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How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner

ByJeremy Schoemaker

Sep 17, 2007

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?

By Jeremy Schoemaker

Jeremy "ShoeMoney" Schoemaker is the founder & CEO of ShoeMoney Media Group, and to date has sold 6 companies and done over 10 million in affiliate revenue. In 2013 Jeremy released his #1 International Best selling Autobiography titled "Nothing's Changed But My Change" - The ShoeMoney Story. You can read more about Jeremy on his wikipedia page here.

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79 thoughts on “How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner”

  1. 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.

  2. Its a great Article Neil. I didnt knew you blog here too. I follow your blog regularly too 😀

  4. 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.

  5. 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

  6. 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.

  9. ” 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” 😉

  12. 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.

  15. 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.

  17. Uhhhh, yeah I’d rather focus on good content that jacking a feed address and giving my readers something they don’t want…

  20. 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.

  21. 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?

  22. “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!

  23. 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.

  24. 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.

  26. 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.

  28. 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.

  29. Ok Neil, you are excused this time 🙂
    Keep up the creativity and hope you bring more suggestions to the table.

  30. 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… 8)

  31. […] talks about feedburner.com titled “How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner“. Like he said, lots of people are already using it, but maybe we’re not using it to […]

  32. […] Check out the full article at Shoemoney. […]

  37. Thanks for the tips. I did join feedburner, and to be honest, I really didn’t understand it at all until I read this.

  38. 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. =)

  39. 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.

  42. 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 🙁 )

  44. 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

  45. 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.

  46. […] subscription numbers.  Neil Patel is a guest bloger this week for Shoemoney and has written a post How To Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner.  He goes over some of the basic methods in the post and then as a bonus tip through somewhat of a […]

  47. 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.

  50. 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.

  53. 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!

  54. Looks like great information…..I have a new blog that currently only I know about!! Thanks for the tips!!

  55. Great information ….currently I am the only one who knows my blog even exists……thanks for the tips!

  56. 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.

  58. 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.

  60. ” 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.

  61. […] A simple post but Shoemoney had a guest writer contribute  a quick writeup of How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner. […]

  62. I’ve found that an email after readers first comment works best for subscriptions to your RSS feed.

  63. 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?

  64. […] 8. Reduce the number of steps needed to subscribe. Using Feedburner to burn your feed is a great way to optimize the efficiency of the subscription process. I highly recommend using Feedburner’s RSS subscription service. In another article of this series I will describe the benefits of using Feedburner. According to a study performed by MarketingExperiments.com, they were able to increase their subscription conversion by reducing their subscription process by only one step. Shoemoney has a good article on how to increase your RSS subscribers using Feedburner. […]

  65. 保证能增加RSS订阅量的35个方法 at 小末|有标题文档 says:

    […] 8. 减少订阅的步骤。 使用Feedburner可以很好的实现这点，因此我强烈推荐Feedburner的订阅服务。我会在另外一篇文章里说通过Feedburner的好处。通过对MarketingExperiments.com的研究发现，如果减少订阅步骤到只有一步，将会大大的增加其订阅量。Shoemoney的如何通过Feedburner增加你的RSS订阅量就很好的说明了这点。 […]

  66. 增加博客RSS订阅量的35个方法 | 摇钱树博客 says:

    […] 8. 减少订阅的步骤。 使用Feedburner可以很好的实现这点，因此我强烈推荐Feedburner的订阅服务。我会在另外一篇文章里说通过Feedburner的好处。通过对MarketingExperiments.com的研究发现，如果减少订阅步骤到只有一步，将会大大的增加其订阅量。Shoemoney的如何通过Feedburner增加你的RSS订阅量就很好的说明了这点。 […]

  67. 赚钱博客 » Blog Archive » 保证能增加RSS订阅量的35个方法 says:

    […] 8. 减少订阅的步骤。 使用Feedburner可以很好的实现这点，因此我强烈推荐Feedburner的订阅服务。我会在另外一篇文章里说通过Feedburner的好处。通过对MarketingExperiments.com的研究发现，如果减少订阅步骤到只有一步，将会大大的增加其订阅量。Shoemoney的如何通过Feedburner增加你的RSS订阅量就很好的说明了这点。 […]

  69. Theres a Blog in my Soup - This ain’t No John Chow Copycat! : Blogs need to eat too! Feed your blog with 39 ways to build your RSS Subscriber base. So easy a slackjawed yokel could do it! says:

    […] Shoemoney’s guide to getting more Rss Subscribers via Feedburner […]

  70. […] * 35 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Your RSS Subscribers * Remind the unverified users to verify their Email Subscription * 11 ways to find new RSS subscribers * How to use Feedburner to bring in more Subscribers […]

  71. […] an additional 60% of people seeing the blog on average via their favorite feed reader. Please note, nothing has been done to pump RSS readers’ either, no tricks […]

  72. […] How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner – ShoeMoney® […]

  73. […] Reduce the number of steps needed to subscribe. Using Feedburner to burn your feed is a great way to optimize the efficiency of the subscription process. I highly recommend using Feedburner’s RSS subscription service. In another article of this series I will describe the benefits of using Feedburner. According to a study performed by MarketingExperiments.com, they were able to increase their subscription conversion by reducing their subscription process by only one step. Shoemoney has a good article on how to increase your RSS subscribers using Feedburner. […]

  77. Wow…great tips. These are really good ways of increasing feeds. it worked well for me

  78. […] 英文原文:  How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner […]

  79. […] * 35 Guaranteed Ways to Increase Your RSS Subscribers * Remind the unverified users to verify their Email Subscription * 11 ways to find new RSS subscribers * How to use Feedburner to bring in more Subscribers […]

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