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I have been thinking for a while now to start a series of “how to blog” posts for the blogging beginners – “blogging tips, for novice bloggers, from a novice blogger”.
Today, Amit Varma, at India Uncut finally reverted to full feeds, and Darren Rowse, at ProBlogger asked “What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?”, prompting me to write the first post in the “novice blogger” series on “how to retain feed subscribers“.
I think that before we ask “why do we unsubscribe from feeds?”, we need to ask “why do we subscribe from feeds?”
I subscribe to all the blogs I read regularly. This includes blogs from friends and a specific number of blogs in my interest areas. For instance, as of today, the 200 feeds I have subscribed to can be classified into desi blogs, “how to blog” blogs, web 2.0 blogs and movie blogs.
Sometimes, I find a new blog in these categories and subscribe to it only to unsubscribe in a week or so because I find that I don’t really like the content. This can be because of the writing style itself, or because the content is not different from what I’m reading elsewhere, or because the content is not really relevant to my interest areas. There are, of course, no short cuts to fix this and the only solution is to go back to the basics and work on the quality of the content.
Sometimes, I like part of the content, but unsubscribe to the blog because the rest of the content is not relevant for me. A blogger can easily fix this by offering category-wise feeds. Amit, for instance, now offers five different feeds for his blog, by category.
Sometimes, I like the content, but the posting frequency is so high that I feel overwhelmed by the number of unread posts in my feedreader. I unsubscribed from Boing Boing because I couldn’t keep up with the te plus posts everyday. If you run a filter blog, like Boing Boing, there isn’t much you can do about this, but, if you have a mix of short and long posts, you can put your short posts in an “asides” category and offer a consolidated feed for all your categories apart from “asides”. Once again, Amit offers a consolidated feed for all his other categories and a separate feed for his “asides” category.
Sometimes, I unsubscribe from a blog because it offers partial feeds, which defeats the very purpose of subscribing to it in the first place. If I like the blog a lot, I visit it once a week and read all the posts, but since I am anyway reading 200 plus blogs, i find myself doing this less and less. The solution, once more, is simple – offer full feeds.
Finally, I subscribe to blogs because I’m writing about a particular topic and I need content to link to. For instance, when I was running DesiBlogging – a filter blog for desi blogs – I had subscribed to about 400 desi blogs. When I stopped running that blog, I unsubscribed to all but my most liked desi blogs. Once again, there’s very little that a blogger can do about this.
To summarize, if you are already doing the basics right, that is, blogging with flair and originality and marketing your blog well, here are a few quick fixes to retain your feed subscribers –
1) Offer full feeds.
2) Offer full feeds.
3) Offer full feeds.
4) If you blog about a wide variety of topics, consider offering category-wise feeds.
5) If you post more than ten posts a day, consider offering a “best of” feeds.
6) If you post more than ten posts a day, out of which two or three are long posts and the rest are short posts, consider putting the short posts in an “asides” category and offering a separate feed for them.
And, if you are not doing the basics right, start now!
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