Blogs gotta Eat Too! Here are 39 Great Ways to Feed Your blog so it Grows
- Educate Your Readers – How can they subscribe to an RSS Feed, if they don’t KNOW what an RSS Feed is?It is essential to discuss what an rss feed is, what a feed reader is, and how to subscribe, don’t assume your readers are the most tech savvy, go slow and have patience with them. You may also want to give them some links to feed reader programs and sites.Examples:
- Give them the Email Option. Feed readers are the rave, most of us know how to use them, and have a favorite feed reader, but not ALL of us. Some people aren’t comfortable with new software – so offer them something familiar – a way to subscribe via email. Feedburner, and Feedblitz, are two companies that make this easy.I highly recommend using feedburner, in fact I’d say that feedburner is a necessary tool for a successful blogger. Besides giving an email option, you can also use feedburner to track how many subscribers you have, and there are a myriad of great features inside feedburner that just make blogging easier. You can even make money with it!Feedburner Email Example:
- Feedcount example:
- Throw a Contest. A lot of blogs I’ve noticed are using this tactic more and more. Blog contests can drive a lot of traffic to your site, and making the only entry requirement, having them subscribe ensures that you will get a lot of entries, and each entry is a new subscriber. Here’s some good articles on running a good contest:
- Give something away. Rewarding people for subscribing is a great way to build a large subscriber base, free hosting, free wordpress installation, entrecard credits, ebooks, etc…Here’s a good Wordpress plugin to help you along: WP RSS Sticky
- Promote it Boldly, with a graphic. Above the fold. Like mine is! By the way if you haven’t subscribed yet, maybe you should now, before you forget!
- Contribute to online communities. Promote the feed on forums / comments / email signatures, etc..wherever you can ethically post your link. Another good way to do this is answer a lot of questions on yahoo answers, and keep your feed subscription link in your signature, this is a wonderful way to build yourself up as an authority on an issue, and with credibility come the flock of subscribers.Maki – from Dosh Dosh – wrote “how you can increase your RSS subscriptions through comments alone.”
- Use Full Feeds. I’m an American, I don’t know about the rest of the world but I’m lazy and most people are, people are also impatient, they do not want to have to visit your site, wait for it to load, etc…Make your feed a full feed, and your subscribers will love you, and they may stick around for the long haul.
- Run an ad campaign. Use a special landing page designed to receive subscribers to your blog. Giving something away on this page could be a bonus, you could also use entrecard and promote a landing page as well, designed to drive people to subscribe to your blog, one thing you might do here is list some of your best blog posts.
- Write compelling content. Of course when it all boils down, compelling content is the best surefire way to build and keep people coming back to your blog, and subscribing to your feed.
- Be a Guest Blogging Pro. A good way to introduce yourself to new people, is via guest blogging on other’s blogs, especially if you can land a spot on a blog with a little more authority or reach than your own.
- Start a Podcast. Podcasts are great way to gain more visitors, there are many people who love and follow podcasts, and for those who are camera shy, it beats youtube. Although youtube videos would be another method.
- Network with other bloggers. Probably one of the biggest, the more friends you have the more people you have linking to your best posts. I know I don’t always have something to write about so I write a small overview of a post someone else wrote and link to the post(of course this benefits me because of the pingback/trackback)
- Cross Promotional Deals. Using the blogs that you networked with in step 12, as a starting point you can show a link to their rss subscription link in your feed, and they can do the same for you. The biggest benefit of this is that everyone who sees your link, is seeing it because they are subscribed to an rss feed – or in other words, they are familiar with rss, and don’t need to be educated. Here are some plugins to help in setting up text ads on your feeds:
- Use Feedflare. Feedflare is a built in plugin through feedburner which will make it easy for people to stumble, digg, or bookmark your blog.
- Use Noindex. This will keep search engines from indexing your feed, and will thus help from getting duplicate content.
- A little black hat for you. Find popular blogs not using feedburner and burn their feed as yours. Then have feedburner link the feed to yours, automatically you will have a large number of subscribers. This isn’t very ethical, but alas I figured I’d list it here, as I found it through another blog.
- Get Social! Use the following social media sites, and be sure to bookmark your posts. You should also focus to building relationships on these sites and gathering friends.
- Use catchy headlines. In the inundation of information, you only have 1-3 seconds to catch someone’s attention enough to make them click on your post, the more catchy, and un-boring the headline the more likely you are to win their attention for the next 5 minutes.
- Enlist the help of friends. Sort of along the lines of networking, but instead of building new friends, use your existing network to spread the word about your blog.
- SEO and SEM. It’s a no brainer if people find your site via search engines, and see a post they like, they are more likely to keep coming back, and might subscribe to your feed.
- Post as if your life were on the line. The More posts, the more people will find your blog. Also the more valuable your blog will be, but keep the topics relevant.You really need to post at least one blog post per day, it doesn’t matter if you write them all during the week you should use the timestamp feature to make them post later on in the day or week, the best time a day for blog posts are usually between 8am and noon Eastern time, in my opinion.
- Stick to your niche. At least try and stick to your niche as much as possible, it will keep your seo high, and your subscribers will be satisfied, after all – they subscribed because they like the stuff you’re writing about – don’t change niches, and expect them to stick around.
- Citations from other bloggers in your niche. Or blog reviews. Getting write-ups from other bloggers is a good way to gain credibility and authority. If you can get some citations, whether by asking, trading, or just writing content that is so damn good everybody wants to link to it, you will see your subscriber count skyrocket.
- Pillar Articles. You Must have 5 Pillar Articles as soon as possible, these will make or break you. I recommend writing one per week, or every two weeks at the least. You also will want to put a link to these prominently on your blog.
- Linkbait & Traffic Bait. Link bait, is just something like a blog post, picture, video, etc that pulls in people, its sometimes viral and people share it with their friends, good examples of linkbait can be found at the front of digg, and reddit.
- GEt listed in Blog / Rss Directories. Here are a few lists:
- Be sure you’re pinging. Pinging basically notifies rss and blog directories that your blog has updated, and a lot of people check the rss sites when they are looking for topics to read. Two really good ping sites are ping-o-matic, and pingoat.
- Share the link love(don’t let them know you’re really being greedy…). Include plenty of outbound links to blogs with relevant posts, this adds credibility to your post, provides your readers with more information on the topic they’re searching for, and also gives you some trackback and link love on the blog that you’re linking to. Especially if you link to blogs that remove nofollow on trackbacks / pingbacks.
- Widgetize your Blog. Use mybloglog, blogcatalog, bumpzee, digg, and reddit widgets. Gregarious is a good wordpress plugin that helps with this.
- Make sure your blogs’ autodiscovery feature is working. This is pretty simple you basically just need to add some html to your blog in the header file. Here’s the code that you should add:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" Â title="RSS Feed for theresabloginmysoup.com" Â href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheresABlogInMySoup" mce_href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheresABlogInMySoup" />
- Get personal! Send personalized emails to each commenter on your blog, and at the end of the email ask them to do you a favor and subscribe to your blog – make this as personal as possible and this is a great way to network. Also if any readers send you an email, please make sure to email them asap, and again ask them to subscribe.Also of course you definitely MUST answer and respond to ALL comments, asap. Your blog should feel more like a community site, or at the least a question and answer session.
- Write easy to scan content. Most people who use readers have limited attention and patience – they usually want the meat of what you have to say and they want it now! I bet half of you reading this now, are just reading the subtopics in bold, but that’s ok. I also know many of you have subscribed, or will subscribe.
- Participate in Blog Carnivals. Blog carnivals are great ways to gain new subscribers, alas it is beyond the scope of this article, and this is actually one spot that I myself could use some more experience in, but here are some good articles on blog carnivals:
- Hire Guest Bloggers. Encourage bloggers to post guest posts on your blog. Their fans will usually check out your blog, and they will usually link up their guest posts, plus it’s free totally unique high quality content for your blog. I don’t see how you can go wrong.
- Become an Authority. If you help people who have questions on sites like Yahoo Answers. Also becoming very active in Forums and linking to some of your pillar articles, and your RSS feed url, will drastically grow your feed. I recommend that you regularly post to 6-8 forums relating to your blog. I’d also recommend that you find the highest ranking forums for your niche, as not all forums are created equal. Don’t just rely on one ranking method though.I’d recommend checking their alexa ranking, google pr, and if they remove nofollow from signatures that’s a big bonus(if they don’t have signatures, then you should stay away from the forum altogether…from a marketing standpoint.)
- Post a Series. Start a series of posts, if you grab your readers attention, then they will subscribe so that they don’t miss the conclusion.
- Display your Subscriber Stats. Once you reach 100 subscribers display your RSS Subscriber count, people like to follow, and seeing that you have a large following will push some into subscribing.
- Collaborate with other bloggers. This can be a lot of fun you could co-write a series of posts, and alternate which blog you post it on, you can share ads with each other’s rss feed, you can start a business together, etc.. Anything’s possible.
- Remind your Subscribers. Adding a ‘If you liked this post, please subscribe to my feed’ link at the end of each blog post is a good way to get a few more subscribers. There’s a really great plugin for this called Subscribe-Remind, check it out!
This list is by no means complete and full, I’m definitely going to be adding more as I learn more. I’ve scoured the net for the most accurate and up-to-date information on building RSS subscribers.
Below are some of the wonderful resources I’ve found regarding getting more rss subscribers:
- Â How to increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 days!
- 11 Ways to find New Rss Subscribers for your Blog
- Shoemoney’s guide to getting more Rss Subscribers via Feedburner
- Subscribe Remind – A great plugin to remind your readers to subscribe.
- Top 5 Ways to Get More RSS Subscribers
- Get More RSS Feed Subscribers!
- What the Heck is RSS?
- How to get Traffic and Links from Popular Blogs
- 35 Guaranteed ways to increase your RSS Subscribers
- The Great Explanation of RSS
- Free Rss Feed Icon Generator
- 3 Reasons you Desparately NEED rss subscribers
- How to increase rss feedburner subscribers
- Join the 500 subscribers per month Challenge
- Why you should Want More Subscribers and How to Get them
- The Ultimate RSS ToolBox 120+ Resources for RSS
- 30+ Wordpress plugins to get More Blog Readers
More from Theresabloginmysoup
- 7 Ways to be Best Buds with an A-List Blogger!
- Is your Blog a Dead Beast? 16 Ways Bring it to life!
- Surest way NOT to Make Money Online: Blog about Making Money Online!
![Recommend [1309]](http://s3.amazonaws.com/arkayne-media/img/logo-recommend-me.png){kind=logo}
Related Posts -
6 Easy ways to get more Subscribers. 6 Techniques to get more RSS Subscribers to your Blog! 1. Comment on someone's blog who has as many or nearly as many subscribers as you do - Tell them you've subscribed to their blog. They may reciprocate - a lot will. 2. Ask your Readers to subscribe. Make it......
-
Review of RSS Hugger by Collin Lahay. Collin Lahay has launched a service called RSSHugger, which is basically an rss directory meets wiki. He allows bloggers the opportunity to promote their blogs easily just by adding them to the directory. You can add your own blog for only $20, or you can get it added for free...... -
The Twitter-Monster is hungry. Let's Feed It! Twitter is a Monster of a Promotion Tool - Let's Try an Experiment... Over the past two weeks, I've learned a lot about maximizing twitter. Before, I didn't know the point of Twitter, now because of Twitter, I'm getting steady traffic around 800-1000 hits per day. (Not too shabby after...... -
Is your Blog a Dead Beast? 16 Ways Bring it to life! [/caption] I launched this blog a year ago this month, and when I first launched it my primary focus was to make money. I've learned a lot in that year, and made many mistakes. I actually gave up on this blog for about 7 months. I came back to...... -
6 Reasons you need to Join my Newsletter! [/caption] Before I give you my top 6 reasons for joining my newsletter, I want to let you know about an upcoming contest. I will be launching a contest soon. Details are top-secret, but those who are subscribed to my newsletter BEFORE the contest begins will get 3x the......
Related Websites - P2P No Bank -- Aggregating P2P Lending Blogs — Covering Kiva, Lending Club, Prosper, Zopa, and more. I think my readers would like to know about: P2P No Bank. P2PNoBank aggregates all known blogs that blog about p2p lending semi-regularly. It does not steal content as it only shows an excerpt. Readers must read the entire content on the source site. However, it does pull all blogs......
-
Smart Steps for Building Blog Traffic This is part two in a three part series on the steps for building blog traffic. If you are looking for quick and simple ways for building blog traffic, or more involved ways with bigger returns, keep reading for some great information. 1 - Participate in related blogs and forum...... -
Increase Blog Traffic Today, pt2 Here is part two in our series for learning how to increase blog traffic today. 7 - Sign It With Your Blog - Add a link to your blog website in the signature file for your e-mail accounts as well as forum accounts and other accounts where signature files are...... -
welcome aboard! If you're new to Brip Blap I'd like to welcome you and point out a few things. But before I do that I want to thank you for reading and tell you that I'm excited by every single new visitor to the site. Whether you're reading a feed, visiting the...... - Pseudo-vacation I'm not sure it's all I ever wanted, but I could definitely stand to get away. For the rest of the month of June, I will be decreasing my posting frequency. I will be here, and I will be posting, but it won't be the five+ times a week you......
RSS
Twitter
Buzz
Facebook
LinkedIn
Digg
Delicious
