Your complete guide to RSS – Part 5 – Do you make these RSS mistakes?

This is the final part of the “Your complete guide to RSS” series. Today we’ll look at some common and un-common mistakes that bloggers make and discuss ways in eliminating it.

Do you hide your subscription options?

Some bloggers tend to give that AdSense skyscraper all the room in the sidebar and tend to literally hide their subscription options. Although I accept the fact that anyone really interested in subscribing to your feed will take the trouble in finding that ‘hidden’ button, I think having that option at the readers face will give you that edge in influencing them to subscribe. So, do whatever is necessary to show it in their face!

Do you not give e-mail subscriptions?

You should give out e-mail subscriptions, because:

• Some readers like to seek the comfort in having your blog posts in their Inboxes, rather than checking online RSS readers every 14 minutes.
• Some readers are totally unfamiliar with this whole RSS thing and they tend to rely on something they are more familiar with, like e-mail.

Do you only give partial feeds?

You’re in trouble if you only offer partial feeds. Most people would not subscribe to your blog if it doesn’t give full feeds. So, if you wan to give partial feeds, be sure to offer an option for full feeds also. If not, almost anyone would appreciate a full feed.

Do you not monetize your feed?

I know it’s so hard to monetize your feed. But it’s not impossible. If you have a good RSS subscriber base, then you can always make some good money with feedvertising. Need to know more, just register with text-link-ads, and they’ll show you around. They also have a nice Wordpress plug-in to go along with it.

Do you leave your audience to RSS readers and RSS readers alone?

Once in a while, have some bait to get them visit your site. You can earn some serious money with that if you play your cards right. You can try,

Posting a video on a post – since RSS readers can’t display the videos.
Having a video blogging section – this is getting popular by the day; many top blogger now tend to post frequent video blog posts in their own classic blogs.Encourage comments – easiest and most convenient short-term method.

Do you ignore people who don’t know anything about RSS?

Unless you are blogging about a very tech-savvy topic, you might want to have a ‘what is a RSS subscription?’ link somewhere close to your subscription options. So, if anyone who doesn’t know what RSS is, wants to make use of its capabilities, you’ll get them enough room to learn and practice it at the same time, increase your subscription count!