stuart piazza .blog

Sure, there are many blogs out there that have a post promising you more RSS Readers, but from what I’ve seen, some of those said posts are lacking some good tips. Either they don’t want you to know some of their “secrets” to easily gaining hundreds if not thousands of RSS readers, ultimately creating an utmost success for your blog, or they just got lucky and don’t know that these following methods exist:

Check out my RSS Feed if you enjoy this post. See what I did there?

1) Write a post about your RSS Feed. Even if your grandma is the only one who reads your blog, don’t let people know that! Write a post about your RSS Feed, why it’s good to subscribe to it, and explain some of the benefits to your readers. For example, subscribing to your RSS Feed via email is a great way for users to read your blog on the go and on their portable devices. Make sure to remind them of this.

2) Make your RSS Feed icon visible. The first thing one may notice when they come to my blog is the large and obtrusive (but shiny) RSS Feed icon over to the right. There’s also the subscribe via email field under it, and it’s pretty welcoming if a reader likes a few of my posts. Take away that tiny text wrapped in <small> at the bottom of your blog saying “Please subscribe to my RSS Feed” – sorry, but no one will. You need something obvious and above the fold (before the user has to scroll down) for you to gain more RSS Readers.

3) Hold a contest. People will do almost anything for $10. A small cash prize for a random drawing of one of your RSS Subscribers is an extremely easy wait to increase your subscriber count (via e-mail). Have them subscribe to your RSS Feed, then comment on the post saying that they did. That way, you can check their email in the backend of your blog software, and compare it to their e-mail in at Feedburner – this leads us to the next tip.

4) USE FEEDBURNER. Anyone who is trying to promote their RSS Feed and doesn’t use Feedburner should be ashamed. Not only can you keep track of how many people are subscribed, but you can also keep an e-mail list, create buttons/widgets for your blog, and even easily organize and promote your podcast, if you have one. It is a necessity if you are running a blog. Sub-Tip: Use the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin to automatically convert all of your RSS Feeds on your site to your Feedburner one. This means that if someone is using a browser that detects your Wordpress RSS feed, instead of giving them access to that, it will give them your Feedburner one.

5) Gain a Twitter following. Twitter has a lot of bloggers, and I mean, a lot of bloggers. If you aren’t a Twitter user yet, sign up and follow some people. You’ll instantly see that they promote their blog like crazy, letting people know about their RSS feed, when they write a new post on their blog, and even set up an automatic DM (direct message) for people to check out their blog. If you want, check me out on Twitter, and I’ll make sure to follow you back if you let me know you came from my blog. Make sure to set up TwitterFeed on your blog (so when you write a new post it will tweet it) and search Google for “Automatic Twitter Follow Response” and write a short message welcoming your new follower and link them to your blog. When you use Twitter though, even out your personal life tweets to links on your blog – if your public timeline consists of only links and self promotion, you’ll have a hard time gaining new followers.

And that’s all folks, comment here if you have any questions or would like to add anything to this list. Good luck! [Image Via]