Two Common Blog Mistakes Which Will Hurt Your Subscriber Rates
There are two common blogging mistakes I’ve seen recently which will really hurt your subscriber stats. Avoid these and I am convinced you’ll see an increase in subscribers.
The two mistakes to avoid:
- Not having a site search, or burying it towards the bottom of your home page
- Not placing your RSS Feed Icon at the top of every page
Site Search
Why is this important? New visitors to your site may have been drawn to your blog by a recent post, but they may be interested in knowing if you’ve discussed other topics. Without a site search, there is virtually no way they can find out. Sure, they can put your feed into Google Reader and search that - but it’s not all of your blog! Make your site search obvious and towards the top of the page!
RSS Feed Icons
Congratulations! You’ve got new visitors to your blog. The hard work has paid off! But hey, where did they go? Why did they not stay and subscribe to your feed? Because you’ve buried your RSS Feed Icons somewhere deep within the middle of your side bar - or obscured them with a million similar icons. Use a simple orange RSS Icon, and place it in the header of your blog, and put text links in your footer. No one will miss it then and they won’t have to go hunting for it!
As I said, I am convinced that if you do these two things you’ll see an increase in subscribers if your doing a good job of getting new visitors to your blog already!
Note: You can feed icons at http://www.feedicons.com
December 29th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Oh my… You really hit it to the core that most people do make this mistakes and these are mistakes people can’t effort to make.
Search makes visitors to look for more information. If they can’t find what they want or they feel hard to find it. They will move away or click the close button fast.
RSS button is crucial to make them stay and come often to blog. That’s one of the main asset of a blogger. Advertisers will use this as a measure of how much they are willing to pay for advertising on our blog.
December 29th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Love the site search suggestion - especially for content rich or overly crowded blogs.
While on the subject (and I hope this isn’t faux pas) I just created this list of 89 places to promote your blogs and rss feeds Enjoy!
December 29th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Great article. I like your blog. Keep on posting more. I will be one of your regular readers.
December 30th, 2007 at 2:07 am
Good points I always have RSS and search at the top of my blogs that way they are in the eye straight away!
December 30th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Thanks for the list! Glad my tips are comin g in handy!
January 1st, 2008 at 9:07 am
Having the RSS feeds is a must for every blog and it can also be applied to any articles or news websites.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:32 am
I, too, am convinced that a prominent feed icon is extremely important. This holiday season I was amused to see RSS feed icons wearing Santa hats, covered in holiday lights, etc. Dressing up your feed icon will also get it noticed!
January 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Hey Rif and Neena,
It’s so critical a component, easy to do, yet overlooked so many times!
I too enjoyed the seasonal RSS icons! It’s a good trick to bring visitor attention to them!
January 1st, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Until now i don’t really know what RSS feeds means..time to search and learn that term! =)
and thanks to your post, now i know a bit about its importance..
January 1st, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Thanks for the points. Never thaught about the rss-button. it makes sence!
January 2nd, 2008 at 1:43 am
I made it a point to make the RSS button very visible. Thanks!
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
The site search function is soooooo critical. I frequently don’t even bother with those that don’t have it.
January 6th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader
January 8th, 2008 at 2:09 am
This is great advice… I just had a friend of mine start blogging and has been really upset that he can’t figure out where all of his friends go on his blog site. He has asked people to click on every link, but it’s really hard to tell what he’s talking about until I scroll all the way through his page. I will have to direct him to your page for some great ideas as I’m thinking he wants to make money doing this.
January 8th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Wonderful! I am glad this advice is proving useful to many people!
January 9th, 2008 at 3:51 am
Advertisers will use this as a measure of how much they are willing to pay for advertising on our blog.
January 9th, 2008 at 3:52 am
Dressing up your feed icon will also get it noticed!
January 10th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I have a blogs an this article is very useful for me. Thanks for it. :)
January 14th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Making the feed icons noticable and obvious makes a huge difference in subscribership and repeat visitors.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Great tips. You are right about the feed icon, I went from 12 subscribers to 50+ subscribers in a day once I put it there.
March 17th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Awesome Trevor! It’s these little things that can make such a huge difference.
Your blog design is nice by the way :)