I have two posts I wanted to quickly mention today, both on the same subject of feeds, but one is about increasing your readership through some on site tips while the other deals with increasing your feed readership thanks to some built in FeedBurner tools.

On Blogging Tips, Patric Herber, gives some great tips to bump up the number of your RSS feed subscribers. Here are two of the tips he hands out:

Don’t be shy, just put it out there and recruit. Ask your readers to subscribe to your feeds, let them know you want them to. Include something catchy at the bottom of every post with a link to sign-up.

Place your RSS icons prominently. Make your feed subscriptions a main part of your design. Create a box that is big and bright with large icons so they stand out. Some people won’t think to sign-up if they aren’t reminded.

Read the full post on Blogging Tips.

Over on Shoemoney, Neil Patel, talks about some features on FeedBurner that you can activate and use to help increase your RSS feed subscribers.

Email Subscriptions – Not everyone is going to be sophisticated enough to subscribe to your RSS feed through a feed reader. Because of this, I recommend giving people an email option so that they can subscribe to your feed via email.

PingShot – Blog search engines like Technorati can provide a bit of traffic if you leverage them right. If you want to get tons of traffic out of them you have to blog on what’s hot and most importantly you have to ping them. If you don’t ping them your blog posts probably won’t be found in these blog search engines.

Check out the full article at Shoemoney.

I especially like the e-mail subscription service as certain people like my parents and grandparents love to keep up on my blogging efforts, and despite not always understanding everything I talk about, they enjoy reading my posts and having them delivered by e-mail to them makes it easy.

Originally posted on September 17, 2007 @ 10:17 pm