When it comes to attracting subscribers the most important thing a blog can have is great content, but no matter how great your content is if your visitors can’t work out how to subscribe then you will miss out. Shoemoney found this out a few months ago when he noticed his subscriber numbers had plateaued after he removed the clickable link to his RSS feed.
Recently I took part in a ProBlogger group writing project, and I noticed that even though it sent me a lot of new traffic I didn’t convert any of those into subscribers. One of the things I suspected as being a cause of this was the poor visibility of my subscription link.
So I decided to do something about it. I removed the subscription link from my WordPress theme and replaced it with a more visible link. I also included the option to subscribe via email, which is increasingly popular these days, and is a service that Feedburner provides. Now my subscriptions area looks like this:
I’ve also signed up my own email address to receive the updates via email. I recommend you always subscribe to your own blogs via RSS and email so that you can make sure your posts are getting to your readers okay.
Lets see if my new subscriptions placement helps draw more subscribers.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
hey, i don’t know if this was intentional (or just me) but it seems like you have only changed the subscription link on the index page. when viewing a single post or other page the new subscribe link isn’t there.
also, this might be a stupid question but how can you tell how many people subscribe?
No its not just you, and it wasn’t intentional. Whoops! I’ve fixed it now so it shows on all views. The perils of late night coding I guess.
I use the FD Feedburner plugin (http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedburner/) to redirect the default WordPress RSS feeds to Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com) which is a free service owned by Google). With Feedburner you can see stats on numbers of subscribers and offer email subscriptions as well as a bunch of other great stuff.