RSS Flatlined | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Need some advice …

Our RSS subscribers have flatlined – dead.  We hit 59 at one time but are now at 56 and we've been in this range for weeks.

We'd love to get some more subscribers but don't know how …

When I see our comments we see some subscribers but not many (a lot of No's in the Subscribed column).  Someone mentioned it may be b/c they don't use google reader, but that seems odd to me.

Any ideas on how to get people to subscribe?  We plan a contest soon and we have some really nice days for visitors (e.g. 268 uniques on Friday!) – but people don't seem to sign up.

I recently (last week) altered our RSS and Twitter Icons … but that didn't help.

Any advice?

I have over 9000 inbound links (I think due to my comments).  I comment daily at least 10-20 times per day.

I participate in some carnivals when it is appropriate to do so.

Last Friday my articles were linked to by some of the more "famous" Canadian PF bloggers and I got a TON of hits (still am getting hits from Canadian Capitalist and Million Dollar Journey as of Sunday) – but no subscriptions … 

Perhaps it is time we start our contests.  I had planned for March but can ramp that up perhaps by the end of next week.  I was hoping our content would be the driver for followers, not free stuff but I guess if we want to have "reader success" we have to use more than just content.  Or perhaps we won't have readers be bought … who knows.  Either way, our traffic has increased these past 2 weeks but our subscribers have not … and twitter hasn't gained many more peeps either.  Perhaps our little PF niche is exactly that: little!

Guest posts is the other thing I need to get done asap.  Somehow I have to find time to churn out (and prepare) about 14 tips in advance so I can focus my time on GPs …

Sustainable PF said:

I have over 9000 inbound links (I think due to my comments).  I comment daily at least 10-20 times per day.

I participate in some carnivals when it is appropriate to do so.

Last Friday my articles were linked to by some of the more "famous" Canadian PF bloggers and I got a TON of hits (still am getting hits from Canadian Capitalist and Million Dollar Journey as of Sunday) – but no subscriptions … 

Perhaps it is time we start our contests.  I had planned for March but can ramp that up perhaps by the end of next week.  I was hoping our content would be the driver for followers, not free stuff but I guess if we want to have "reader success" we have to use more than just content.  Or perhaps we won't have readers be bought … who knows.  Either way, our traffic has increased these past 2 weeks but our subscribers have not … and twitter hasn't gained many more peeps either.  Perhaps our little PF niche is exactly that: little!

Guest posts is the other thing I need to get done asap.  Somehow I have to find time to churn out (and prepare) about 14 tips in advance so I can focus my time on GPs …

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I agree it is best to have content drive your followers, but sometimes you need a way to get them to visit.  If you have good content, they often stay.  I would say try the giveaway and see if that helps, then keep up the good content to keep them coming back!

A lot of people don't know what RSS feeds are.

A few thoughts.  

1) I find it kind of difficult to even know where to sign up for your feed once I am on your site.  (I see it, but it is not very noticeable, and I was looking for it.

2) Like us, you post everyday, so sometimes people may get burnt out or worry about getting burnt out.  

3) We noticed a huge uptick once we started to expressly provide a link and give people the "click here to subscribe" "command" language.

4) A Contest is a great idea, as just about everyone as said.  We are holding off on that and trying the free e-book right now, but I am sure the contest is actually a better hook.

5) Some people have remarked to me that they are following because they want to see the conclusion of one of our series, for instance we are trying to last a month eating only food already in our house.  The fact that your whole site is in a way built around a series may be helpful.  

6) Take everything I just said with a grain of salt, we only have 54 subscribers ourselves. 

 

I read somewhere once that if you can get 500 subscribers on a personal finance site you are well on your way, so being more than 1/10 of the way there is good.  I also think a lot of blogging has to do with momentum, so once you get it rolling you should be set.  Best of luck! 

Hi BP – perhaps I need to change the subscribe icon to the boring plain jaine one and mark it "subscribe".  Boring but perhaps what we need to do.  It's in the top right area of the home page where most i've seen go, but perhaps the boring version is better to use.

Our site isn't built around the tips – we just started those in Jan.  Our real content, imo, comes Mon/Weds/Fri – that's when we get our heavier traffic and comments.  But perhaps perception is reality.  The tips are being used to keep people engaged and coming back to see what weird/neat/useful thing we said today but the real meat of our content is in the longer articles.  If people think we're a "tips" site i'll kill the concept immediately as that was not our intention whatsoever …

Interesting stuff Jaymus – thanks.

Should I be using the feed that has the rss2 in the URL instead?  I'm not really sure how to do what you're suggesting …

And thanks for subscribing.  As silly as it may seem, it means a lot to us.

Thanks Jaymus

I've had some real issues w/ my site feed vs published feed and when they actually display in our readers RSS.  So if I set it up to the faster feed people will hopefully see our feeds within 30 mins of publishing instead of the random 3-10 hours we're getting now.

Jason@LiveRealNow said:

Sustainable PF said:

Thanks Jaymus

I've had some real issues w/ my site feed vs published feed and when they actually display in our readers RSS.  So if I set it up to the faster feed people will hopefully see our feeds within 30 mins of publishing instead of the random 3-10 hours we're getting now.

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When I started, the feedburner algorithm wasn't updated my feed very often, because they didn't know, yet, how often I posted.  Every day, I'd log into feedburner and ping the feed.  After a couple of weeks, it was updating faster.
 

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We see updates, and due to our feed issues i've been pinging the feed for 6 weeks, almost daily.

I added the plugin jaymus suggested and re-directed our feed to our rss2 URL and we actually sent out our feed on time last night.  Will check again for tmrws post – here's hoping it works!

And perhaps we'll get more subscribers someday hehe

My 6 month giveaway had a large impact, but afterwards I flatlined for a while. I had a small boost with some major features and then flatlined a bit for a while. Sometimes progress is made in leaps, and sometimes it's a slow steady progress up. Just keep focusing on the good content and give them a reason to subscribe. :)