Showcasing Your Subscription Options For More Traffic
One thing that causes a lot of problems for a lot of bloggers is that there is just so much stuff out there to put on your blog. New widgets are released and hyped every day, and we all love to showcase our particular talents through our blogs. Then there is the advertising, the blog rolls, the community widgets, and on and on.
It really can be overwhelming, especially for newer bloggers.
There just isn't enough room for everything.
But even once you've decided what you want to put on your blog, you have to make decisions about what you want to showcase and what you want to give special attention to.
I'm going to suggest that the things you want to put at the top of the list are your communication and distribution options.
No one is going to see everything you have to offer on that first visit anyhow, so the trick is to bring them back again and give them more chances. Now, you have to have the good stuff, certainly. You have to give them a reason to want to subscribe, or why would anyone want to come back? But if you don't make it easy for people to subscribe to your feed and or your email newsletter, they aren't going to subscribe.
It really is that simple. I've been looking for peoples feeds for another of my blogs over the last week so that I could display their blog headlines with their reviews, and I'm telling you that sometimes it is downright difficult to find that feed. Now if I'm there actively searching for it and can't find it, how likely is it that someone who just clicked over from a search engine to read an article is going to end up subscribed?
Did you say zero?
Alfred over at TechiePortal gets this. His blog highlights cool new sites and techie type gadgets. The topics are somewhat broad and cover a moving target.
He has made a wise decision to showcase his feed and his email subscription right at the top of the side bar. And not just with a couple of little icons either. He's using larger graphics that draw the readers attention, and has written a short paragraph of text for each describing the benefits to his readers of subscribing to his blog.
And he's placed this prominently, putting it ahead of advertising and sponsorships. He seems to understand that the increase in repeat visits is going to get those ads seen and acted on more often than simply sticking them up on top of everything. Ultimately his is the winning solution to deciding what to showcase.
Check out the top of TechiePortal's sidebar and consider whether you might do a little better by following his lead.
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Glad I came across this
I had been getting very unhappy about my blog but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. Then I came across this post. then I realised that it was all the clutter that I was unhappy about so I went back to basics and gave my blog home a spring clean and now its nice and tidy and I plan to keep it that way.
rss scraping
unfortunately i have had some problem with my dope content being scraped when i set up the rss feed, any suggestions on this?
I have some, but I don't know if you'll like them.
Thanks for the question Alex. A lot of people don't really like my answers to this question. I think I may do a full post on the topic, but I'll give you the short version here.
First, lets just agree that the effort to go after people who re purpose our feeds and "steal" our content is generally not going to meet with a lot of success. There is too much of it, and the barriers consume a lot of time.
1. Use full internal links in your posts. Link to other content either on your site, or on other sites that lead back to your site. Make usre to use absolute links with the full http://yoursite domain.come/pathto/your content, not just pathto/yourcontent. This ensures that scraped and re purposed content leads back to you.
2. Publish only what you are Okay with having syndicated to your feeds. Most blogging software either has, or has plugins that have fairly sophisticated feed publishing options. You should be able to create feeds that give readers enough meat, while also encouraging the real fans to come back to the blog to read the whole scoop. This way, anyone who uses your feed is really just publishing an ad for your blog.
3. If you really really don't want people to syndicate any amount of your content, look into using an authenticated feed where your readers have to send their login to the xml to get the feed back. This will limit your subscriber base somewhat, but if your content is solid, the people who really want it will authenticate for it.
Thanks for the tips you've
Thanks for the tips you've mentioned here. I think this will absolutely help me increase my blog's traffic. Getting a considerable amount of traffic has been one of my biggest problems then.
Cool Beans
Be sure to check back in and let us know how it's going once you have some results in.
I really like how
I really like how techieportal has his feeds. It could be both good and bad though. On one hand everyone sees it and it looks good. On the other hand it takes up premium sidebar space.
good tips! ill implemented
good tips! ill implemented on my sites.
I tend to disagree to put
I tend to disagree to put communication and distribution options on the top of the list. I think it's more useful to put information about what spesific information the reader could expect from the site/blog. Only after that the reader will be able to decide whether she want to subscribe or not.
But What About tesing?
It's not so much whether you agree or disagree in principle, Maximillion. It's more about what your goals are with your blog and whether or not you have tested the technique to see if it improves your progress toward meeting those goals.
Obviously if you don't want or don't care about subscribers, you wouldn't want to do this. And if you tried it and it did not increase subscriber rates, there would probably be something else more valuable to do with that space. But if you try it and your subscriber rates go up, well, then there is nothing to disagree with, right?
Another problem is: Many
Another problem is: Many people don't know what RSS is..
Well this is a good tips to
Well this is a good tips to get more readers. I love a good tips. Thanks for it.
I have the subscription form
I have the subscription form and RSS for my readers making it easier for them to access..
Sometimes, I wonder if I
Sometimes, I wonder if I should just dump all the widgets in our take them out.
good tips! ill implemented
good tips! ill implemented on my sites.
I find that I clean up my
I find that I clean up my blogs and then over time as I see more “cool” stuff which I add then they start getting very cluttered again and so every so often I have to clean them out again. A clean blog with the important elements properly placed is very important particularly to anyone trying to earn an online income. Which reminds me that it probably time for a spring clean on my blogs.
Should I add to the chorus
Should I add to the chorus of guys shouting "good post! excellent! brilliant!" ? Nay, don't think so, altough I do feel the same in some sort of way.
Sometimes I did find it difficult to find the button for RSS subscription, but the one in the url-field never failed me with its auto-discovery. And, believe me, the average Joe doesn't have a clue of the difference between Atom / RSS / FeedBurner. It only matters for you. Actually, I get a bit annoyed because of the big-red-shiny-RSS-button, that has its lesser obstrusive copy up there.
With the newsletter I agree to some extent, but after all, people have to dig through useless mails daily. If you are a prolific writer, they may find themselves annoyed by the e-mail quantity received from you - especially if they don't feel like reading it right now, but nor do they want to delete it. Tricky business ..
Well that's a great idea -
Well that's a great idea - getting the big images and loads of info on there about what it is. So simple, yet brilliant. Thanks for the tip off about this.
Kind regards,
Dan
In this day its crazy to not
In this day its crazy to not be able to find an rss feed for a site, but every day I come across some other site that doesn't have one, or it's just plain no visible. Its a good idea to make them stand out too.
Thanks! We actually would
Thanks! We actually would love people to officially subscribe since we give great gifts for doing so and send more tools and resources throughout the month (things we think are really cool and useful). However, having the rss/email for those not wanting a full out subscription moved higher up the page (wordpress does put it in an odd place) is something that, duh, we never considered.
Also got a really cool script when I visited Alfred's site, again thanks to you :)
Another idea- don't assume
Another idea- don't assume people know what your are talking about when you ask them to subscribe to your feed or sign up for your RSS feed, etc. Write a post about what that means, What a feed is- simplify it. My husband, who is in IT an quite Internet savvy confessed to me a while a go that he didnt have a clue what the orange buttons were.. . Write up something that gives detailed explanation about what this is.. especially if your blog is not targeted to a tekky audience.
thanks for the tip!
thanks for the tip!
Your feed should always be
Your feed should always be at the top and easy to find. I subscibe to many feeds and I will not spend time looking or scrolling down to find your feed. Readers are what make your blog valuable, not ads.
Yeah, I try to keep myself
Yeah, I try to keep myself up to date with the latest information but sometimes this can be very demanding. In fact blog communities nowadays seems to prefer all those fancy widgets and you can always find sites with just too many buttons or those sort of things and this eventually make the web page load slower. I try to stick somewhere in between.
I'm still very much learning
I'm still very much learning to hack wordpress(.com) and although my blog's RSS Feed icon is at the top of the sidebar, I haven't done anything to draw attention to it, but I will now. It's very easy to assume that people know what you yourself know, but of course that isn't the case. I'd forgotten that everything pretty much requires a clear call to action;-D
I find that I clean upp my
I find that I clean upp my blogs and then over time as I see more "cool" stuff which I add then they start getting very cluttered again and so every so often I have to clean them out again. A clean blog with the important elements properly placed is very important particularly to anyone trying to earn an online income. Which reminds me that it probably time for a spring clean on my blogs.
You are so right! I have
You are so right! I have been looking more lately for rss feeds on blogs, and on many sites I am just not finding them. On other sites I can find the feed, but the feed does not always work.
Blog owners, keep the feed at the top, and make sure it works!!
Hi---Dane: Man it is
Hi---Dane:
Man it is getting more and more difficult to weed out from the plethora of widgets and bligdets that keep at us. It is a bit of a struggle to determine what goes where and which is more important. I want to give primal space to advertisers, but i dont want all the focus there. I want to build traffic and links, but again not too much focus there.
The blog sidebar has become prime real estate, and everyone wants to be there.
I think ones theme has alot to do with deciding what goes where, and how it looks and how it is rec'd by a reader/visitor. I use the Cutline 3 column by Pearson, and i really like it. But am starting to think it might not be very well optimized. Im still determining this and am constantly playing with the layout and placement of items.
As far as my RSS feed center, i do have it prominently displayed right at the top, 1st right sidebar. I have between 90-100 subs. (as you know that feedburner thing fluctuates like crazy)
I kinda figured you were
I kinda figured you were doing well with it, Alfred. In fact I'm going to follow your lead and add some text to mine here and at Chain Drop.
Mark, it would be really cool if WP.c added a plugin to let users set their autodiscovery URIs.
Lin, it's frustrating as all get out when you are trying to review these blogs and they don't have basic things like a link fr their feeds. I ended up subscribing to most of them to get the URI's and then unsubscribing from those I wasn't personally interested in reading.
Man ain't that the truth!
Man ain't that the truth! Not only do I have difficulty in finding subscription options for some blogs, but I've actually gone to the trouble of contacting them (if that is even possible) to suggest they actually make it possible for people to subscribe because they don't have any. I cannot believe the number of blogs I've run across that don't even have subscription options! It's crazy! I've found it especially true when searching for dental niche blogs, for the dental blog I'm building right now.
My feeds are always at the
My feeds are always at the top. I used to think it didn't matter much for RSS, since most browsers can autodiscover feeds, but not everyone browses with their browser's address field open. Also, since I Wordpress.com for two blogs, i have the problem of having a different feed for autodiscovery than I actually want people to use. I want readers to use my Feedburner feeds, not the one Wordpress.com has. Offering the RSS link near the top encourages readers to go with this option. Besides, I also want to offer email subscriptions, and there's no auto-discovery for that.
and that is how i managed to
and that is how i managed to get 120 readers in 20 days :D
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