It would seem most bloggers are only concerned with the traffic they get and fail to study and take advantage of their blogs subscriber loyalty. Traffic is an important part of blogging but a high volume of traffic does not really provide you with an accurate representation of how your blog is perceived by your visitors.
One of the great things about blogging is it uses an RSS protocol that provides visitors a way to subscribe to your blog feed and become a loyal follower of yours.
As long as these subscribers are using a blog reader such as Blogline, NewsGator, Netvibes or the dozens of other RSS readers, these subscribers will automatically be notified that you have written a new blog post and it will allow them to easily stay up to date with your blog.
There are literally dozens of available readers on the market. For an inclusive list check out Add This.com
BlogMaestro uses Feedburner as a way to syndicate our RSS feed and to provide our users the ability to subscribe to our blog via an email update. What is nice about Feedburners is that it’s a free service and it is very easy to setup. Upon setting it up we no longer had to worry about personally managing our blog subscribers. Additionally it only took us a few minutes to link our Subscribe Feed images up to Feedburner to get started.
Upon providing your visitors a place to subscribe to on your blog it is then time to motivate them to subscribing. In an interesting Search Engine Guide article “How I Increased My Blog’s Subscribers Count By Over 1000% In Less Than A Year”, Mack Collier discusses his attitude change from focusing on only the volume of traffic he got to substantially increasing the loyalty of his readership.
One of the key changes Mack made to his site was placing his RSS Subscribe offering in a highly prominent position on his site to promote his Subscription offering.
If you want to attract more loyal reader to your blog you will need to give your readers the option of subscribing to your RSS feed. A second alternative to RSS subscribers is providing your visitors the ability to stay up to date with your blog via an email update.
Currently most users on the web are not yet comfortable with RSS and are really not yet ready to understand what RSS is all about. Since email is still the most widely used tool on the web, giving users the ability to stay current via an email update only makes sense and can dramatically increase a bloggers subscriber rate.
The Edublogger has a detailed post about “How to Add an Email Subscription to Your Blog”
Probably one of the most highly respected bloggers on the web, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net writes quite a bit about how to attract new subscribers. Darren mentions that one of the ‘secrets’ he uses that has helped him build his blog subscriber base to over 40,000 is to leave his readers with a feeling of wanting more.
If visitors of Darren’s blog fail to stay current they might miss out on something really important. “A Secret to Finding New Subscribers For Your Blog”
“[…] they think that the blog might produce content that they’ll want to know about as some point in the future”
Following the same sentiments of Darron Rowse, Dosh Dosh reached 10,000 subscribers and explains how they did it.
“The main reason why people subscribe to blog feeds can be explained in one sentence: Readers subscribe to blogs when they provide an informational or entertainment value so great that it would be a loss to not subscribe to it.”
Popular bloggers will all say that to build a large dedicated following you must keep a blog that is consistently on topic and make it as easy for your visitors to subscribe.