Increasing RSS feed subscriptions

Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 10:32 pm

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Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy my site.

Inspired by a post by Rohit Bhargava I thought I’d try to make it easier for readers of my blog to add the RSS feed to their favourite feedreader and to their preferred social bookmarking site.

Rohit’s post is worth checking out, along with all the linked resources and his more recent post. The concept of social media optimisation seems like a logical one to me as a marketer.

Since I’ve been blogging the traffic to the site has been growing steadily, but RSS subscriptions through Feedburner haven’t grown at a similar rate. So I thought it’d be worth trying a bit of optimisation.

I had originally thought about using a Wordpress plug-in to put a set of buttons against each post to let users subscribe with one click. But something about having a long list of buttons seemed like a waste of precious screen space to me, plus I’d never be able to keep the list up-to-date as new RSS services come along all the time.

Then I found iFeedReader (courtesy of All Narfed Up)- it’s a free service that allows me to put one subscribe button (and one social bookmarking button) on the site, which then links to a page with a wide (and growing) list of services. You’ll see the two big orange buttons at the foot of each post. The “hit the button” approach appeals to my sense of usability I think.

There’s also a long list of similar tools on 3spots but the simplicity and scalability of IFeedReader wins it for me.

Tags: Blogging, Marketing, social+media, web+development, Wordpress
Categories: Blogging, Marketing, Social media, Web development, Wordpress

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