Jeba’s Blog

Promoting your feeds – My way

The very first question is why to promote a feed instead of the site itself. I myself under estimated the power of feed, now I have realized my mistake and it is now time to undo that mistake. This mistake would have costed me 1000’s of possible subscribers. These feed can be very helpful to bring up a loyal community around your blog and give them something to return to your blog and the chances are they will return. Imagine this case, a visitor came to your website through search engine found something interesting, made a couple of comments and he disappeared for ever. If we have promoted the feed in right way, he would have subscribed to the feed and might be reading your posts daily. Currently I am promoting my feeds and thought to share it with rest of the world.

Make it visible

Don’t expect your visitors to search for your feed on the sidebar of your wordpress blog. Make it obvious to them, Earlier I had put a small Feedburner’s Feed Count at the top right of the header with the same background colour as the header. The result was a disaster, I guess no body would have even noticed it. Even if someone would have noticed he wouldn’t have subscribed since it showed the number of subscribers as 9. So here we learn two things

1. Make your RSS feed more visible.
2. Don’t show the number of subscribers until you have something in 3 digits.

Use a Single Feed

Even though the soul purpose of feed is to increase the subscriber base it is very important to promote a single feed. I recommend FeedBurner to manage your feeds. Remove the default feed which you see under the meta category in Wordpress or edit it to point to FeedBurner’s feed. Not all users like to subscribe via a RSS feed, give them something more. You can use FeedBurner’s E-mail subscription to do the same. Using this your visitors can subscribe to your blog via e-mail.

Promote your Feed

It is very important to promote your feed other than in your blog. Use other blogs to promote your feed, in the comment area of blog, instead of your blog url enter your feed url. The chances of them subscribing to your feed increases as they are just a click away. Promote your feed url in Forum signature, the conversion will be very high as the person in blog is related to your niche. vBForum software based forums lets to add your feeds directly in your user panel, so it appears every time you post. Post more often on forums to make your feeds visible to larger audience.

Promote you feed via your messenger Status, both Gtalk and Yahoo! Messenger let you have links on your status. You can also promote your feed via Social Networking websites, Orkut lets you add feeds to your profile or you can add your feed url in your profile and request them to subscribe to your feed.

If you are using wordpress there is a wonderful plugin which will remind users to subscribe to your feed. It uses cookies, to find out how many times the visitor has visited your blog. You can choose the number of visits for the reminder after which it will no longer bother them. The plugin is called What Would Seth Godin Do

Here is the quick list

1. Promote your Feed in Comment Box of other Blogs.
2. Promote your Feed Via Forum Signatures.
3. Promote your Feed by posting more often in forums.
4. Promote your Feed Via Messenger Status.
5. Promote your Feed Via Social Networking.
6. Get the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin for wordpress.
7. Promote your Feed Via E-mail Signatures.

and finally Some Do’s and Don’t

• Do offer full feed subscription, don’t expect them to check your blog to read the rest of the entry.
• Do write some kind of tutorial to make them understand how the feed works.
• Do shameless promotion of your feed. It doesn’t matter if you beg them to subscribe.
• Do maintain your posting schedule. Irregular bloggers can loose subscribers.
• Don’t change your feed url once you have choose it, it would spell disaster.
• Don’t use the FeedCount until you have around 50-100 subscribers.
• Don’t promote your feed too much, it will effect your earnings.

If you really liked the post please subscribe to my feed , if you didn’t still subscribe to my feed. Well this is what I meant by shameless promotion.