A Not-So-Often-Used Trick To Increase RSS Subscriptions
October 3rd, 2007 by Court
About 540 people are now reading my site each day through RSS. This really helps my site because people get a daily reminder that I’m still here. I’ve been asked before about what people should do if they want to increase the number of people that subscribe through RSS.
I eventually will create a really large post that will contain all of my ideas for increasing RSS. Today I just want to share a little trick that many major players aren’t using yet.
16% Of My Subscriptions Are Through Email RSS
If you’re not using email RSS, you’re probably missing out on quite a few subscriptions. Feedburner makes email RSS fairly easy to set up. You basically will log in to your Feedburner account, and will then go to ‘Publicize’. You will then find a link on the left side - ‘Email Subscriptions’. Go there and Feedburner will give you a piece of code you can paste into your site. I pasted mine into my sidebar, and that’s how I made the little form where people can sign up for my ‘daily tips and tricks by email’.
So far, I have 78 people that have signed up for email updates through RSS. Most of them probably wouldn’t have signed up for regular RSS because people who choose the email option often aren’t comfortable with a feed reader yet. This means that if I hadn’t started using email RSS my count would be around 400 instead of 500.
It’s most definitely worthwhile! 
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October 3rd, 2007 at 11:48 am
lol Ok Court so I guess you notice my RSS subscription box on my site and decided to write about it.
Yes I will come clean I copied it from Courts site because my feed subscription sucked and yes as always Court smacked it dead center my subscription got better it increased by 10%
An yes what ever you see on my site that looks like something on Court’s site I also copied it.
On a serious note my best % is Google Desktop with 67% this is way different than your Court, this would really be cool to understand why such a huge difference, or is it that Google Desktop is the same thing as Google FeedFetcher if some one knows please let me clue me in.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Gotcha!
Hey I got the tag cloud from you so we’re even.
That’s pretty interesting about Google desktop, I wonder if they’re counted the same. The one doesn’t even show up on mine. Hmm…..
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Having 270 links on a page in generally thought to be bad for SEO. Do you really think it’s a good idea to have it? Especially since you don’t use nofollow on it.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Using nofollow on it would totally defeat the purpose. Nothing online is ‘good vs. bad’. It’s more like ‘risk vs. reward’. I can see some benefits so it’s worth an experiment. I’ll let everyone know how it works out.
If you look at some insanely successful sites like Engadget, you’ll see that they have over 400 links per page.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Sutocu linking to outside websites hurt you, linking to pages inside your website help you, you can verify this at Google’s Blog also if you go to your Google Webmasters Tools and click on the left links you have two options,
Pages that link to yours
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.
Pages with internal links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.
In my case:
Pages that link to yours
6762
Pages with internal links
54655
October 4th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Court, I understand the purpose, but even Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).”
Nofollowing all the links would defeat it’s purpose, but I would use some sort of method to limit the number of links somewhat. For example nofollow or remove half of the cloud.
You could easily modify the script that each link has a 50% possibility to have nofollow. This would make it look static to visitors, but different pages would link to different tags.
Vic, I’m sure you know it’s not that simple. Websites that inlink heavily with the same anchor, or that keyword spam have been banned or penalized in the past.
Yes inbound links help crawl depth, but you don’t need to take chances with Google to achieve a good level of inbound links.
I agree that there are some risk/reward decisions, but you can just look at JohnChow’s case to see what it can cause. This is a situation, where I believe you can reap the rewards without taking too many chances.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Hi again Sutoco! Again, I appreciate another point of view so that we can dig a little deeper into this issue.
I know about the Google webmaster guideline, in fact I have talked about it on this site before. The question is whether right now it’s going to do more good than harm. There’s no way of knowing without trying it out.
There are a lot of really powerful sites that are way over that limit.
This isn’t the kind of thing that can get your site banned so it’s worth the test. If it hurts traffic, I’ll take it off. I have a feeling that it won’t.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:52 am
I have found that it can be difficult to get people to sign up for an rss feed. I am sure it has a fair amount to do the sites contents and the age. I am going to try out the email subscription though and see how it works for me. I do have two unrelated questions. The first what benefit does the tag cloud you have in your sidebar have? Second, do you know how alexa functions when you have a website that is a subdomain of the main site. Does the subdomain increase the sites rankings in alexa or is it soley based of the main site? Also is it possible to create an alexa ranking solely for the subdomain and keep it seperate for the main site?
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Alexa counts subdomains as the same thing as the primary domain, so all the subdomains will have the same Alexa again, Alexa is just a joke.
Google love TagCloud visualize constant changing content on your deep pages, plus additional in site cross linking with keywords, scuttle sites where a hit and still are because of the TagCloud
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:50 pm
What is the plugin you use for the Tag cloud?
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:05 pm
You can do it with Ultimate Tag Warrior!
December 4th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
There’s a tag cloud plugin (or you can use a sidebar widget in WP 2.3).
Ultimate Tag Warrior isn’t compatible with WP 2.3, Court. Just an FYI for anyone who has upgraded or plans on it in the future.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
It is extremely difficult to get your RSS feed going in the beginning. The first 100 are really hard to get and then it gets a lot easier. Once you can show 100 on your chicklet people start following.
What you want to ask yourself is if you even want to push your feed. Remember that the only way you’re going to make good money off the RSS subscribers is through affiliate programs. Most of them won’t visit your site anymore once they subscribe.
The biggest benefit of pushing the feed on a site like yours in the increased linkage you can get from the people that subscribe.
If you decide that you want to push your feed, make sure you have a good amount of affiliate programs you can link to in your posts.
Usually the subdomain is counted as the same site to Alexa. There are exceptions to this, i.e. blogspot subdomains.
I tried to create a subdomain with a separate ranking in Alexa and wasn’t able to do it. Alexa showed the same ranking on both subsites. You could, of course use this to your advantage.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:39 pm
So If I am trying to develop a subdomain to become larger than the main domain this would end up hurting me, is that correct?
As a solution would it hurt me to take the content from my subdomain and republish it a a new stand-alone domain and redirect the traffic received from the subdomain to the new domain?
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
I’m waiting a bit till I have a decent number of RSS subscribers before I show the feedburner subscribers on by blog.
Adding the email subscription will be something I take care of fairly soon. Thanks
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Yeah, I did that too James! Once you hit 100 subscribers I would show it though. I waited until 150 and it took forever to get there. Going from 100 to 150 would have happened a lot faster if I had shown the count.
Once you hit 100, you’re golden. It gets a lot easier at that point.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Hey Court never notice that about the blogspot subdomains, but think about this if they can do that for blogspot subdomains why not do it in general.
Alexa should also be an X-File
lol
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Seriously, Alexa really is a joke. They should do it consistently for everyone - the whole system is so inconsistent it’s freaking ridiculous.
Sites like yours are the ones that get hosed the most.
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:03 pm
I added a link to email subscriptions last week and have noticed my email subscriptions have gone up a lot faster than my RSS readers. Since my blog is about skin care, and not blogs or making money, I don’t think my viewers are as tech-savvy and a lot of people don’t even know what RSS is all about. I didn’t before I started my blog!
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Very cool Jeni! I’m surprised that more people aren’t doing it because it works great. You’re right, it will work even better if the audience isn’t tech savvy.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:26 pm
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]
October 4th, 2007 at 7:18 am
Good stuff! Yesterday I was really having some issues with my feedburner feed. It was driving me crazy until I realized there was nothing I could do about it and it wasn’t on my end.So now I think its a good idea to check on your own feedburner account to make sure its working every once in a while.
October 4th, 2007 at 8:34 am
Hi Court,
Have you noticed your pagerank has gone down to 2 accross all data centers? http://www.digpagerank.com/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcourtneytuttle.com%2F&dc=18
Not that it matters as your obviously doing well. Google really should bin off the toolbar page rank if they aren’t going to update it, annoying if you ever want to sell links tho
October 4th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Yeah I noticed it last night. I was worried about it until I figured out that I have some other pages whose PageRank went up.
I found a page that went from a 2 to a 3, and another page that went from a 0 to a 2. I’m not sure what the reason is but I’m not that worried about it anymore.
October 4th, 2007 at 9:56 am
We are off topic here, but that is really weird even my toolbar says 2 WTF?
mmmm Could Google have slapped Court? And if so WTF?
October 4th, 2007 at 11:07 am
I wonder if Google is in the process of exporting pagerank right now. I know I have read in the past that the pagerank toolbar can be off for a few days while the export is taking place. If that is not the case, I wonder if Court has any ideas as to what is going on?
October 4th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Yeah I really don’t know what’s going on with it. Luckily, I haven’t lost any rankings and my PR went up on some other pages.
I guess we’ll see if there are any other effects.
October 5th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I’ve been using the email subscription option for quite a few months and I get a lot of people signing up for it….I read about this technique on Copyblogger and started using Feedblitz because that’s what Brian uses (he wrote about some good advantages of their service).
I’ve been thinking about switching to Feedburner, though, but I read somewhere else that if you update an old post it gets sent to your subscribers as if you just wrote it. Have you ever had that happen?
October 7th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
I use the email subscription box too but through FeedBlitz!
October 9th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Yeah 16% of my subscribers are from my email option. There can be a problem with unverified subscriptions though.
July 13th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
simple and easy……
July 21st, 2009 at 8:20 pm
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