RSS readers are far more important than people who land on your page from a search engine or from a  link on another site. You can safely assume these readers are loyal and will read most, if not all your posts, for as long as you manage to keep them interested. This is the first post in a series of articles that will try to offer you some tips on how to boost your RSS subscribers count.

Offer a full RSS feed

Many RSS readers will unsubscribe from your feed or simply disregard it if you’re not offering a full feed. Contrary to what many people think, the “teaser” scheme doesn’t work: you can’t show an excerpt of the article and expect people to come to your site to read the rest, unless you already are an authority in your field.

I know, your next question will be “How do people get to see the ads on my blog if they read the articles from their feed reader?” The answer is simple: the feed reader doesn’t show the comments. There is no way the user can engage in the community around your site if they don’t click in from their reader. And a user who gets involved and has something to say is far more likely to visit your advertisers than one who only lurks around and never comments.  It is also possible to monetize large RSS feeds through various feed replacement services like Feedburner.

Use a standard RSS button and make it visible

RSS is already a long established standard with an equally well known graphic button. There is no room for innovation, don’t get overly creative. Don’t change the color of the icon just to blend in your theme. Don’t use a “Get updates” text link without the button.

Also, make sure the RSS icon is easy to be found. People are inpatient, if they can’t find the subscribe link within a few seconds they are likely to forget about it and move on to another site. It is sometimes a good idea to try experiment with creative techniques like the outrageously huge button  Daily Blog Tips tried a while ago.

Use FeedBurner’s Wordpress plugin

The major drawback of offering the RSS feed through the standard http://example.com/feed/ URL is that you can’t keep track of how many people read you. Wordpress offers the raw XML feed and that’s about it. FeedBurner is an external service operated by Google that provides the feed the very same way your Wordpress blog does, but also offers you valuable information on your total readership base, how many people read your articles every day (broken down by each post) or which bots or spiders are reading your feed.

This Codex article on Wordpress.Org gives you an insight on how you can integrate FeedBurner in your blog.

Don’t display the feed count if it’s too low

There is a widget offered by FeedBurner that can display your total RSS reader count. If the number is very low (less than a hundred or so at a minimum, but you should be the one to set the standard) then disable it. I can’t stress it enough: you DON’T want to show the world that you only have 14 RSS subscribers.

That’s about it for this episode, stay tuned for Part II.