Tips to get maximum out of Feedburner
The importance of feedburner is evident from the fact that it is rare to find a blog that does not have a feedburner subscription box. So I will directly get into how you can get the maximum out of it. I shall be dealing with 3 broad topics in this article
- How to get more visitors to subscribe to your feed
- How to make more % of subscribers to actually click into your article
- How to get more benefit out of the subscribers once they land on your page
How to get more visitors to subscribe to your feed
- Offer an option to subscribe via email.
- Place the subscription box at prominent places including your sidebar, beginning of the article and the end of the article. End of the article is my favorite place as the visitor is most likely to subscribe right after going through a really good article.
- Draw attention to your rss subscription box prominently. Use of an image or arrow to draw users eye to the subscription box can be quite effective.
- Remind people to confirm the subscription. Lot of people who subscribe to your blog never confirm the feedburner message. Techzoomin has a really detailed post about how to get back unverified feedburner subscribers
- Run a contest that needs participants to subscribe or offer a free ebook only after subscribing to your blog.
- Avoid the 34 mistakes that make your subscribers abandon you
How to make more % of subscribers to actually click into your article
While most bloggers that I know are obsessed with the first step i.e how to get more people to subscribe to their rss feed, the second and third step are most often neglected. Unless the subscribers actually open the email and read your content either in the body of the email or click through and come to your blog, all that effort to get them to subscribe goes in vain. Following are some steps that you can do to ensure that more peopleactually open your email
- Use dynamic subject line. If you are subscribed to my blog, you would have got an email with subject line as “Tips to get maximum out of Feedburner”. I have been getting around 4 times more click through after making this change instead of the same static subject line of “Binaryday – A better day”
- Choose a suitable time of delivery for your email. You want the subscribers to see your email at the top of their mailbox when they login. If your feed email is sent at 2 in the night then it will be hidden below 10-15 emails by the time the person logs in at 10 in the morning.
- Deliver value consistently: I am subscribed to a large number of feeds. Some of these bloggers deliver awesome content everytime without fail. Others give me one good content for 5 sales pitch. If I want to read only one, then which one will I select?
- Stay on topic: I have been guilty of not following this advice and in the process have lost a lot of feed subscribers. When I subscribe to a blog about blogging, I am asking you to send me posts about blogging alone. Please do not send me posts about mobile phones. If you must blog about different topics, then provide an option to subscribe to category wise feeds.
How to get more benefit out of the subscribers once they land on your page
Your feed subscribers are a highly valuable asset. They are different from your search engine traffic because
- They read your blog regularly and are more likely to trust your advice
- They are less likely to click on adsense ads
If you put these 2 together then you shall realize that it is not very smart to deliver the same adsense ads to your feed subscribers. Rather I will try to sell some useful affiliate products to them from time to time. The 2 words in bold are really important. Never sell a product to your subscribers whose usefulness you are not sure about as that will loose their trust in you. And never send more than 1 sales letter not separated by at least 7-8 useful content posts.
Feed subscribers can be really useful in spreading your high quality posts. Try to pitch them to link to you, share your posts with people they know through twitter, digg and other methods.
I hope you found this post useful. In such a case please help me get more traffic through a stumble or a tweet or any other method you like
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Nice post sita.
But, i have to say this. irrespective how much you work hard to have good title and good post. there are lot of subscribers who subscribe but when they get in their email boxes. they don’t visit.
I have lots of subscribers but, rss feed visitors are very very less.
@Nihar,
That is exactly what I am trying to emphasize. All of us put in a lot of effort into building up a large subscriber base and too little effort into getting real result out of the subscriber base.
Have you tried the dynamic title for feedburner? I got around 300% increase in click through after the change.
Sita,
yes i have tried dynamic title trick. it is right now enabled for feedburner.
Is this the same you mentioned in the comment you left on my blog?
Man,
but I guess, you have covered more than what I would have…
We seem to think alike… I had semi drafted a post on Feedburner
Nice tips and tweeted
As for the timing of the post, this was very crucial in blogging idol competition
What I figured out is that if you deliver it just before midnight US time you have a very good chance of getting the email subscriptions counted for that day. I usually deliver it 11AM indian time… may not really work for the US people who see it among several other mails in the morning 
But post timing is even more important. I write most of my good posts on Friday (afternoon at work) and I found that they don’t really get traffic/recognition for the next three days!
hmmmm…some really nice ideas Ajith especially the one about post timing. I should start observing it even more closely.
Thanks for the tweet. Tweets and stumbles of people have become really important as I have sort of stopped promoting binaryday and intend to post around 4 posts a month.
Thanks for the link love dude… I see you’re more concentrating on feedburner count and all
Very useful post. The new Subject line feature is a boon for us and is very useful…
Even I have seen a difference after using it..More over a clever placement of RSS subscription option is also a great way to enhance your Feed subscriber experience.