How to Massively Increase RSS Subscribers: One Method You’ve Never Used

Glen / 16 Comments / December 22nd, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

Tips on increasing RSS subscribers are mentioned around 100 times per day in the blogosphere, everyone and their cat wants to share their knowledge. That isn’t to say these tips don’t work, but they are tips that most of us know about. Recently I tested something a little different and I’ve had great results, in fact 10% of all visitors were subscribing to my feed.

I was featured on the huge blog a few weeks ago (80k+ subscribers) and received over 1,200 visitors as a result for a backlink in the middle of the post. However, the page people were landing on had a lot of exit paths, and there isn’t much I can do about that, that’s why I got the link (Resource page).

Tracking & Testing

I use BLVD Status as well as Google Analytics to check website traffic; BLVD is very useful because it includes live tracking so you can see what is going on in your site, right now. I was watching a flood of visitors land on my page, and could see that they were all quickly closing the site or clicking off to some of the links on the page.

After about 900 visitors I had received an extra 3 feed subscribers, this is from a blog that is highly targeted to what I write about. I knew I had to change something. I’ve been spending a lot of time in affiliate marketing recently so I kind of went back to my roots, the nice arrow pointer to wherever you want people to look.

I included the following image on my page:

That arrow was pointing directly to my feed sign-up box which includes a link to my regular RSS feed and my email submit form.

The result: For the next 300 visitors I received over 30 subscribers. A 10% subscription rate is very rare and I’m pretty excited about the potential of putting a big arrow in peoples faces ;).

Implementation

Personally, I think it would look a bit spammy and over the top if you included this on all pages of your site. So, what I recommend is that you might want to put something like this on your high traffic pages in order to get peoples attention. I think this might even work better than sticking more RSS notices within the post as the arrow and benefits really get a readers attention.

What I’m using this for now on a number of my niche sites is to display a special image to visitors from certain websites. Use the code below and copy that anywhere in your wordpress theme template, change the image to one that you’ve created, and make sure there’s a big arrow (call to action) pointing to your RSS feed or subscriptions box.

<?php
$camefrom = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
switch($camefrom['host']){
case ‘www.stumbleupon.com’:
echo ‘<img src=”imageurl.jpg” />’;
break;
case ‘www.digg.com’:
echo ‘<img src=”imageurl.jpg” />’;
break;
default:
//echo $camefrom['host'];
break;
}
?>

You shouldn’t need any technical skills to work out how to add more sites to the list, just copy the case, echo & break lines and be sure to change the URL. For the images, customize them so that they specifically mention the site where the user came from, this will increase the number of sign-ups that you get.

Now, if you start converting 10% of your visitors or even 5% into subscribers, how much of an affect is that going to have on your final numbers? My guess is a huge one.

Some other great articles on increasing RSS subscribers include:

• How to Get 1,100 subscribers in Five Days
• 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Double Your Subscribers while Blogging Half as Often

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