. Effectively sabotaging their own audience. Read on to see if you are making the same mistakes with your own feeds …
- Not allowing Email – The exact percentage varies but on my own blog at least 40% of my subscribers sign up with email. That’s right, you could be cutting out around half of your potential audience. Still think allowing visitors to subscribe via email is a waste of time?
- Hiding your feeds – If a visitor has to search around for your feed they will more likely just give up. In fact, many visitors will not even realize you can subscribe to your blog. Put feeds where they can be found.
- Not promoting plain RSS – Sometimes a blogger will provide specific buttons for all sorts of feed readers thinking they are being helpful, not realizing that for a great many of us the standard RSS button is what we look for and need in order to subscribe. Even users of other services will look for the RSS button to know where the feed options are hiding.
- No benefit – “Get your RSS here” might work for a savvy minority but other visitors will need encouragement. Some times you have to sell your visitor on subscribing. Why should they subscribe? What is in it for them? Explain what they will get and why that is important.
- Bad timing – If your subscription options are only in your sidebar then you are missing the visitor when they are most likely to be motivated to sign up. Put your subscription options right under your posts; if they are ever going to be warm towards your blog it will be after just having read a killer article.
Just fixing these five mistakes could make all the difference between no subscribers and a growing audience.
Got your own tips? Share in the comments! :)
