It would seem most bloggers are only concerned with the traffic they get and fail to study and take advantage of their blogs subscriber loyalty. Traffic is an important part of blogging but a high volume of traffic does not really provide you with an accurate representation of how your blog is perceived by your visitors.
One of the great things about blogging is it uses an RSS protocol that provides visitors a way to subscribe to your blog feed and become a loyal follower of yours.
As long as these subscribers are using a blog reader such as Blogline, NewsGator, Netvibes or the dozens of other RSS readers, these subscribers will automatically be notified that you have written a new blog post and it will allow them to easily stay up to date with your blog.
There are literally dozens of available readers on the market. For an inclusive list check out Add This.com
BlogMaestro uses Feedburner as a way to syndicate our RSS feed and to provide our users the ability to subscribe to our blog via an email update. What is nice about Feedburners is that it’s a free service and it is very easy to setup. Upon setting it up we no longer had to worry about personally managing our blog subscribers. Additionally it only took us a few minutes to link our Subscribe Feed images up to Feedburner to get started.
Upon providing your visitors a place to subscribe to on your blog it is then time to motivate them to subscribing. In an interesting Search Engine Guide article “How I Increased My Blog’s Subscribers Count By Over 1000% In Less Than A Year”, Mack Collier discusses his attitude change from focusing on only the volume of traffic he got to substantially increasing the loyalty of his readership.
One of the key changes Mack made to his site was placing his RSS Subscribe offering in a highly prominent position on his site to promote his Subscription offering.
If you want to attract more loyal reader to your blog you will need to give your readers the option of subscribing to your RSS feed. A second alternative to RSS subscribers is providing your visitors the ability to stay up to date with your blog via an email update.
Currently most users on the web are not yet comfortable with RSS and are really not yet ready to understand what RSS is all about. Since email is still the most widely used tool on the web, giving users the ability to stay current via an email update only makes sense and can dramatically increase a bloggers subscriber rate.
The Edublogger has a detailed post about “How to Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog”
Probably one of the most highly respected bloggers on the web, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net writes quite a bit about how to attract new subscribers. Darren mentions that one of the ‘secrets’ he uses that has helped him build his blog subscriber base to over 40,000 is to leave his readers with a feeling of wanting more.
If visitors of Darren’s blog fail to stay current they might miss out on something really important. “A Secret to Finding New Subscribers For Your Blog”
“[…] they think that the blog might produce content that they’ll want to know about as some point in the future”
Following the same sentiments of Darron Rowse, Dosh Dosh reached 10,000 subscribers and explains how they did it.
“The main reason why people subscribe to blog feeds can be explained in one sentence: Readers subscribe to blogs when they provide an informational or entertainment value so great that it would be a loss to not subscribe to it.”
Popular bloggers will all say that to build a large dedicated following you must keep a blog that is consistently on topic and make it as easy for your visitors to subscribe.
16 users commented in " Professional Tips For How To Increase Blog Subscribers "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThank you for writing this article! My wife and I just recently created a blog about our son who was born in January. Most of our family still uses email and doesn’t know much about rss feeds so we had to add the subscribe link via email to the top. So far they’ve really liked getting the updates every time we update the blog, and we don’t have to do anything extra to email updates to family. Now it’s time to apply some of your tips and create a blog for my coaching site.
[…] Maestro caught my eye today with an article on howbloggers can lure more subscribers. If you have a blog and you’re wondering just what the hell this RSS thing is anyway, you […]
Eagle1, thanks for dropping us the comment. Congrats on the birth of your son, remember to sleep when he sleeps
[…] How do you create loyal blog readers? It would seem most bloggers are only concerned with the traffic they get and fail to study and take advantage of their blogs subscriber loyalty. Here is a great article on how you can increase your reader loyalty. Submitted: 4 minutes ago Category: News Submitter: RssFeed Website: http://www.blogmaestro.net Report this link: Click here to report Comments: 0 […]
Very interesting, placement of rss icons definately have an effect on success of rss readership.
How about ways to drive more traffic to new sites in general? Good article, though. Especially the points about RSS.
Workpost It!
http://www.workpost.com
Great article, reminds me to fix my ‘Subscribe’ button.
Hi BlogMaestro,
Excellent tips. I also think that it is important to let people know “What is an RSS feed” by adding a small link. You’ll be surprised about how many don’t know what it is. As you mentioned Darren, he uses this link, take a look at it
Also, I blogged some days ago about the statistics of ProBlogger, John Chow, and ShoeMoney (the three biggest make money online blogs), and their different RSS subscription count. It would be interesting to note why one of the three websites is 25K subscribers ahead of the other two
Great tips
Thanks much
Petar
NeedToKnowBlog.com
Being a blogging newb, I found lots of useful info here. Thank you for the help and count me as a subscriber.
Don’t for get about commenting on other blogs!
I use feedburner too. But if they read the email, there’s no reason to read the Blog - the email of course being the blog entry…
Did I get that right?
Tom
Foreman, we will have more to come about driving traffic real soon.
Curly, I would say those three are the exception when it comes to blogging. A significant amount of branding and work has gone into making those three as popular as they are.
Michealwont, we a pleased to have you as a new subscriber of BlogMaestro!
Joe, you are right on with commenting. We plan to address that soon but thanks for pointing that out.
Tom, you should be able to offer only a summary of your blog when sending out the email thus forcing people to come back to your blog to read the rest of the post. You may have to check those settings.
yep, i’ve read some other post that says the same thing…. did this alreadyy and i’m currently awaiting for the result of a ballooning “blog loyalty”
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I’m new to blogging and realise the importance of creating a large loyal subscriber base, and the only way to do it is to create articles that will make people want to come back. The tips gained from here, have giving me a good insight into what I have to work on to increase a my subscriber base.
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