Why You Should Build Your Feed Subscriber Base: Benefits and Perspectives
Subscribing to a web feed allows one to centralize a large number of websites and monitor them through a feed reader, which is a basically a funnel which channels content right to your browser window or desktop.
Feed subscriptions are primarily a user benefit and I’ve always wondered how encouraging readers to subscribe to your blog feed benefits the blogger in question.
I’ve done some reading around the web and according to most bloggers, there seems to be three common benefits of a strong feed subscriber base.
- Personal Gratification. This most basic benefit pertains to the mild pleasure that results from tracking statistical figures. It is personally gratifying to see a feed count increase over time as it represents the fact that more people are interested in your website.
- Feed-based Monetization. Involves the selling of advertisements in feeds. Depending on the size of your feed, this can bring in some extra money every month from your website. See my article on feed advertising networks you can use for your site.
- Social Proof. A large subscriber base offers social proof by validating your blog in the eyes of first-time visitors. A feed count is just one of the social tools you can use to grow your blog’s audience.
These reasons for pushing feed subscriptions are valid but I’ll like to offer another perspective towards promoting feed subscription options for your blog as well as some other reasons why you should build a large feed subscription audience.
An Alternative Perspective on Feed Subscription
I always like to look at things from a long-term profit angle because the monetary returns that you’ll see from any online project usually grows and develops over a period of time.
I primarily view a feed subscription base from an affiliate marketer’s perspective. Like newsletter or email list subscribers, feed readers are people who have indicated their interest in your material and opinions by subscribing to your blog feed.
These are people who will react to your recommendations. One can possibly consider feed readers to be the most loyal of your audience because they’ve chosen to consistently follow the content on your blog.
While there’s really no way to confirm the real depth of their interest, understanding the distinctions between your feed and normal audience allows you to appreciate the value they can give to your blog, business or personal brand.
Three Other Benefits of Building a Feed Subscriber Base
In order to distinguish feed audiences from on-site visitors, I’m going to assume that the feed audiences follow the website in question more regularly than other readers who only visit it once a day or every few days to access the content.
I believe this is the case though I’m not sure how to verify this exactly. Here are additional benefits of promoting your site feed and two of them are a result of differences between feed and regular site visitors:
- Ability to Initiate Feed-Level Promotions. Feeds allow you to promote a specific project or item outside of the normal post and site structure. For example, if you want to promote an affiliate program through your feeds and not on your blog, all you need to do is to include it within a feed signature. Two of the feed signature Wordpress plugins you can use are Digital Fingerprint and Sig2Feed.
- Improved Linkability. Links come more easily when you have an audience regularly following your blog, especially when that audience consists of people who can link to or recommend your blog to their friends. For breaking news, the feed audience may react faster and hence direct targeted traffic to your content. This will eventually lead to a snowball effect and induce more links or traffic to come in over time.
- Buzz Generators. Feed audience access material on your blog faster and have the ability to fill your website with relevant comments or feedback. They are essentially buzz generators which makes the blog look ‘busy’ or or more welcoming for other readers when they visit the site to view the content.
I’ve always wanted to examine why I regularly ask visitors to subscribe to Dosh Dosh’s blog feed or educate them on how to use a feed reader. In essence, this is really a post about the rationale behind the whole process.
Hopefully it will be helpful for some of you out there, especially if you’ve ever wanted more reasons to promote feed subscription on your blog or website.
If you can think of any more reasons why having a strong feed subscriber base will help your website or blog, please leave a comment.
For all marketing needs, subscribers are important.
I agree, having a high amount of feed subscribers can mean great traffic and repeated readers which will turn into loyal readers. plus they get a preview of what you are writing and if interested they will definitely go to your page instead of Googlin
I don’t really like bouncing from site to site to read the latest posts. If I had to do that, I would visit maybe 5 blogs, tops. Here is how a feed helps you, in my case.
If you write something uninteresting, I’ll skip to the next post on my feed reader. If, on the other hand, you write something that catches my attention, I’ll click on the link to read your post on your site so that I can get the full effect of your post.
I believe that this helps the bloggers to which I link because you will know what gets my attention and what does not rather than robotic loading of your home page to find the latest. It’s a hit, but it doesn’t tell you which post I liked in particular.
I am also a blogger. We like to think all our posts are gold. The reality is that most are goose eggs. The more frequently we post, the more likely we will have a few hits.
Pragmatically, I want my readers to skim through the goose eggs and click on the posts that catch their attention. This way, I know what my readers like.
Is subscribing through technorati is also considered subscribing to the feed? I dont like using the feedburner, so I subscribed blogs through technorati..
RSS subscriber yet very important to all blog writers to generated more money and traffics, but to make reader subscribe our blog are hard enough if our blog same as other. Even more hard if we new blog writer.
What you think about this matter? Seems your blog are successful to do this.
Good stuff, Maki! I’d like to see more tips on *how* to best promote & build your RSS feed subscriber base.
Well done. Building an audience over time by creating consistently good content that interests users is not an easy thing to do, but certainly has a lot of benefits, as you’ve explained.
@Rob O.
A post on how to promote and build your subscriber base will be upcoming
@cikgu azleen
Yes, I do think Technorati audiences do count as ‘feed readers’ (though not in the conventional sense) as they are able to monitor your blog when be informed when a new post is published.
@Shaine
Thanks for your response and detailed comment. Yes I agree with you that feed readers make it so much easier for a reader sort through the posts on a blog and like you, I do click through on links I like to comment on them.
I’ve always wondered whether opening your blog to feed subscription hampers the process of encouraging visitors to your site. But I guess getting an audience via feeds is better than getting no readers at all.
Good article Maki!
Have a question for you: When do you think it would be worth the effort to add ads in regard of number of subscribers?
I got 65 right now and it is growing slowly, but I do not want to scare away feed readers with ads..