How many subscribers have you lost over the lifetime of your site simply because you only have a partial feed instead of a full-post feed? This generation of streamlining the means of obtaining information allows subscribers to read your full posts in their RSS reader without ever having to go to visit to your site. People don’t want to have to go through the hassle of clicking through links and scrolling through pages to get to the information they want. They want it now, and the worst part is they can. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. With thousands of other blogs out there delivering the exact same content as you, you as the blogger have to remember the relationship between you and yours users and your place in the food chain. You depend on them to read your content, they don’t need you at all.

After reading that, maybe you’ve just declared these people your worst nightmare, but hear me out before you make those kind of assumptions. These people are a valuable part of your user-base that you can’t live without. So don’t fight them, cater to them! Give them what they want, and more!

By now your first reaction to these people not having to visit your site to read your articles might include the following:

• They won’t leave comments
• They won’t generate pageviews
• They won’t bring in any advertising revenue

 

 

They’re absolutely worthless right? WRONG! That common misconception is what seperates the 100 views a day blogs from the 100,000 views a day blogs. These blogs cater to their users no matter what, by giving them the information they want, regardless of it profits them in the short or long term. To understand how beneficial these people are you have to go back to the underlying thinking behind their actions. They want to extract all the knowledge out of a site fast. So how do you convince them to visit your site instead of just reading through their rss reader? Simple!

Provide value in your articles and pages that isn’t available through their rss reader!

Here is a list of ways to compel your rss subscribers to visit your blog.

1. Give lots of links to other posts in your articles to entice someone to click through to your blog. Try to stick to your own articles so your getting something out of it, however linking to other sites is beneficial as well as it increases the value of your site from the perspective of the reader. If you give a link in your article, a user using an rss-reader won’t know what it’s about unless they click through.

2.  That last point is crucial to understanding the mindset of these people. They can’t stand on missing out on even an ounce of valuable information. They’ll be inclined to click on anything that they believe has any value to them at all. This goes back to the general rule of blogging, content is king!

3.  Provide a call to action to post comments. The point here being not to convince the rss reader to post a comment, but something much much simpler. Remember when I said that these people can’t stand missing out on any valuable content? The same rule applies here. Create value in your posts through your comments. If you have drawn out discussions or opinions of different people on your comments your users will be creating valuable content for you! If you can prove to your rss-subscribers that your comment sections have valuable information in them they will start going to your site to view your articles instead of through their rss reader. Congratulations, you’ve just made a convert.

Some people believe that by asking the readers questions or encouraging them to offer additional information to your post’s topic, that you’re undermining your position as an “expert.” However, that is completely false. People will judge you as an expert or an amateur based on the content you deliver. Anything else is merely a gimmick to get them to respond to the article and create value in your comments section.

Wrapping up, the one thing I want you to take away from this article is this.

By increasing the comments, your readers provide valuable insight and content pertaining to the issue for you, which in turn entices the rss subscribers to click through to your blog. By simply creating activity on your blog you will find that in the long-run the majority of your rss subscribers will convert to every-day frontpage readers by themselves without any coaxing on your part.