10 Simple Steps to Increase Your RSS Subscribers

1) Write quality content – People will not subscribe if all they’ll find in your blog are rants, the food you ate and more of your rants. Provide useful information that they could use for whatever it is they’re doing. The more they find your voice helpful, the more they will subscribe.

2) Write interesting content – Similarly, people will also subscribe if they could relate to your content and find it unique and interesting. People don’t only flock on useful things. They also tend to gather on things that appeal to them even if it’s not as useful.

3) Make catchy headlines – This is your article’s introduction. It’s the first impression that they’ll make of your post before they read it. If your titles are boring, that would instantly affect how they’ll receive the following lines of words you make. What do you think make girls buy glossy magazines just by looking at its cover? The same should also apply to your blog. Just convert buying into subscribing.

4) Make it easy to read – Make sure that your posts are easy on the eyes. Don’t publish research articles and blocks upon blocks of words that will intimidate the usual internet user suffering from attention deficit disorder. Use bullets to enumerate ideas. Use subheadings to break your train of thought in parts. And most importantly, use white spaces effectively. Don’t make one huge block of paragraph that’s hardly pleasing and difficult to read. It’s all about making it easy for the brain to digest your information quickly.

5) Get a clean and organized template – Imagine a non web-savvy internet user searching for answers in Google landing in your messy blog. How do you think he’ll browse what you have to offer and subscribe to your blog if you don’t have any links to your previous posts or it is buried 100 feet below your pile of useless widgets? Before anything else, your blog must serve its primary function which is to “SERVE YOUR CONTENT” and not to forecast your city’s weather or watch your neon ads. Emphasize your content, subscribe widgets, search box, categories, archives and anything else that will point to what your blog has to offer. Throw the rest away, or put them someplace where they can’t distract your potential subscribers.

6) Post regularly – Don’t write just when you feel like it. Also, don’t write like there’s no tomorrow (unless you’re a huge blogging institution). Determine your posting frequency like once or twice a day, thrice or twice a week, but never once a month. People hate it when you’re slacking; they also hate it when you’re too hyperactive that they can’t keep up with you. Just get the right blend. By posting regularly, the more people will know what they could expect from you. You’ll be keeping your current readers plus you’ll be pulling in new ones.

7) Stick to your niche – Keep posting relevant articles about your theme or topic. Your readers are expecting you to write more about it. By writing more about it, the more you become an expert on that field which leads to better posts which will lead further to more subscribers.

8) Make it easy to subscribe – Place your subscribe buttons where people can see them immediately. Offer email subscription for those who are not using feed readers. Additionally, ask your readers to subscribe to your blog through messages at the end of every post that tells them to consider subscribing to your updates. I’m not using it yet but I’m beginning to believe that they really work.

9) Tell the rest of the blogosphere about your blog – Tell more people about your blog not just your circle of friends. Make “useful” comments in other blogs to pull in readers from that blog. Join social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, etc and submit your posts. Join forums and use your blog url as your footer signature. Submit your rss feed to rss directories. Submit your blog to blog directories. It’s all about exposing your blog to a greater audience.

10) Use entrecard – I’m not sure if everyone will agree with me but by using entrecard you’re guaranteed to get your blog exposed to a lot of bloggers. And if you do the rest of the outlined tips from 1 to 8, it’s not impossible to convert a dropper into a subscriber. Just do your regular drops, and make “insightful comments” on the blogs you find interesting or relevant to your niche.

11) This is an extra tip which you might consider taking if you really want to boost your rss readers. Join blogcatalog and look for groups with threads that involve feed exchanges. Participate in the discussion and you’ll be guaranteed 20 or more new subscribers in a day. Of course, we all know that this is only for short term gratification. But it always depends on how you present your content to these people. If you’re proving yourself worth their attention, then by all means, why can’t they be your long term subscribers?

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