Working at Home on the Internet

Blogging Tip #14-Don’t Forget About e-mail Subscribers

 I seems like everyone is looking to increase the number of RSS Subscribers to their sites, and rightly so. If someone puts you into their RSS folder or Subscription service, it means they are interested in what you have to say and want to stay updated when you post something new. But, not everyone Likes RSS or doesn’t want to subscribe through a service for whatever reason, maybe they just don’t know how. I know because I was one of them until I got IE7 with it’s auto feed finder.

Prior to that I would subscribe to someones Blog IF they offered an e-mail subscription service. It didn’t matter to me if it was generated by FeedBurner or another service, as long as it showed up in my mailbox when something new was posted by those I wanted to read.

I have offered both RSS and e-mail subscriptions since I was introduced to FeedBurner about two years ago while investigating ways to increase readership. I started to wonder how many other Bloggers offered both types of subscriptions to their readers, so I started looking at some of my Favorite Blogs to see what they were doing to get additional subscribers. I was really surprised at what I found.

Out of 39 Bloggers I have in Favorites:

• 35 offer RSS
• 17 offer RSS AND e-mail
• 3 offer NEITHER

I, personally, think these individuals are experts in their respective niches. What they have to offer is important to their readers. Why not offer every way possible for your audience to follow your newest (and possibly your best) posts?

Why Offer e-mail subscriptions?

1. Everyone has e-mail
2. People are comfortable with e-mail
3. Not everyone is comfortable with RSS
4. e-mail Subscribers go through extra steps to subscribe, they must be interested
5. They are less likely to unsubscribe than RSS users
6. Why not?

These are just a few of the reasons I came up with FOR offering e-mail subscriptions to your readers. Can you come up with any others?

* Darren over at ProBlogger is having a poll this week related to this subject: How many RSS Readers does your Blog have? Go on over and take the poll.

New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!

December 3rd, 2007 at 01:02pm | Posted by Joe | Blogging, RSS | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post