Before you try to increase the number of subscribers to your blog, you need to decide if this is what you want to do. A RSS feed is much harder to monetize than a blog.Despite the low income, there are many valid reasons to increase RSS subscriptions. The main one being RSS represents a loyal reader base and as such, anything you can do to increase it helps your blog in the long run. Another reason to increase RSS is because some ad networks,like ReviewMe , take RSS subscribers into account when determining your price - the higher the RSS number, the more stars you get.
Offer a Full Feed - If you really want to increase your RSS base, then you must offer a full feed. Many RSS users won’t subscribe to your feed if it’s not full. I have over 30 feeds in my Google reader. Everyone single one of them is a full feed. If you don’t have a full feed, I’m not subscribing.I use my RSS feed to give my readers a mostly ad free version of my blog. Do not use RSS as ateaser in the hopes that the reader will click to the blog in order to read the full post. Unless your
blog is updated 20+ times per day, readers won’t sign up to the RSS in the first place.
Don’t Show Your RSS Count When It’s Small FeedBurner offers a nice chicklet that displays the number of RSS readers on your blog. Right now, it shows 5,099 for my blog. The number represents the amount of people who access the blog via RSS yesterday. I don’t recommend a blog shows this chicklet until the subscriber counted reaches at least 50.
This is human psychology at work. People, in general, are like sheep. They’re scared to step outside their comfort zone and won’t do it until they see others do it. When they see a blog with a chicklet showing six readers, their tendency is not to subscribe. It’s best to hide your RSS number until you have enough subscribers to display a decent number. Big RSS numbers makes people subscribe. Small RSS numbers turns them away. It’s not fair, but that’s how it work.If you want to be evil, you can fake a RSS feed count by displaying someone else’s Chicklet
number.
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