How to get more than 500 RSS subscribers per month

Author: Steven Aitchison (382 Articles)

The owner of this blog. Proud father, doting husband, blogger, hire me as freelance writer, and addiction worker

Dramatically increase your subscriber numbers

I have embarked on a journey of gaining readers for my blog. I have
had the blog since August 2006 and up until March 2007 I had 189 RSS Subscribers. I
was looking at a fellow PBN Members blog www.zenhabits.net and
noticed he was up to about 7000 subscribers in a very short space of time. I
was happy with gaining about 10 subscribers per week and Leo was getting about
500 – 800 new subscribers per week. This blew my mind and I had
to find out what to do to gain more subscribers.

The first thing I did was write to Leo from www.zenhabits.net and
congratulated him on his phenomenal success. He shared a few secrets
with the PBN network and I think all concerned have gone on to raise our game
on the subscriber front.

So for the last 4 weeks I set a goal to raise my subscriber numbers by 100
per week. I have gone from 189 subscribers to 638 (peak) subscribers
on May 23. It goes up and down but it is stable at about 600 just now.

Here are the 5 ways to get your subscriber numbers up

1. Quality Content

It goes without saying that what you write has to give something back to the
reader. If your articles are not up to scratch and you are not giving
anything on a regular basis you will not get the readers or subscribers in.

To write quality articles read quality blogs and articles and get a feel for
what other people are writing in your niche. You are now talking about
competing with the big guns in your niche as you will soon have over 500 subscribers
if you follow the plan below.

2. Traffic

It’s all about getting the traffic in. If you get the traffic in
you’ll get the new subscribers in. The way to do this is to use
the social media sites:

Netscape
Digg
Reddit
Stumbleupon
Delicious
MyBlogLog

That’s the only ones you’ll ever need to use. There are
new ones coming out all the time and no doubt they will take over. The
likes of reddit and Digg are already dropping in popularity but they are still
very useful in helping your traffic.

Sign up with all the sites mentioned above and start socialising in them. Take
1 week to build up your friends and submit quality articles to all of them. You
can have a stumbleupon toolbar which makes it easy to stumble articles. You
can also use the social bookmark icons on nearly all blog posts; again this
makes it easy to submit articles to the sites. At this point do not
submit any of your own articles unless you have been using the sites for a
while.

It is very important to build up your friends lists and submit articles. Make
a point of submitting for an hour every day for 1 week (believe me it well
be well worth your time after the week).

As you continue to build up your friend lists on these sites, continue to
write your articles and post them as usual and resist the
temptation to submit your articles to any of these sites.

What you are doing is building credibility. Can you really do this in
1 week? A little credibility is better than no credibility.

3. Great headlines

Having a great headline can dramatically increase your traffic from the search
engines in the short term and the long term. Consider the two headlines:

Getting more subscribers

How to get 500 RSS subscribers per month

What one grabs you the most? Consider what your readers will search for when
you are writing your article. Some friends www.askdanandjennifer.com recommended
an eBook from Joe Vitale called Hypnotic headlines which I read and thought
was a great book for any blogger to read. It gives some great advice
about drwaing readers in and wanting to make them read more. Consider
the two headlines above again and you can see instantly which one you would
click on. Also you’ll notice that one of them looks like a bigger
font size, this is not the case, the bottom headline is capitalised which therefore
gives the illusion of larger font, this also draws the readers eyes to the
text much more.

Look at the headlines in your blog and think about how you could reword them
to make them more appealing to your readers. Better yet why not leave
a comment with a post title and ask the readers to change it to make it more
appealing.

One great way of getting headlines and finding what people are searching for
is enlisting the help of Google.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and
type in a few keywords you are considering using for your title. You
can look at the previous months search volume to get an idea of searches that
are being conducted on a particular keyword. This is only for search
engine traffic, but it’s a great way to write sustainable posts that
will have a long tail effect.

4. Enlist the help of your friends

Everybody else is doing it and if you want to get more readers and subscribers
this is the way to do it. If you don’t have friends ask bloggers
from your niche to take a look at some of your posts and ask them to submit
them to the social sites and you could do the same for them.

I have helped friends get over 5000 visitors in just because I stumbled his
article. I have to say I love Stumble the best as it is the easiest and
most unobtrusive site to use.

Consider joining or setting up a community of like minded bloggers. This
way you can help each other out. However be careful when doing this as
you could get banned if all your are doing is submitting your friends sites. Make
sure you continue the practice of submitting quality sites to all the sites
above and you should be okay.

5. SEO

This is another often overlooked area of writing articles on your blog. Make
sure they are optimised for the search engines. Use 7 – 15 keywords
for every single blogpost your write. There are widgets and plugins
for most blog platforms now to be able to do this with ease.

You can also use Meta tags in your posts which will hep in the long run when
spiders crawl your site, although some say this is not quite as useful as it
once was. However I feel this is coming back into fashion.

The 4 week challenge

This is only a short version of what I was going to write and had another
few thousand words to go into more detail about getting more subscribers, but
I will leave that for an eBook.

Why not take the 4 week challenge and use the exalt method above and share
with us how you got on. Remember if you have never used the social sites
mentioned do not submit any of your own posts until you have built up some
credibility.

If you like this post why not submit it to your favourite
social bookmarking site.