How to get more than 500 RSS subscribers per month

May 27th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

CYT Guide to Lucid Dreaming	CYT Guide to making true friends

There Are 21 Responses So Far. »

Comment by Joseph Bernard on 28 May 2007:

Thanks Steven for these great ideas. I m now starting to get some nice numbers of hits as each month is doubling. I need ideas where to go next. I will use your ideas and maybe join with others as you suggest. I haven’t been by your blog recently and boy I have been missing out.

Keep up the great stuff. I so much appreciate what you are doing and the quality of it and you,

Joseph

Comment by Ponn Sabra on 29 May 2007:

Congratulations Steven! Your success is empowering!

I’m eagerly taking up your challenge…and I took it up a notch (or 2). Hope you like my changes enough to be My Friend…

Details here!

Comment by Edward Mills on 29 May 2007:

Great post Steven. I’ll definitely be incorporating some of these ideas in my quest to increase subscribers!

Pingback by Home With Heather » Is There Really a Secret To Getting More Blog Subscribers? on 29 May 2007:

[...] I found some great information at Steven Aitchison’s blog. Check out his post How to get more than 500 RSS Subscribers per month. [...]

Comment by AgentSully on 30 May 2007:

I’ve been trying to do all these things and I’ve been seeing 100% upto 1000% increase in traffic and subscribers. My actual numbers are still not huge, but every day things are increasing and I know it’s a result of focus mainly on quality content, consistent posting frequency, and some rallying of my online buddies for some social network support.

I you’re interested in reciprocal support, come on over and visit anytime and let me know if you need a vote somewhere. Best regards.

Pingback by RSS Subscriptions - The Ultimate Ressource List. [FitForFreedom] on 30 May 2007:

[...] How to get more than 500 RSS subscribers per month [...]

Comment by Steven Aitchison on 30 May 2007:

Hi Jospeh

Thank you for coming back to the blog it nice to have you here. I hope you blog is doing well? keep in touch.

Ponn, I hope it goes well for you. I know you will get there using this method, let me know if you need any help.

Heather thanks for the link.

Agent Sully, I can always count on you. let me know if you need any help.

MrRich, thanks for linking to this post.

Comment by Steven Aitchison on 30 May 2007:

Hi Ed

You’ve got a great blog, I don’t think you’ll have to try very hard to get your subscriber numbers up.

Comment by Edward Mills on 30 May 2007:

Thanks Steven. I must admit, the thought of adding - or finding - 1-hour a day is a bit daunting. But it’s obviously paying off for you! Great work and great blog.

Comment by Ponn Sabra on 30 May 2007:

Hi Steven!

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

I must say one of my biggest pet peeves about these sites is their lack of ability to find ‘friends’ easily. Therefore, I modified your challenge by adding and asking others to join my networks by placing my profiles directly in my post.

For example, I could only find you at StumbleUpon, no where else…I’d love if you hop over to my challenge and offer your “friend”ship by joining us!

Just by this post, I met Heather and Sully and we’re sharing our “friend”-ships everywhere with extra pats on our backs along the way, so thank you for making this forum so welcoming!

Ed and I have been friends for a while…but we’ve even had troubles finding one another at each site.

I look forward to hoping over to Marco’s now

I’m determined to keep our “networks” alive and open for all our readers to join in.

A quick ‘digg’ would be much obliged…only because you asked

Pingback by Home With Heather » Who’s up for a Challenge…and more visitors? on 31 May 2007:

[...] Join our challenge, crediting Steven here, Ponn here, and me here, edit the next 5-6 steps with your personal information, or add your own information and research. [...]

Pingback by Home With Heather » Who’s up for a Challenge…and More Visitors? on 31 May 2007:

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Pingback by Who Else Wants 500 New RSS Subscribers Each Month? Join Our Four-Week Challenge! | Moneysponsor.com - Doin it online on 1 June 2007:

[...] Join our challenge, crediting Steven here, Ponn here, Heather here and then me here, edit the next 5-6 steps with your personal information, or add your own information and research. [...]

Comment by Matt Ellsworth on 16 June 2007:

Great tips - I’ll definately be back to read more from your blog. I found this on stumbleupon… I think that its a great start.

Comment by Matt Jones on 13 July 2007:

Those are some good ideas. In my experience it takes longer than a few weeks to build credibility on Digg. About half of the page 1 articles are submitted by a core of 100 or so members who have been since the beginning. I have been commenting and voting on other stories (while adding my own posts every now and then) for a month or so. Most of my submissions get about 10 or so Diggs, which is gradually increasing but no page 1s yet.

Comment by Kevin Gibbons on 21 August 2007:

Nice story and it’s obviously worked well for you.

I’m upto around 400 subscribers at the moment but would like to get to 500+ before the end of the year.

Pingback by » Completing an SEO (for the online entrepreneur) challenge …Part 6 & 7 Business Support Services for Entrepreneurs on 21 August 2007:

[...] – Now, this is something that I started and I am following others footsteps to achieve this. For instance, that is why I am completing this SEO challenge for my blog. I am learning a lot as I am doing these things and offering value to my blog by giving others my advice about my experience. I am following others I admire and becoming a part of the blogs/groups/communities that they are a part of in order to learn what they have done. For instance, Ponn suggested to me that I sign up to Yaro’snewsletter – already did it (and boy, I am glad I did–great information). I realize that I may not be able to do everything at the speed that someone else may have, however, at least I am actively moving in the right (increasing exposure) direction. As you are reading this, I just noticed thatPonn had added another post challenging others to Steven’s blog by following his post on how to increase RSS subscribers to 500 in 1 month! [...]

Pingback by » SEO challenge…The Final Chapters…or Parts (for the online women entrepreneur) Business Support Services for Entrepreneurs on 5 September 2007:

[...] – Now, this is something that I started and I am following others footsteps to achieve this. For instance, that is why I am completing this SEO challenge for my blog. I am learning a lot as I am doing these things and offering value to my blog by giving others my advice about my experience. I am following others I admire and becoming a part of the blogs/groups/communities that they are a part of in order to learn what they have done. For instance, Ponn suggested to me that I sign up to Yaro’snewsletter – already did it (and boy, I am glad I did–great information). I realize that I may not be able to do everything at the speed that someone else may have, however, at least I am actively moving in the right (increasing exposure) direction. As you are reading this, I just noticed thatPonn had added another post challenging others to Steven’s blog by following his post on how to increase RSS subscribers to 500 in 1 month! [...]

Pingback by RSS Subscriptions - The Ultimate Resource List - MarcoRichter.net on 2 October 2007:

[...] How to get more than 500 RSS subscribers per month [...]

Pingback by The Blogger Tips on 11 February 2008:

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Pingback by My Get Things Done List » Blog Archive » My Ten Commandments of Blogging [The Daily Saint] on 4 April 2008:

[...] tie in all of your self worth with your # of RSS subscribers. It’s a fact: there are people around the planet each day who will sign up for your [...]