Provide Subscription for Your Readers

Do you provide feed subscription for your readers?

Providing subscription is an important thing if you want loyal readers of your blog. There are some tips about providing subscription that might help you.

In fact, every bloggers will provide subscription for their blogs if they know the benefits that they will get, except the bloggers who prefer to make their blog private. Most bloggers wanna spread their words, I believe.

Most popular reason is “I don’t know hot to provide subscription at my blog“. OK, that’s simple. The first thing is you have to find a feed web management for your blog. I recommend Feedburner as it’s easy to use and free. You might want a help? Click here to go to FeedBurner Help.

The benefits of providing subscription for your readers are:
1. You will get loyal readers as well as traffic.
2. You save your energy and time to spread your word.
3. You have good potential if you’re promoting something e.g. products.

Here are some tips on how to optimize subscription service for your blog.

Provide Subscription by Email
Subscription by email is the easiest method because most of us have our own email. I found some blogs with good connect but unfortunately they don’t offer subscription via email. Some people don’t prefer to use aggregator such as FeedDemon or FeedBlitz so provide subscription through all available options especially via email. Use subscription box for better results.

Put Subscription Box at The Visible Place
Subscription box is a good idea to ease readers to subscribe to your feeds but you’ll reduce the result if you “hide” it. Some visitors might try to search for the subscription box, but most of them will not. The good place to put the subscription box is on top of the sidebar or after the post (before comment section). Decorate the subscription box nicely and use interesting words to attract the readers to subscribe to your feeds. You can see a tutorial on how to customize your subscription box here.

Make A Contest for The Subscribers
You can make a contest for the readers who subscribe to your feeds. You don’t have to provide a lot of prizes. Just make a lucky contest and the lucky winner will be chosen from the readers who subscribe to your feed. Announce the due date of the contest and use randomer such as Random Line Picker to choose the lucky winner. 10USD for the winner, maybe. The price for subscription is free and every subscribers have the chance to win. They seek for prize, you got subscribers! You can make the contest monthly or annually so the readers will stick their subscription to you.

Using FeedBurner Count
FeedBurner count is a way to show your current total of subscribers. This is a good step to encourage other readers to subscribe to your feed, because they’ll curious why other readers subscribe to your blog. But it’s not recommended to put the Feedburner count when there’s only a little amount of subscribers. Wait until there’s 10 subscribers and above and you’re ready to show-off.

Maintaining Good and Useful Contents
You have to maintain good and useful contents especially when you have a huge amount of subscribers. The subscribers will get your feed in their inbox our through the aggregator and they have the choice whether to go to your blog or not. Some of the tricks are :

1. Write interesting content to encourage your subscribers to go to your blog and leave a comment.

2. Provide summary version for the subscribers and put attractive topics so they will get interested to read more of the content at your blog.

Avoid Too Much Notification
Your subscribers will be notified upon your submission of the post in your blog. Let’s say there’s a mistake such as typo or you missed something in your post and you edit it then submit it again. Your subscribers will be notified for the 2nd time about the same post. Imagine what’s happen if you do the same thing 10 times? Your subscriber’s will feel annoyed with too much notifications and then unsubscribe from your blog.

Check your content 2-3 times before submit it and if you want to update the post, in case there are latest news for the posts, add the word “Update” or “Updated version” for the post so your subscribers will know it’s an updated version for the same post.

The things that I stated above come from my own experience. If you have any additional ideas, thoughts or suggestion, feel free to leave your comment below.