If you have a blog, you probably have heard of Feedburner and are probably using it to some extent. Even though Feedburner is simple to use and setup, it seems that tons of people are making mistakes that are causing their subscriber rate to grow slowly. If you use Feedburner, here are all the settings you should be using to ensure that your subscriber growth is increasing:
BrowserFriendly – The browser friendly option makes your feed look pretty. This option may seem dumb, but there are tons of people who don’t know what RSS is and they are probably more likely to convert into a subscriber when seeing a pretty looking page that is easier to read compared to a raw XML page.
SmartFeed – Some feed readers look for specific XML formats such as Atom or RSS. By using the smart feed option Feedburner translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application. If you don’t use this option you may lose some subscribers.
FeedFlare – If you want to gain traffic from social media sites like Digg or StumbleUpon, you need more votes. An easy way to get more votes is to use the FeedFlare feature which allows your RSS subscribers to easily promote your website throughout the social web. You probably won’t get tons of votes through the FeedFlare option but every vote adds up.
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.
NoIndex – This option prevents your feeds from getting indexed by the search engines. This setting goes both ways because if you get tons of search love you probably don’t want your feed being indexed because it will cause Feedburner to also have the same content indexed within the SERPs. On the other hand, if you did something shady with your site in the past and it currently isn’t getting any search love this can help. Your feed will be indexed by SERPs so that searchers can find your RSS feed when they do searches that are related to your content.
I know some of the above stuff was a bit basic so here’s a bonus tip: If you want to increase your RSS subscribers I would find all the top bloggers that aren’t using FeedBurner and register their FeedBurner URL under your account. Once you setup the feed with their content you’ll notice that after a while it will start gaining subscribers and usually after it gets to roughly 100 or so you can email FeedBurner and request them to redirect the subscribers to your blog feed. Granted, the content will be different but people are lazy and most won’t unsubscribe.
There are probably tons of other ways you can increase your RSS subscriber count, but before you look at other options I would make sure you check your FeedBurner settings. Anyone have any other tips to increasing their RSS feed count?
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Hey, have you seen this news article? http://www.teratips.com/19-more-tips-for-finding-readers-on-blog/
Wow that’s a bad ass trick with adding other blogs to your account! However, I somehow just don’t trust third party services, in this case Feedburner, with my feed – what will happen to my subscriptions if it goes down or goes paid model?
I’ve found that an email after readers first comment works best for subscriptions to your RSS feed.
” If you want to increase your RSS subscribers I would find all the top bloggers that aren’t using FeedBurner and register their FeedBurner URL under your account. “
a method which is even more wicked than hijacking is, to let the topbloggers work for you. just kidnap the feed and just implement some advertisments… this might be a bad method to use other peoples work and let it work for you.
Heard of Blogrush Free traffic syndication for your blogs? How long do you think it will work? http://www.blogrash.com/blogrush-widget/
Wow this are very good tips, i searched whole internet and never found so usefull tips.Burning feeds will really get traffic and new rss subscribers.
Nice handy tips, I’ll have to bookmark this.
These are some excellent tips and I would like to add that all in all traffic is still what makes a website/blog successful. My blog http://www.gymtops.com has less than 100 subscribers, but my traffic shows that teh site is doing well and is not needed to be a success based on how many people subscribed. Why? Most of my readers probably aren’t tech savvy, but they atleast know how to navigate to a website and do some reading.
So, it’s cool to focus on how many subscribers you have, but I think it’s more important to not single out your sites success based on how many subscribers you have.
Just my two brown pennies.
Great information ….currently I am the only one who knows my blog even exists……thanks for the tips!
Looks like great information…..I have a new blog that currently only I know about!! Thanks for the tips!!
Thanks for these great tips with feedburner, I’m still trying to figure out this service. I am a newbie, and love reading the content that I find on this blog it really helps me out with my own blog. Thanks Shoe keep up the great work!
Another cool way is to set up Feedburner Mybrand, so that the feed url is hosted on your own domain name, just incase feedburner goes away one day……..
these are some great tips niel! thanks!
hmmm maybe some of us have used something like this to gain readership in the past. 1000+ subscribers was easy (I mean could be easy) to get with newer blogs.
what’s the quickest way to get a exploit fixed?
expose it to everyone!
great posting, thanks for all the information
In my experience I saw that 10 to 20 % of the rss subscribers also visit my site daily. Which is in fact why I added the rss feed. I also 301 redirected all existing feeds to one feed, the feedburner one, so that I can trace every move. I learned this way that my number of feedsubscribers was 3 times as big than what I thought.
Well yours is redirected. Not all of them are redirected. Mine wasn’t
It is important for my webapp (check beta.nafurai.com especially the stats page)
btw u havent’ replied my mosaic’s email.
I guess I should finally get on the bandwagon and start keeping track of my RSS subscribers..? I have an addthis functionality but I cannot track and/or send emails like shoemoney so I’m missing out :S
it 301’s so whats the difference
Actually the MOST IMPORTANT thing that we all should do is change the HTML tag link-alternate to point to feedburner, because most of the blog I see still use the old/wrong link.
Even shoemoney.com has the wrong one!
)
(actually even my site
In my experience, feeds generate a poor amount of traffic, but I guess everything hepls
Great tips — Ill have to put some of your ideas to work
Another RSS tip to increase subscribers and traffic is to submit your feed to every friggin RSS directory out there.
Just use Google and search for rss directories. After about 2 hours you should have gained 100 new active RSS “subscribers” and traffic channels. It’s killer ’cause it works to build any new blogs RSS subsciber number above 100 really fast and start the daily trickle of new traffic!
Great post by the way.
Neil, great post. However, I do agree that “Feedjacking” might have been a tip that could have been left out of your otherwise helpful post. Hopefully that paragraph gets edited out so people don’t start getting any ideas. =)
Thanks for the tips. I did join feedburner, and to be honest, I really didn’t understand it at all until I read this.
Wouldn’t take long to notice…
Nothing wrong with learning a little bit from both sides.
Haha, you told that black hat tip with such ease though
on Digital Point you can buy gmail/yahoo email addresses, mass add them to your feed and bam, x amount of addresses shows up as x amount of feed subscribers, thus pumping up your stats. Not saying people should do this, just telling it like it could be…
Ok Neil, you are excused this time
Keep up the creativity and hope you bring more suggestions to the table.
lol to be honest I think the idea of using someone else identity for an RSS feed to gain subscribers is abit stupid. I mean it might work or whatever but I’d much rather fail as myself than succeed as someone else. I think you should build your own authority.
I am a 22 year old college kid. I am 100% pure and non-evil.
You’ll be surprised, for some reason people still subscribe to them. I honestly don’t know why, but that is just the case.
I totally agree with you, I think it is more wise to spend time writing quality content.
I am a white hat.
By no means am I telling you guys to jack others feeds and I myself also think it is dirty… instead I am just telling it as is.
It does sound evil – steal all top blogs not using feedburner and after a while move the feed to your own blog??? I guess that this type of thing happens and doesn’t really hurt anyone… if your blog sucks people will eventually remove you from their reader.
“Granted, the content will be different but people are lazy and most won’t unsubscribe.”
Neil, you sound like John Chow with that evil idea!
Great information, Albeit, I don’t think that duping your users is the way to go.
Since we’re on the topic of feeds, what do you think about partial vs. full feeds?
How about “do not disable Web Awareness API from feedburner” ? If you disable it, lots of ranking sites (like mine, for example) can’t see you.
How about this tip – write really good content that people will want to subscribe to…
Straight up evil. I agree, I would rather get my own readers than hijack some.
Uhhhh, yeah I’d rather focus on good content that jacking a feed address and giving my readers something they don’t want…
Great information. I will be using some of this for my blog! Thanks!
Even if you register someone elses feed, no one is going to sunscribe to it because there isnt a link on the blog the feeds coming from also if your going to spend all that energy jacking someone elses feed why not devote it in writing good content.
Yep, that was some pretty dirty stuff there, I expected more.
I think Jeremy is away for some event so there will be few posts done by other bloggers.
I think above all the others the most important of all as mentioned is compelling content. You need to be providing such quality that people feel if they don’t subscribe they will be missing out.
I like to keep XML raw, most users are already familiar with it… better imo.
Neal, too sneaky on that last one! Have you gone over to the dark side?
” If you want to increase your RSS subscribers I would find all the top bloggers that aren’t using FeedBurner and register their FeedBurner URL under your account. “
Now that kind of FeedJacking is just wrong. We have to give users more credit than that. If someone is smart enough to subscribe to a RSS feed, they are very likely to know that the content is fake. In any case even if you feedjack, the top bloggers arent going to advertise that URL. So discoverability is totally an issue.
I appreciate the post, which is somewhat unique around RSS. However I was hoping this to be a bit more than just FeedBurner basics.
PS — I just invented a new term “FeedJacking”
I can’t agree more… content is king!
These are some great tips, thank you!
Some great Feedburner tips, thanks! I would also say that the best way to increase your subscriptions is to write quality material. If you have compelling content, people will subscribe more often.
Thanks for all the tips. I will incorporate the ones that I havent omitted previously.
Also, I had a question. Although my subscribers list is pretty small, I get a large number of hits on the http://domain.com/feed page. What is this traffic, is this bots or readers ? Could I redirect this traffic to feed burner page and increase my subscribers ?
Thanks
Neil, nice write up. I need/want to increase my readership. I’m hoping I can by reading some articles on here and your site.
Mine could be increasing faster… I will definitely be implementing these tips thank you!
Its a great Article Neil. I didnt knew you blog here too. I follow your blog regularly too
At what point to we reach critical mass with RSS and no one pays attention to their feeds any longer? It seems that a user will get so many feeds running that they just become annoying.