If you ask any blogger what metric they would like to increase on their blog, it’s likely that their first answer will either be income or feed subscribers. Of course, they are linked in some way: the more feed subscribers you get, the bigger the audience you have to leverage for income.
Today I want to look at an overlooked yet highly effective tactic you can use to increase your feed subscribers which will in turn increase your blog traffic and your revenue. The whole process will take less than five minutes to set up, and you can be converting more visitors into subscribers straight away.
Step One: Stats Analysis
The first thing we need to do is be able to learn more about where our visitors are coming from and which ones are subscribing to our feeds. I’m going to use two analytics tools as examples, BLVD status, and Google Analytics. If you don’t use either you may be able to find a way to do this in your own stats program, if not I recommend you sign-up for them as they are both free.
1. BLVD Status
BLVD Status is a free live analytics tool that shows you real-time stats for people visiting your website. It has been put together by a team of SEO and Social Media experts so it literally includes everything you are going to need. In this post, we are going to focus on the conversion side of the tool, the aim being to find out which keywords or referring sites are converting the most feed subscribers.
First of all you need to add the code to your site; this is very straightforward and explained on the BLVD Status page after you’ve logged in. After that, you will be shown a dashboard page with 6 boxes, each showing different types of information. The one you are looking for is ‘Conversions’, the box on the top left-hand side of the page.
From there click the “Config” tab >> Click “Add New Campaign >> Choose a relevant name and image >> Then on the bottom drop-down box choose The Visitor Leave a Page.
What this means is that it will track a certain URL for people leaving the page and show that in your conversions box. So, in the URL field, you want to enter the URL of your RSS feed as shown in the image below:
If you also have a separate exit link for email subscriptions (Feedburner uses a pop-up) then include that as well as a separate conversion to track. Now you will be able to see exactly where people are coming from when they subscribe to your feed just like I do for my own website.
Once you have this set-up you are ready to skip to step two.
2. Google Analytics
I highly recommend that you use BLVD Status (I use it in addition to Google Analytics) as the setup process for goals is a lot easier. It is of course possible to track Feed subscribers via Google but it will take a little longer.
I recommend that you use this guide to help you get set up; it’s slightly trickier but shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes.
Step Two: Increasing Subscribers
Now that you know where your visitors are coming from before they subscribe, it’s very simple to increase the number of conversions that you make. All you have to do is increase the number of referrals from a certain source. Let me give you some examples…
1. Search Referrals
If it’s common that people looking for certain keywords in one of the major search engines are subscribing to your feed then you need to increase the amount of traffic you are getting. Work on increasing the number of relevant backlinks to the page so that you can increase your rankings for the keyword in the major search engines.
2. Site Referrals
If a certain website is sending you a lot of visitors that convert, look at how you can get more traffic from that site. it might simply be that you can start leaving comments on their blog posts, write an article for them with a link or even buy an ad on the site. They are obviously sending relevant visitors your way so look to increase that.
3. Certain Pages
If a certain page on your site is getting a lot of conversions, then see if there is anything different about it. Is the article short or long? Does it have an extra link to your RSS feed? Was it a particularly useful article that people really connected to? Work out what it is then apply that to your current pages or at least more pages in the future.
There you have it, I told you this was simple but it’s also very effective. I’ve found that there are certain marketing efforts I use to bring me the most subscribers and ones that don’t do too well. Therefore, I obviously spend more time on the efforts that bring the best results. You can’t do the same until you know what is working though.
To your success!
Guest author Glen Allsopp runs a blog called PluginID and writes on the subject of Personal Development. If you have some tips to share, you too can write a guest article on QOT.