Two Common Blog Mistakes Which Will Hurt Your Subscriber Rates
December 29th, 2007 by hbond{{chris}} 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
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.
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!
Great article. I like your blog. Keep on posting more. I will be one of your regular readers.
Good points I always have RSS and search at the top of my blogs that way they are in the eye straight away!
Thanks for the list! Glad my tips are comin g in handy!
Having the RSS feeds is a must for every blog and it can also be applied to any articles or news websites.
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!
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!
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..
Thanks for the points. Never thaught about the rss-button. it makes sence!
I made it a point to make the RSS button very visible. Thanks!
The site search function is soooooo critical. I frequently don’t even bother with those that don’t have it.
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader
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.
Wonderful! I am glad this advice is proving useful to many people!
Advertisers will use this as a measure of how much they are willing to pay for advertising on our blog.
Dressing up your feed icon will also get it noticed!
I have a blogs an this article is very useful for me. Thanks for it.
Making the feed icons noticable and obvious makes a huge difference in subscribership and repeat visitors.
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.
Awesome Trevor! It’s these little things that can make such a huge difference.
Your blog design is nice by the way
Thanks, that makes sense!