Introduction

I’ve been waiting for quite a while to write this post. I’m not the kind of person that throws out meaningless jabber, and as I stated yesterday I foolishly used to think that I didn’t need RSS subscribers. Yesterday’s post will be crucial to help you to understand why your RSS count is the holy grail of blogging: 3 Reasons You Desperately Need RSS Subscribers.

Since I didn’t believe RSS was a big deal when I started this blog, my RSS count increased slowly in the beginning. I realized a few months into this how crucial it is to get subscribers, and of course didn’t really know how to get them.

I didn’t want to write this post until I felt that I had some really good ideas that would actually make a positive impact on people’s feed count. You may find some things you already know in this lesson, but I promise to bring some fresh ones along with the oldies. I really doubt that you have heard my Secret RSS Booster Tip, that’s included at the bottom of the post.

What Really Increases RSS Subscriptions

When it comes down to it, the quality of your work is what matters most. There are very few blogs that I trust to write a quality post every time, and that’s why there are few blogs in my feed reader. That said, there are multiple aspects of your blog or site that will need to be improved to get maximum results. I want to cover each of these areas with this lesson:

• Quality of posts. No matter how good your site is technically, no one will want to subscribe if your content isn’t any good. You can do everything else right and still fail if the quality work isn’t there.
• Feed visibility. You may have spectacular writing ability and useful knowledge, but if readers aren’t presented with your feed at the opportune moment, they will probably forget to subscribe. If they leave without subscribing, they may never come back. Another aspect of feed visibility is blog traffic. You can have the best site ever but if no one reads it… I’m sure you can finish that sentence for me.
• Incentive. You have to remember that people subscribe to RSS feeds because they think it’s in their best interest. You can only get so far begging because that’s about you. Most subscribers won’t do it for you, but they will do it if they think it will benefit them. We’ll talk more about how to give incentive later in this lesson.

Post Quality

Most of you will probably find the second half of this article to be much sexier than this section. Don’t allow yourself to be fooled - the quality of your posts is what will allow you to gain the most ground. People will subscribe to your feed if they believe that your future posts will contain something that appeals to them.

Many of you have blogs that are outside the ‘internet marketing‘ realm. You may be thinking that this is a disadvantage to you because you see people like ProBlogger.net that have 35,000 plus subscribers. I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is no disadvantage whatsoever in fact it likely gives you an advantage if you have chosen an interesting topic. Here are some sites that have ridiculous RSS counts that aren’t internet marketing sites:

• TechCrunch.com (Tech Blog) - 621,000
• Mashable.com (Social Networking Blog) - 136,000
• ReadWriteWeb.com (Web Technology Blog) - 154,000
• CrooksAndLiars.com (Blog About Crooks) - 99,500

No matter what topic you have chosen for your blog or site, the more you increase your quality, the more you will increase your feed count. There is a misconception that you have to post everyday to keep people subscribed to your feed. During the last two months I stopped going for quantity and upgraded for quality on this blog. I’ve only been posting about three times a week here (used to post about seven times per week) but my RSS count has experienced 50% growth during that time period.

Effects Of Choosing Quality Over Quantity

1. More people are exposed to your work through social media. People won’t vote or submit your work if you throw it together. Additionally, if you have too much new material on your site your best work will get lost in the shuffle and you will miss out on positive votes that you could have had on social sites.
2. You get more comments on your posts. This happens for two reasons. First, your posts are left front and center for a longer time period. Secondly the articles are able to get more social traffic (thanks to #1).
3. Useful information/content fills up the homepage. On the flip side - if people look at five posts on your homepage and only find one that’s useful/interesting to them, they probably won’t subscribe.

All three of those effects will help you to increase your RSS count and will help to build on each other. More social traffic leads to more people viewing your homepage. 100% solid content on your homepage leads to more comments and more social submits/votes. This brings more social traffic and the whole thing snowballs leading to additional RSS subscribers. Quality is the keystone principal behind any site with a huge RSS count.

Authority

Authoritative writing is a concept that I think a lot about and haven’t covered in enough detail. I can see the need to write more about this so watch for posts on authority writing in the future. Whether you have a traditional website or blog, you have to learn to write with authority.

Most bloggers never even try to set themselves up as authorities and instead opt for repeating and reporting. If you are simply repeating what top bloggers in your industry are writing, you are adding to their authority and taking away from your own.

Authoritative bloggers see things happening and are able to come up with unique perspectives of their own. I could give you 1,000 example of this but one in particular comes to mind. Andy Beard is a blogger that always provides a unique perspective on most events that happen in the ‘internet marketing’ world. A perfect example of this is when Andy called out TechCrunch about the paid links fiasco - he saw a hypocrisy that no one else saw in how TechCrunch handles links to advertisers. Even though Andy is somewhat new on the scene (18 months) he is already looked at as an authority in his field.

Authority and RSS Count

One issue that every new blogger is going to run into is that it’s much harder to get RSS subscribers when you don’t have many. Showing a big number in your feed count gives you authority as a blogger. I remember when I first found CopyBlogger I was reading a post and happened to glance over to see that they had about 20,000 subscribers. They now have 28,000 and it hasn’t been that long. I remember thinking that the ‘CopyBlogger’ must know what they’re talking about.

So how do you establish authority before you have the feed count? Answer that question and you can be wildly successful with the internet. Let me give you a few steps that will be involved in that process.

• Believe that you can and will be an authority.
• Stop reporting.
• Start thinking critically. You should note that I didn’t say start criticizing - there is a huge difference. No matter what niche you’re in, you can find inadequacies in the sites of the niche leaders. Fill those gaps on your own site and keep the criticism to yourself.
• Write like 100,000 people are already subscribed to your site. It took me like 10 hours to write my 5,263 Words On Starting A Profitable Blog article and at the time my site was two weeks old. Hardly anyone read it back then but a lot of people have read it since. A lot of people try to save their best stuff for when they have more readers. The problem is that your best stuff is what gets you the readers. If you don’t have the goods on your site, why would people stick around? Here in a few months I will create a new ‘Starting A Blog’ post and it will be bigger and better than the original.
• Create a set of authority-type posts. No matter what industry you’re in, you’re going to need this. Have a ‘make money online’ site? You have to showcase what you know. Have a humor blog? If you’re really funny you should have some really hilarious posts. Run a movie blog? You should have some spectacular movie reviews that are threaded with personality.

Here’s the bottom line on writing with authority. You have to believe that you are an authority and start acting like it. This isn’t meant to be condescending in any way but it is meant to be blunt. If you don’t believe in yourself then how are other people going to believe in you?

Authority blogging is a major factor in creating a high RSS count, although there are other techniques that can speed up the process.

The Bandwagon Effect

When people see a huge RSS count, they will naturally want to subscribe. If everyone else is reading your site, they obviously should too. The bandwagon effect is simply part of human nature. This effect will work against you if you start showing your count when it’s very small. If your site has 14 RSS readers and you show your count, you will discourage subscriptions. If you don’t show it, people won’t necessarily think that you don’t have a good count - there are some spectacular sites that don’t show it. DoshDosh has over 8,000 and doesn’t show it.

If you have less than 100 subscribers I would recommend hiding the feed count. Once you get over 100 showing it starts to encourage subscriptions and once you get over 500 it really starts to encourage people to subscribe.

To show the feed count, you will want to register your feed with FeedBurner. You pretty much just give them the URL to your feed - http://yourblog.com/feed/ and then they will let you choose a new URL to use for your feed. The new URL will allow FeedBurner to track the amount of people that sign up.

Feed Visibility

In order to get people to subscribe to your feed, it has to be visible to them. A lot of factors go into this including:

• Site traffic levels
• Placement of feed buttons, chicklets, and links
• Social pressure and the bandwagon effect

Increasing Traffic Levels

Getting an exponential increase in RSS subscribers is obviously going to require getting an increase in traffic. Let me point you towards a few sections and articles that can help you with this, since that’s a topic of its own:

• Search Engine Optimization Tips (13 Articles)
• Link Building Tips (11 Articles)
• 5 Reasons I Used To Suck At Social Media
• Escaping The Search Engine Pipe Dream

Placement Of RSS Buttons, Chicklets, And Links

Buttons - Since RSS subscribers should be on top of your blog’s priority list, access to your blog’s RSS feed should be as well. If you don’t have an RSS button or icon at the top of your site, you ARE losing potential subscribers. Place an easy to identify button or chicklet in the top six inches of your site. Sorry no room for exceptions here.

Links - A link at the end of your posts that invites people to subscribe to your feed is absolutely necessary. If you write the post of your life and 10,000 people read it, you better make sure that you invite everyone to subscribe at the end, providing a link to your feed. You can also invite people to subscribe to your feed within posts. If this lesson is helping you, it’s probably in your best interest to subscribe to my feed. There’s more where this came from.

I highly effective way to get some subscribers is by writing posts in series. I decided to separate my lesson on why you need RSS subscribers from this lesson on how to get them for one reason. Some people are going to subscribe to ensure that they don’t forget about the second part of the lesson.

Incentive

If you want people to subscribe for you, I think you’re going to have a hard time getting RSS subscribers. Most will subscribe when and only when it’s in their best interest to keep track of your work. This might be because they are entertained by you or because you offer insight into something that they are trying to learn. You must provide them with something they want to get them to subscribe.

Incentive is somewhat related to authority blogging but can be improved significantly with marketing techniques. Highly effective marketing gives both parties something they want and getting people to subscribe to your RSS feed uses that principle. What can you find or produce that people need or want? You should be asking yourself that question every single day if you want to grow your feed count.

Secret RSS Booster Tip

Earlier this week I figured out how to create posts that are shown only to people that read your site through RSS and email RSS. This means that you can create special posts that only your subscribers get to read. You can use this as a huge incentive to increase your RSS count. Tomorrow I’m going to be teaching everyone everyone that is subscribed to my feed how to do this.