Building A Strong and Stable RSS Readership

Building a strong and stable RSS readership is one feature that a large percentage of bloggers have in common. Over time, if you are marketing your blog well enough, driving traffic using various techniques etc…You will probably get quite a few RSS readers subscribing willingly and that is what separates a good and loyal RSS reader from a bad RSS reader.

The key to getting good RSS subscribers all the time is to make sure that you are not forcing them to…when a person subscribes via RSS it should be for this reason and this reason only.

They Liked Something, And They Want More Of It

That is the only reason someone should be subscribing via RSS, if you hold a blog contest, you will undoubtedly get a big rise in subscribers if you tell them that they will increase their likelihood of winning by subscribing…But what are these people likely to do after that? Nothing. Plain and simple, I say it is better to have quality than quantity. I don’t care if you have 1000 RSS subscribers, if you got three quarters of those people by running a contest, they are basically passive subscribers (only in it to win it).

The next point to consider is that 250 RSS subscribers that are left, how many of them actually participate actively at the blog, the answer to this would probably be around 10 or 20 only. This is a typical number for any blog, because statistics show that only a very tiny percentage of subscribers actually participate by doing things like commenting, voting, responding to polls, taking part in community projects etc…

So, I am not saying contests are bad…they are very good actually. They are good for a large variety of reasons. I am saying that you have to have a “focused” contest, if you are in a particular niche. Having a contest for a “make money online” blog and telling home garden blogs to blog about it is like bringing roast pork to a vegetarian dinner…You are not reaching that target audience that will be likely to actively participate on your blog.

So remember, the next time you have a blog contest, make sure you blog about it and you tell other blogs in the same niche to blog about it, the recent “Bloggin-Ads” contest is a great example of this because a huge amount of blogs in the same niche were blogging about the contest, and it made it successful. But…this contest was only able to do this by offering a VERY large amount of prizes from a multitude of blogs, hence more bloggers who offered a prize blogged about it.

Posted on January 23, 2008
Filed Under Blog and Site Improvement |

Tags: blog contest, context, focused content, really simple syndication, rss readership

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