T.L. Pakii has a great piece on How To Get Blog RSS Subscribers which is useful for anyone wanting to expand their RSS readership (an ever increasingly important way of finding readers for many bloggers).
One of his main points is that you should work on Educating your Demographic which makes a lot of sense as RSS remains a relatively new and often unknown technology:
‘Your demographic may be a bit behind on the technology curve so you may want to write about the value of RSS with your market. Write a free report for them to download and even offer a video tutorial that shows them how to use RSS after they read about the why of RSS. Making sure that your customers and prospects knows what RSS is and how to use it productively is a next step in increasing subscribers. An important point to realize is that that there is still a learning curve on blogs and more so on RSS. It’s getting easier for more and more people to engage and use these tools but you will do much better to take a lead role in educating those within your reach on the merits using RSS.’
Read more at How To Get Blog RSS Subscribers
Another way is to combine the comments feed to the entries feed and tell commentators to subscribe to it.
Adding the comments into the entries feed or even making updated feeds with something like comments (n) in it is HIGHLY annoying and a reason to unsubscribe at once.
Nicole, you like comments and commenting, don’t you ?
How do you prefer being notified on new comments ?
Emailing is subject to spam and spam filter.
Combined feeds are good for authors, readers and commentators – do you know why ? – I wrote an entry about this.
Why are you highly annoyed by syndicated comments ?
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of having comments in the entries feed. What I do on my sites (for example http://vancouver.asklocally.com/) is have a feed for the entries, and then a seperate feed for the comments of each entry.
That way, if someone is interested in the answers to a particular question they can just subscribe.
Yup, last month I posted 74 comments, with the comment feed per entry method I would have had to do the feed subscription process 74 times and I would now have 74 more feeds in my aggregator.
I like email-notify on comments, because I dont fear spam from the site admins. Well, of course I would prefer to not have that address published, o n the other hand, my filter works. I use those addresses on Usenet, so…
Comment Feeds are anoying, most of the time I only care about direct responses. This also means you need a threaded comment system like S9Y has.
Greetings
Bernd
Hmmm I found the solution with feeds that would make everyone happy (except those preferring email, of course).
Lets see how I could implement this…
How to Get RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
I myself don’t know how and have no opinion so I will just leave it to T.L. Pakii by way of Darren Rowse. Please figure it out and then help me out….
Some interesting comments here but personally I’d find focusing on getting RSS subscribers should be way down the list of other priorities with a blog for two reasons, if readers like your blog enough and get RSS they’ll subscribe, but the second reason is every reader that goes to RSS is potentially lost exposure if your trying to earn revenue from advertising from your site. Yes, you can have ads in your RSS, but at the moment they are as useless as you know what on a bull. Take the ad servers for this post in the RSS feed: Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Get Real Meals : Eat Healthy Without Going to Extremes. I’d not that lots of people still don’t get RSS, Ive seen lots of people who will actually visit multiple blogs every day by clicking on their bookmarks, and despite having spent an hour trying to explain RSS and Bloglines to her, my wife is amongst those people. Seriously, don’t stress about RSS.
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