Giving Your Blog Readers a Reason To Subscribe To Your RSS Feed

Increasing opt in rates to your RSS feed is a major challenge faced by bloggers.

This challenge requires finding creative ways to give your readers a list of reasons why they should subscribe to your feed without receiving any immediate benefit or reward.

If you’re using an email service like Aweber or Mail Chimp, you should be receiving far more subscribers than you do using Feedburner or another rss management service.

Why is this?

Because email services provide auto responders which allow you to automatically send a download link to a free ebook in return for signing up.

You can also embed an eBook cover in your sidebar which looks more attractive and offers more incentive than an RSS icon.

Offering  a bribe like a nice free download that looks great does convert really well especially if you place it above the fold using a feature box like the best marketing themes include.

Creative Ways to Increase RSS Opt Ins

The Why Subscribe? or 6 reasons to subscribe link included after all posts is linked to a landing page containing 6 Reasons to Subscribe for Blogging Tips.

Each sub heading contains 6 of the most popular topics which bloggers are interested in and searching for tips on. Below each sub heading there’s 2-3 lines containing more information relating to the sub heading which includes links to popular articles.

Here’s some ideas on what the text below each sub heading could contain.

• Link to testimonial for each reason or short testimonial included below some of the sub headings.
• Challengers faced by other people in your field
• Freebies which include useful content that helps solves problems and benefits the user
• Practical advice on subjects your readers can relate to.
• The page title contains keywords related to the link they clicked, Sign Up.

Testing Improvements

One thing i haven’t added to this page is an opt-in box which really should be placed above the fold within the content area.

I have also added shortened testimonials to this page since taking this screenshot.

If you’re not getting many RSS subscribers, maybe its time to create or update your opt in page and test some of these methods for yourself.

You can view the updated page providing reasons to subscribe to this blogs tips here.

Creating a subscribe page or updating your existing one and incorporating these tips will give your readers more reasons to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Have you tried using these methods?

Or do you already receive a large amount of RSS subscriptions?