Experimenting with how Feeds are Displayed
Lately I’ve been reading a lot on how you can tweak the way you show your feed, or market it to you readers. Basically, little things that would probably go unnoticed to a normal reader, but would draw in a new one. There are a lot of posts going around telling you to do all these different things, but here’s what’s worked for me. First off, I say this has ‘worked’ because the last week has shown no loss in subscribers, only staying equal or improving:
So as you see there the last seven days have only shown increases. This could be due to the things I’ve been doing to try and improve this of course. First of all, here are some things I’ve done on my own:
- Keep posting regularly. The key to getting more people to read your feed, or to come back at all is to have something there. Fresh content is always king, and if it’s interesting, insightful, etc… thats always a plus.
- Always offer full posts in feeds. This is mentioned a lot but I’ve never strayed from this. I personally 60~ feeds everyday via BlogLines, and only about 2 of them don’t offer full posts. Doing this just makes it more convenient for the reader.
- Have buttons, links, whatever above the fold. Above the fold simply refers to the screen the reader sees without scrolling. The first 1024*768 (including window, that res is an example) of your site.
- Use the FeedBurner Tools. I use the Headline animator as my forum signature anywhere that will let me. It gets only around 50-100 views a day and a couple clicks but links directly to my feed.
So now things I’ve been reading, and have tried out. Some of them work and some haven’t for me.
- At the end of every post put a link to your feed: Seems to work. As you can see below every post I’ve added a little tagline with a link to my feed. It seems to have been working.
- Submit to lots of RSS Directories: I don’t think so… This one just doesn’t seem to work. My feed is out there in lots of directories but they either don’t update their feeds enough or they don’t identify their readers to FeedBurner.
- When talking about RSS, link to your feed. I haven’t done this much, but I don’t see it working anymore than the links below each post.
- Use different methods of subscription: Seems OK. No huge improvements, but by offering normal RSS feeds and email subscriptions, as well as a quick BlogLines link, this might have been helping.
And now here’s some things I might be trying in the future. It’s all about experimentation, and here’s some new ideas I have:
- When commenting on a blog, link to your feed, not your site. This could work out if you leave comments regularly on other blogs, and people click your name. I don’t get a lot of traffic like this (barely any) but I’ll try to leave more comments when I try this.
- Don’t display your subscriber numbers when they’re low. Personally, I like to have the FeedBurner chicklet up at the top because it functions as an extra button and shows growth over time, but the theory behind this is:
People are like sheep. If they see under 50 people subscribing to a feed, they are less likely to subscribe to a feed with 1000 readers.
True? Maybe, but I don’t know. I would never subscribe to a feed because lots of other people do. I subscribe when I like the content and want to read it regularly.
- Include a text link in all emails, forum signatures and anywhere else you can. This will probably yield the best improvements.
So there you have it. There’s a total of 11 things you can do. If you try anything here, post a comment below and tell me if your stats went up or down, or even stayed the same. Not all these things are guaranteed to work right away, but over time you should see an increase.
Leave a comment
Tony
March 31st, 2007 at 2:24 PM
So basically keep on drawing attention to your own feed. It’s really frustrating when a layout does now have an obvious RSS button (if I really want to, I fetch the feed uri from source, it’s always there).
By the way, you might be interested to know, that about 10% of my subscribers are via email. Though I imagine that this option is geared towards users unfamiliar with RSS feeds. (So you might have to reword your email feed link to appeal to such audience)
Connor Wilson
March 31st, 2007 at 5:21 PM
I guess you’re right on the email subscribers thing. I had 1 email subscriber for a while, but not any more. It’s weird that a blog about Computer Sciences would yield so many people unfamiliar with RSS, though.
Tony
March 31st, 2007 at 5:47 PM
You’re right, it’s weird. Though I suspect that RSS is still mostly a blogger technology. I’ve got a couple of friends in CS and Engineering, and my blog is the only one they read - it doesn’t make sense to set up a reader for just a couple of feeds, so e-mail is a better option in such a case, even for technologically literate people.
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