Dosh Dosh explores Why You Should Build Your Feed Subscriber Base and gives a variety of good reasons for building up the number of readers subscribing to your blog including:
- Personal Gratification
- Feed-based Monetization
- Social Proof
- Ability to Initiate Feed-Level Promotions
- Improved Linkability
- Buzz Generators
I’d add two more reasons to build your RSS readership (and I’m sure there are many more that readers will suggest in comments):
1. It increases the Viral Nature of Your Blog – while RSS is becoming more widely spread in the type of people using it – I still think that you’d find that those using it are a fairly tech savvy crowd and that many of them are bloggers. I have no way of measuring this – but my own anecdotal experience through conversations with readers shows that those who subscribe to feeds are more likely to link up to your blog than those who follow your blog through other means.
2. SEO – it strikes me that search engines are becoming more and more interested in RSS. One example of this is Google’s recent purchase of Feedburner – but we’re also seeing more and more integration of RSS into the personalized search offerings of Yahoo, Google etc. I am yet to see any real evidence of this happening yet – but to me it is a logical extension that Search Engines would start to integrate into their algorithms the popularity of a site’s feeds. Of course there are complications with the implementation with the implementation of this – but it makes sense to me that if a company like Google can see how many subscribers your blog has (and they should be able to get a guide to this not only through Feedburner – but through Google Reader, iGoogle etc) that they could fairly easily use such information to rate a site’s popularity. It’s just an untested theory – but one that is a hunch I’ve had growing in me for a while now.
Lastly – I guess it’s good to grow your RSS readership for the same reason that it’s good to grow every other type of readership that you have – influence. The more people that read your blog (via any means) the more likely you are to achieve the goals you have for that blog – whether they be monetary goals, fame, influence etc.
Want to read more about getting RSS Readers for Your Blog and how to keep them?
First – subscribe to ProBlogger’s feed.
Then – read some of these articles:
