A Very Simple Method to Increase your RSS Subscribers & MyBloglog community members.
I was recently leaving a comment on another blog in regards to MyBloglog (MBL) and decided to leave the URL for Dosh Dosh’s MyBloglog community instead of doshdosh.com. This was because I wanted the owner of the blog to have easy access to my community page. Looking back, I thought that this would be a great method which you can use to promote your MyBloglog community or increase the number of readers who subscribe to your blog.
How do you implement this super easy method?
Whenever you leave a comment on another blog, put down the URL to your MyBlogLog community or your Feedburner feed in the ‘Website‘ section of the comment box. Don’t paste either URL below your typed comment but connect it to your name by entering it as your website. Make your usual witty or insightful comment and exit.
I like this method because it doesn’t feel like you’re spamming a link. You’re just commenting as usual, except that the link directs interested readers to your MBL community page or Feedburner feed.
Most blogs use the nofollow attribute for their comments, so you won’t lose any PR benefits by doing this.
Why not use your comments to build up your RSS subscriber base or MBL community?
How does this increase your RSS subscribers or community members?
When you leave an comment that is approved by the owner of the blog in question, you’re leaving a permanent link that everyone that visits the same blog will possibly click on, should they be curious enough to find out who is the person behind the name.
By linking your comment with either your MBL community or RSS feed, you are effectively doing two things:
- Building MBL Community Awareness. You’re immediately letting the blog owner and his/her readers know that you are on MBL. They don’t have to click through to your website and look for the avatar widget and then click on it to access your MBL community. You’re offering them one-click access to your community.
This will work very well with regular readers who are familiar with your website. They might have already joined your community but might not have done so because some of them might not even know that you are on MyBloglog.
- Indirectly promoting your RSS feed. You’re telling bloggers and their readers that they should subscribe to your blog feed. Feedburner’s default feed subscription page is pretty functional and offers a large variety of subscription options.
After clicking on your feed and browsing through the contents, they are more likely to subscribe because they only need to scroll up and choose the method of subscription. Very hassle-free and convenient.
For example, I didn’t know that some of the blogs I usually read had MBL communities. That’s probably because I usually read them through my feed readers and seldom visit their websites. Leaving a comment on blogs you visit makes your readers (and their readers) aware of your MBL community.
How does a bigger MBL community or RSS subscriber base help me make money online?
I see MBL as a blog-based networking community which allows you to connect with many types of bloggers. If you have a lot of community members, you get a chance of being listed in the Top 50 communities section of the community page.
This will give your blog greater visibility, which is very important when more and more bloggers sign up with MyBlogLog.
More RSS subscribers usually mean more returning traffic and greater exposure for your blog. When more people subscribe to your feed, more people are likely to see everything that you publish, which increases the chances of getting more links to your website.
More Subscribers + Readers= Greater link popularity = More traffic and PR = Stronger ad selling power = More money in your pocket.
For example, pay-to-post setups like ReviewMe set their rates according to your RSS feed subscriptions, among other factors. The more subscriptions you have, the more money you’ll get for reviewing a website. This method that I’ve suggested should be integrated alongside other fool-proof ways to increase your RSS subscribers.
My only gripe about this super easy way to boost your MBL community & RSS feeds is the difficulty involved in monitoring its success. I don’t think there’s an easy way to track how many people actually subscribed to your feed or joined your MBL community because of the comments you’ve left in other blogs.
I do however, think that you really have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Do leave a comment (hint!) because I would love to hear your thoughts on this tip.
Maki, are you benefiting from MBL in terms of traffic well? I am still in doubt whether I should put the MBL widget on my blog or not
That’s a great idea. However, I would prefer to have more people linking to my blog directly as it would have a beneficial effect on my page rankings.
Very good post here!
I have been talking about promoting other sites as a means of getting more links, readers, and subscribers and it all seemed to fall on deaf ears until now!
Why do this?
Click on my link and think about it for a second:
I am still promoting my site. I am still promoting links to my site.
See that Feedburner page I send you to has some PR now? That is because I link to that page from various places and it of course links to my latest posts.
You ARE linking to your site when you use this method and you are making an off site page more popular at the same time.
Meaning you are getting links from, in this case, Feedburner that are 3rd party links on a page you “own” with higher PR than, say, this page we are both reading right now.
It IS a big deal. Link outside the box!
I’ll be interested to hear how this works for you. I’m with Daniel, unless you’re a “hot” community or on the main page (which according to Eric is broken right now, hence why Random Good Stuff has been there for almost a month), I’ve never seen any advantages to MBL.
Hi Daniel and Anita,
I don’t think MBL brings in large amounts of traffic but rather, it reinforces relationships between bloggers. I think the MBL widget makes it very convenient to network with your readers.
You can discover who is reading your blog and easily send them a public or private message. This does wonders for building a strong reader base.
Also, Andy Beard has also written about how MBL’s widgets provide social proof or validation of your blog’s worth in the eyes of other bloggers and readers.
For example, if readers notice (through the widget) that someone like Darren Rowse is reading your blog regularly. They’ll think that your blog has something important to offer and they will keep coming back or even link to your articles because they think your opinion has value.
All in all.. nothing really to lose and a lot to gain.
MBL can bring in significant amounts of traffic for a new blog, but you have to get involved with communities in the same niche.
A lot of my blogs grow can be attributed to the relationships I fostered with other bloggers, with MBL as the medium through which we met.
If you meet your future business partner in a bar, you don’t attribute the success of your meeting to the bar, but it might well have helped foster the relationship.
There are ways to track the clicks, but not the signups – hmm there would actually be a naughty way to do the MBL signup but you could get a backlash if people thought they were tricked.
Irony = 6 people commented on this technique before me, but only one actually followed the advice.
Well is a good idea but I still prefer to link back to my blog.
If people enjoy reading my blog they will subscribe from there.
Anyway that is a good ideea
I don’t but then my blog is designed as a landing page for both subscribers and MBL community signups.
I do however often link to feeds and people’s MBL communities.
There is another factor these days also to think about. There is a wave of people now adopting dofollow plugins which I have been evangelising for some time.
Also I still need more followable links for Yahoo, who as far as I can tell have never fully supported nofollow – they always follow links.
I agree, what’s the worst that can happen? Whilst I may not have had tens of thousands of visitors from MBL, bloggers can see who’s visiting their blog & check them out (I’ve done this) and the community allows one set of my readers to discover my other blogs.
Cool concept; hope it works.
I couldn’t agree more. Since I started my MBL community about two weeks ago, I didn’t thought much about building a community. I was there for sake of being there. When I check my stats – most of the incoming link was from a MBL members. Then I realize, how important building a strong MBL community is to the overall success of my blog. Now I’m putting a little bit more effort promoting my community.
These are not bad ideas. More depth would be appreciated and these tips are more a common sense issue.
If I may just arise something going on recently in MBL. Co-author spam. People are adding tons of co-authors and then switching them over to community members.
I don’t think this is ethical but definitely interesting
Looks like it’s worth a try! Thanks for the tip. Tried it here.
It’s an interesting suggestion, Maki. However, it’s not clear (to me, at least) what the real purpose of communities is on MyBlogLog. I mean, it’s nice to see how many people have joined a community, and I’ve joined several. And I’m very grateful to those who have joined mine. But what are the communities really for? Should Yahoo! not attach some kind of interactivity to them?
I think I’d hold off on doing what you suggest until I can see more value from attracting folks to join a community. I’d prefer to get traffic to my site first.
thanks for the tips.
CU
Thanks for the info.
Very useful tips, thanks.
Interesting tips, I thought I will not understand text but its very handy and easy so now everything is clear in my head
Never thought of that. Thanks
That’s an awesome idea, I never thought of it. I’ll try it out and see how it works.