Are RSS subscribers as valuable as direct visitors?
In this day and age it seems that the number of RSS subscribers a website has becomes increasingly important for its status. Particularly when it comes to blogs, it has become the flavor of the month for judging its popularity. This trend has undoubtably been aided by the fact that large, popular blogs such as for instance Techcrunch publicly display their feed subscription numbers. Thus it has become a way for bloggers to give their new readers an indication of how popular their blog is by indirectly saying “Hey look, xxx people already subscribe to this blog, so it is worth your time“.
As a result of this, most blog spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to boost their subscription numbers and “luring” people into the subscribing to their RSS feeds. The natural question that arises when we spend so much time trying to convert our visitors into RSS subscribers is whether or not it’s really worth it? There are some obvious drawbacks, especially when it comes to monetizing. A large portion of the blogs out there offer full feeds, which essentially means that they make it possible for their subscribers to read their content without actually visiting their blog. While there are ways to monetize your feed as well, such as including contextual ads, it has been proven time and again that these ads are hardly as lucrative, nor do you have the same options as you do when monetizing your actual blog.
This taken into perspective, it is hard to see just why we spend so much time trying to build our feed subscription base. As I’ve spent some time thinking about this, I’ve discovered that this coin does have a flipside as well, just like most others do. I’ve already mentioned the fact that a large number of RSS subscribers helps can give your blog social proof, and help convert new visitors into regular readers. And that it is just what RSS subscribers are, regular readers. Once a reader decides to hit that link and subscribe to your feed, he or she makes a conscious decision to stick with your blog, and see what you have to offer in the future.
Unlike other, traditional visitors, even though they might bookmark your blog, it is extremely likely that someone subscribing to your feed will read your future articles, and that is where the true value of an RSS subscriber lies. Even though you might not be able to make as much money on each RSS subscribe on average as you can from a traditional visitor, an RSS subscriber is potentially much more valuable to you in the long run. As I’m sure you remember, I wrote about the importance of valuing your regular visitors in a very recent article, and RSS subscribers are part of a group that you should definitely value highly.
If you want to make to make the most out of RSS readers however, the true value is in getting these people to visit your blog, and not just read your articles through a feedreader. How can you do this? Well, believe it or not, it starts with your design. If it’s clean and readable, people will always be more likely to visit your blog. Secondly, if you are able to create interesting discussions on your blogs, they are likely to come in to make their voice heard. Although the silent majority will rule on most large subscription base, it can certainly encourage quite a few to actually visit blog.
In future posts I will be investigating how you can encourage more people to actually subscribe to your feed. Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with different methods, and I have found some to be more useful than others. If you want to know my tips, why don’t you just subscribe to my feed, just to make sure you don’t miss them? You know you want to!