Quitting The Day Job

Three Quick Tips to Get More RSS Subscribers

Here’s something you may have never thought to do, but you probably should.  Do you subscribe to your own feed?  I have never been into RSS Feeds, but I am looking for more ways to make my life easier.  I figure just going to my feed reader to see new posts is A LOT easier than going to all those blogs individually.  The problem is finding blogs that I actually want to read.

Anyway, here are some quick tips to increase your Feed Subscriber count:

1. Publish a full RSS feed.  Under Settings -> Reading, make sure the “Full Text” radio button is selected.
2. Give your readers different options for subscribing to your feed.  When I was subscribing to different feeds today, I would click the subscribe link and Firefox would bring up their feed reader.  If you use FeedBurner, go to Optimize -> Browser Friendly, and activate different readers.
3. Subscribe to your own feed just to check for errors.  You don’t have to read your own posts, but it can’t hurt to double check for spelling and grammar issues.  If I hadn’t subscribed to my feed, I would not have noticed that our feed was only showing summaries of the posts and not full text.
4. BONUS - Here is something that I would not normally suggest, but it makes your posts look better in feed readers.  Don’t use CSS for content in your posts.  The feed readers don’t have access to your CSS file, so if you are using classes like “alignright” to right-align your images, they will not right-align in your feed.  Using DIV tags and STYLE in your posts will translate over to feed readers nicely.  Check out our feed for examples of this.

These are not going to explode your RSS subscriber count, but they will help keep the readers who would normally leave because of annoyances.

I have been using Google Reader for my feed reader.  Any one know of any better readers?