Do you really want more subscribers?
April 19, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Traffic
If you’re a regular reader here, you know that one of my big goals for the month of April is to increase our subscribers here on the site. Already I’ve tried to improve our numbers by making subscribing more accessible and more eye catching. I thought I would take a quick moment though, and talk about things from the other side of the coin.
For a new site, do you really want more subscribers?
Improving the number of subscribers to your site can have many benefits. Obviously, more exposure for your posts and having your site “look” popular are two very big ones. On the flip side though, increasing your subscriber count may actually have a negative effect depending on the goals for your site.
Take for example your target market. If you target a technically savvy niche or blogging niche then subscriptions may be a very solid method of reaching your community. On the other hand, if your site targets a niche where the majority of your readers may not be web savvy, what are the odds they are using a feed reading application to begin with? In fact, promoting your feed excessively may actually confuse and turn some of these users off.
Another thing to consider is whether or not your actual site is important to your content. I have roughly 3 dozen sites in my feed reader that I check on a daily basis. Many of these sites, I scan their content quickly, maybe check out a few links, but in most cases never actually visit their sites. That, in itself, is the beauty of a feed reader. It’s like having a custom built newspaper that you can scan without needing to visit a large array of different sites.
What if your site really doesn’t stand out on content alone? The real content of many sites is not the posts themselves, but the comments and discussions that form as a result. To these types of sites, a reader via RSS is really not getting the full experience that the site has to offer.
One last thing to consider is your source of revenue. Most people do not take the time to actually place ads into their feeds, which is another reason many readers prefer a feed over the site itself. The problem with this though, is that people are getting your content for free, with no way for you to generate revenue. Take for example the site SEOBook.com. When I check out the site, it appears to me that their biggest source of revenue probably comes from the sale of their E-Book. In this case, they probably want to drive as much traffic as they can to their site and not to their feed. In their case, they simply publish partial feeds instead of full feeds which forces readers who want a complete story to visit their actual site. These are things you need to consider yourself. Every reader via feed is one less person looking at the ads on your site.
Bookmark Bliss is just over a month and a half old now and it is really too early to tell whether or not subscribers are interested in our content. Our subscription numbers fluctuate so erratically, that it’s tough to tell how many people really are solidly subscribing. I think with our readership and our niche, publishing partial feeds or not publishing a public feed at all would really hurt us instead of help. My goal for Bookmark Bliss is to be a source of good information first and a source of income second so if a few of our readers read exclusively through feeds, that’s ok with me.
This is a judgement call on our part and something every site needs to consider. There is a different path to success for every new site and before you start to promote the hell out of your new feed make sure you’re doing so with your future goals in mind at every step. Ask yourself, Do I really want more subscribers?
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
5 people have left comments
Interesting idea. Personally, I like to go to the blog itself to read the latest. I use Bloglines to subscribe to feeds but I never use it to read the feeds. Strange I know but I look at subscribing to a feed much the same as adding someone to your favorites back at Technorati. I know the subscription helps them so if I like the site I subscribe, but after that I just come to the site itself.
I fluctuate on whether or not to post partial or full feeds. Sometimes I’m more interested in trying to build discussion, and want people to see my ‘post a comment’ link while other times I really just want to be *read.*
Another problem is that I try to apply my own habits to those of my readers. Personally, I’m like Bret — I don’t read through a feedreader. It’s handy for sites that don’t update on a regular basis, but I still go to the site and read it there.
That is interesting. Do both of you use a reader like Google Reader still to keep track of your frequently visited sites? I know I should give a lot more site visit love to my favorite sites, but a feed reader is a really convenient way to stay on top of everything without having to visit 30 different sites…
Long time ago I used bloglines but used to repeat posts. Now I use Google Reader as feed reader, but just to know when a website has been updated, then I go to the site to read it there! I love to see how the sites changes daily!
I use Google Reader to read my feeds, but I also like to go to the actual sites to comment and click around