How to Make Visitors Subscribe to your Blog Feed

Getting visitors to your blog is quite a hard task but making them subscribe to your blog’s feed is lot more harder because you can either use the Social Media or Implement Search Engine Optimization tricks to get visitors to your blog but how are you going to make them subscribe to the rss feed? Lets read on a few ways which can help you in gaining your subscribers count. Just adding a small RSS button on your Blog’s sidebar wont help you in getting thousands of subscribers because the same old icons can make the visitors feel bored and just ignore the subscription process totally and even if they would like any article on your blog, they would either bookmark it or else share it with their friends. We had already written few similar articles on increasing blog subscribers

Subscription Box Location : This is a very important factor for getting the count increased because adding the icons at a location which is quite ignored is totally useless. Better implement a Visual Heatmap script and test which is the most clicked area on your blog or the location where in there is the maximum activity going place. Then start adding either a list of subscription options or else a email subscription box which your visitors can use to subscribe. Many Bloggers add huge feed icons on the header just near the logo or on the blog’s sidebar but they fail to understand that the visitors would read the blog post and then the comments section, hence adding a box or icons between these two sections would be one of the best area.

Another option is by adding a scrolling frame or else a popup frame which would appear after a few seconds of the web page loading. This would not make the visitor run away from the blog and also a neat and simple looking box would make them subscribe rather than a flashy banner style which would look more like a advertisement.

Feed Icon Options : You need to decide the type of options you should be giving to your blog visitors, ranging from a simple feed icon or else a large list of icons with each linking to a different feed reader service. It again depends on the usage of these services and how famous and useless these services are. Previously i had a long list of subscription options ranging from bloglines, delicious, fark, Yahoo etc but later found that the most important and regularly used out of these are Google Reader, Feedburner, Google SMS Labs etc, hence there is no point adding a long list. If you are running a Social Media or Internet News related blog, then may be a long list of icons would be preferred more since the traffic you would be getting is more inclined towards using different services. The most important option is personally feel is the Email Subscription Model, since its free if you use feedburner, you can customize it and then the delivery is on time with all your latest posts automatically sent to all the members. If you are into Affiliate Marketing or Listing Building, then its preferred that you use services like Aweber because they could help you in customizing the lists and send emails with any kind of content, rather than limiting you to just the blog posts.

Emailing Commentators to Subscribe : I have implemented this option and have seen a decent amount of growth in my blog subscribers, because there is no guarantee that a person who has visited your blog and commented is going to click on any subscription icon and take action. Hence, a plugin like Comment Relish would help you in sending a Thanks You message or a Welcome to My Blog message which looks pretty good and not like a spammy message. Also in these emails you can attach a link to subscribe to your blog in case they like the content. There are chances that out of every 100 emails sent, atleast 8-10% of the people would subscribe to your blog. Hence this means that from every 1000 comments, there are changes that you would get around 100 subscribers boosting the total numbers. There are many other wordpress plugins out there which if implemented in the right way can help you a lot like the Wp Greet Box plugin which based on the referrer would show a custom message to the visitor, example if the visitor has come to your blog post through Twitter would get a message like this – “Hi Twitterer, you know you can keep up-to-date easily through the RSS Feed? Subscribe now to receive the first news immediately”

Ultimate Footer Ads : This is one trick which most affiliate marketers implement to grab readers or subscribers. They would implement this simple plugin which allows them to display a nice message on the blog’s footer section with a option to subscribe, which in most cases is linked to the feedburner or Aweber services. Hence the visitors are offered to download a copy of some excellent ebook or a useful guide which can help them and for getting a download link, they have to subscribe to the blog once. This is a paid script but worth the money because there have been reports that a very high number would enter their email address to get the free stuff, hence if you get 5,00,000 uniques every month and if we calculate the total number of signups through this option at 0.5%, still you can get 2500 subscribers from this option which is a big number considering the efforts you have to put in. There are many other creative options like the footer ads which can be setup like the roll over ads which are normally setup on the blogs top corners, which get activated when the visitor mouse over’s them.

Always place your Subscribers Count Image on your Blog’s Sidebar so that the visitors can know how many people have already become a member of your blog and this could be one reason why they should be joining the large list. There is one point i would like to teach you at the end of this article. If you offer something to your visitors, they would obviously offer you something back. In this case you can offer them with free guides, free downloads etc and in return them to thank you by subscribing to your blog feed or else sharing your blog url within their Network which would anyway help you.