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2 simple steps to boost your blog subscriptions

Some background, and the Blog Pack

Acting on an idea by Remarkablogger Michael Martine, Chris Garrett launched the Authority Blogger Blog Pack as a way for interested folks to quickly boost blog RSS feed subscribers and twitter followers. The idea was to give folks an expanded readership who will occasionally Digg/Stumble/etc their posts and basically boost blog presence. To do this, anyone interested provided their RSS feed URL on the forum, and Chris compiled these into a single OPML file that, as I write this, is up to version 7 and contains over 150 entries. Import the OPML into your RSS feed reader and–boom!–150+ new subscriptions. And, potentially, 150+ new subscribers.

But it’s unlikely anyone actually got everyone as a new subscriber, for a couple of reasons.

Why I didn’t subscribe to your blog.

Or, more accurately, why I unsubscribed your blog. Their were two main reasons: Your blog has no relevance to me, or I had no idea what your blog is about.

The primary one was simple lack of relevance to me. For example, one blog dealt with running. I’m not a runner, and I don’t deal professionally with the industries surrounding running, so I don’t need to follow your blog. Similarly, lots of folks in the pack don’t need to know anything about B2B content development or marketing, so I got dropped. No big deal.

More seriously, I didn’t see a reason to keep your blog around. I follow RSS feeds using the online reader Bloglines. In Bloglines, clicking on a blog’s name in the feeds list will pull up the blog in the main window, with unread posts listed by headlines. Just under the name of the blog in the main window, it will also give the blog’s tagline, if one is available, which serves as a brief description of the blog’s purpose.

Here’s the kicker: In a surprisingly high number of pack blogs, there was no tagline. I had no way to easily see what the blog is about! I tried to guess by scanning post titles, but a lot of those were pretty vague or unfocused, too. (Since all blogs came in as brand new and unread, there were literally thousands of posts that showed up as unread, so I had plenty of titles to scan. I know I could have just nuked them all to start fresh, but I wanted to weed out as soon as possible as many blogs as I could that I don’t need to read.)

Actually, about halfway through (the 120 or so last time I imported the new blogs), I stopped scanning headlines. There were just too many. If your blog lacked a tagline, or at least a blatantly obvious name, it got dropped.

How to attract and retrain new RSS subscribers

It’s a shame that I ended up cutting so many blogs out of hand like that. I might have dropped a few gems. But I ended up with about 190 RSS feeds to follow overall and can’t afford the time for more without a compelling reason. Give your blog a fighting chance and put up a blog tagline. I run this blog on a self-hosted Wordpress platform and can tell you that you put in a tagline by going to Settings, where you’ll find a line labeled “Tagline”. Can’t get any clearer than that.

If any of you who use a different platform can tell me how you put in a tagline in the comments, that would be great!

Send an image out with your feed. A lot of blogs come through with an image, essentially a logo, and I think this is a great idea. It’s an obvious way to help brand your blog, and it provides a second chance to communicate what the blog is about if it lacks the tagline.

If you use Feedburner to serve your RSS feeds, as I do, inserting an image is easy. Log in to Feedburner and choose your feed. Click the Optimize tab, then choose Feed Image Burner. From there, just follow the on-screen instructions.

If you don’t use Feedburner, but still feed the image, please let us know how in the comments, or provide a link to instructions.

It’s probably not too late.

My ego is not that big. You’re not going to do this just because I didn’t subscribe to your blog, but because I and a lot of other people didn’t subscribe to your blog.

As I stated earlier, the blog pack is up to almost 200 entries, but folks continue to sign on. Each time Chris updates the OPML file, he adds the new folks on. But all of the previous blogs are still there. This means the next time we import the OPML file, we get all the blogs all over again. If your blog has a tagline (and maybe even an image) this time around, so I (and other prospective subscribers) can see that, yes indeed, your blog has relevance for me, this time I’ll know to keep you!

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll put up the post on irrational desire I promised on Friday.