I write this as something of a slow convert to the importance of RSS subscribers. The reason is that a while back I had gained good traffic levels and a reasonable income without having any RSS subscribers. However, whenever I read articles about blogging, I heard people talk about the importance of RSS subscribers. So slowly I tried focusing more attention on this aspect of blogging.
Why I focus most of my blogging attention on RSS subscribers.
- Chasing Google search traffic is a limited business model. What happens if you get a google penalty or you lose rankings?
- It is hard to fool Google with artificial links. In this article – quality of links, I mentioned how ‘easy to get links’ are generally not very valuable. The really valuable links are the natural ones from visitors. My feeling is that these natural links are most likely to come from your subscribers. I don’t try to get subscribers just so I can get links. But, if you have hundreds of subscribers, it is likely you will get a lot more natural links than if you have just one (yourself)
- RSS subscribers will help vote for you on social bookmarking sites.
- RSS subscribers is a sign that people like your blog. This is good for advertisers. It is a sign to Google you are not a spam blog. I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow Google used RSS subscribers in determining rankings. A high subscriber guarantees a certain level of quality. Anyone can try manipulate search rankings but manipulating rss subscribers is much harder.
- RSS subscribers encourages higher quality posting. When I had no RSS subscribers, I would often shoot off short posts with the main motive to get keyword rich titles in the post hoping to get traffic from Google. However, if you have a number of RSS subscribers, you don’t want to post something of inferior quality. You want to maintain a good level of blog posting otherwise you will be doing a disservice to your readers. Ultimately this helps to improve the long term quality of your blog.
- 8 Effective ways to Increase RSS subscribers
- My RSS subscriber numbers – slowly going up!