How To Increase RSS Subscribers

If you’re a member of the social networking site FriendFeed, and you have your blog added to your FriendFeed services, and you have your RSS subscribers through FeedBurner, then you just increased your RSS subscriber count.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my RSS subscribers jump exponentially on June 18, 2009 because of this. So I rushed over to the FriendFeed blog to find out what was up and sure enough they reported that Subscribers Count!

This is great because if you’ve been building your FriendFeed subscribers they now are counted as RSS subscribers to your blog. FriendFeed reports that there are even more readers of your articles because when someone “Likes” your blog post on FriendFeed, that means the readers of the folks who “Like” your blog post also see and potentially read your posts. Nice.

This could mean the difference for newbie bloggers placing their RSS subscribers count on their blog or not. If you’re a new blogger and you’ve been taught NOT to display your readership until you have 50 or 100 RSS subscribers (for social proof reasons), then this could mean it’s time to display that golden number on your blog.

As new bloggers it helps to display the number of RSS subscribers for social proof reasons. Social proof tells visitors to your blog, “Hey, this blogger has an audience and maybe I should stay and check out what they have to say.” And potentially you’ve got a new RSS subscriber. Your RSS subscribers can be like a steak dinner as these readers like what you’ve written (acceptance) and want to stay informed, and could become potential customers or even business partners.

Just a note on FriendFeed for those folks who don’t know about the service. FriendFeed is a social networking aggregator for all the social networking sites that you’ve joined. As you join social networking sites like twitter, facebook and others, you can add them to your FriendFeed account and you’ll have yourself a Grand Central Station to all your online activity. This is a great way to peruse what you’ve been doing online and even do a weekly review of what you’ve become aware of or learned about online. It also helps to give other people a sense of what’s important to you and new resources for them as well.

So if you haven’t done so, open an account on FriendFeed and start building your subscribers on FriendFeed. Make sure you add your blog as a service on FriendFeed.

Oh yea, if you like what you’ve read here at my blog, consider subscribing.