A Feed Is Born

How to increase RSS subscribers

by Juned on July 10th, 2007

I came across this article this morning. Its all about a survey conducted by email newsletter specialist Newsweaver on how Irish organizations are using emails to promote their business and retain clients. According to their survey, Eight-eight percent of businesses surveyed used their email to retain clients - three times more than the use of email to promote their business. What interested me and did not surprise me though about the survey was that several companies expressed an interest in using podcasts (25%), blogging (23%), and RSS (20%).

Using Webfeeds , RSS and Atom, is fine but you have to use it effectively in order to make full and productive use of it. Hari of Got Chance came up with 5 Tips to Increase RSS Subscribers. Here is the shortened version

1) Make your RSS button stand out but not too loud.
2) Always offer a full feed.
3) Use a subscriber count only if you have over 150 subscribers.
4) Avoid putting in too many buttons it too may become annoying.
5) Use email subscription to increase your subscribers.

I would agree with all five tips. The strongest tip for me though is to always offer a full feed. From the point of view of a subscriber there is nothing more irritating than getting half of a feed or a just an abstract. It pushes It must be remembered though that summaries have their uses and can be quite practical when dealing with a large collection of information. But as teaser that will lead to another website it defeats the purpose of RSS and is counter productive - it turns people off.

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POSTED IN: RSS