In all honesty I never really understood RSS feeds. I always just saw them as a lame way to read a webpage without going to it. I mean why would I want to read some poorly formatted text version of a site when I can just goto the site itself and read it the way it was meant to be read… Well I still kind of feel this way, but even if I don’t really use RSS feeds that doesn’t mean that the people reading my sites don’t use them. And as I’ve found out, a lot of my readers do use my RSS feed to get the content from my site.
So here is what I’ve figured out, and it’s basically common sense but not everyone may think it will help, but trust me it does. Gather email addresses anyway you can. The easiest way I’ve found to do it for blogs is Feedburner.com they handle everything. They will take the url to your RSS feeds, give you a piece of code to put on your site, confirm email addresses and send out emails daily based on your updates to all of your subscribers. You can even tell them at what time you want the email to go out, it’s that simple and it will help you push your posts to people that may not come back to the site everyday to check for new posts.
I didn’t even think of doing this on one of my main sites, not really sure why, but as soon as I did it my conversions have gone up, I get more visitors every day and after about 3 months of allowing people to subscribe I’ve now got over 150 subscribers that get my emails every morning! If you read my previous post about my record days, this is the site I’m talking about, so it helps. You can also push affiliate links to all your subscribers and maybe get a bite or two, who knows, you’re not doing anymore work than you were doing previously with updating the site, so there’s absolutely no reason not to do this.
You can see an example of the feedburner subscription box in the upper right hand corner of this page and while you’re checking it out, why don’t you subscribe! It only takes a second and you will only get emails if we’ve updated the site here. So if you’re interested in what we’re doing here you might as well sign up, it doesn’t cost anything and you don’t have to remember to keep checking the site! Plus we’d appreciate it.
