Want to Increase Feed Readers? Offer a Free Prize

Though you might have read many ways of increasing your feed readers, I found that offering a free gift can motivate more feed readers to subscribe. You can win a iPod by subscribing to Marketing Pilgrim’s RSS feed!

“Why are we giving away an iPod just for subscribing? Well, to be honest, some of you are still trying to use the old Blogger RSS feed, while others still simply try and just “check in when I can”. We want to ensure that everyone is kept up to date with the very latest marketing news, so we thought we’d add an extra incentive.”

You are encouraged to keep staring at the sponsored ads that display in their RSS feed, then suddenly one day a secret, RSS-only message will appear in the feed which you email them and be lucky to win an iPod MP3 player. The prize upgrades as more users subscribe, and if it hits 4000 readers, a video ipod or Microsoft Zune is up for grabs.

This incentive based approach is a unique way and I particularly like this idea when you switch feeds, or want users to subscribe a particular feed. The downside is that many users might unsubscribe once the contest ends. But the upside is that if you can get new readers hooked on to your great content for a few days, they may continue as your loyal RSS readers.