Help your readers follow your blog

13 Replies Christopher Roberts

This is the fifth in a series of articles in which I hope to share with you my knowledge of how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful, so fast. Learn more about this series by reading our Technology Bloggers success article.

As many of you know I used to run a tech blog of my own – entitled Christopher Roberts Technology Blog. Now on that blog I made a key error that many bloggers still make today. I didn’t make it easy for people to ‘subscribe’ to my content.

If you have a great blog, but no really easy ways for people to subscribe, the chases are that you won’t be able to retain visitors for very long. If you have a blog with good, (not great, but good) content, but you give readers loads of ways and incentives to subscribe, then you are much more likely to get loyal readers.

So if you have good content you could have more visitors than someone with great content, simply because you make it easy for people to keep up to date with your content.

With Technology Bloggers I hope I have created a blog with great content from a load of fantastic authors, as well as multiple ways to receive that content, making it really easy to subscribe.

So how can you ‘help’ your readers to follow your blog? Everyone is different, so I find there is no ‘one way fits all’, but there are a few ways that I think cover them all.

FeedBurner

If you use FeedBurner, FeedBlitz or some other feed subscriber, you can instantly give readers tens of ways to follow your content. Check out our feed or look at the image below to see just how many ways FeedBurner lets users subscribe to your feed.

Ways to subscribe using FeedBurner

Ways in which you can subscribe to Technology Bloggers via our (FeedBurner) RSS feed

Furthermore, if you use FeedBurner, you can get your feed to link into your Twitter account. This means that every new article you publish can appear in your twitter stream just seconds after publication. This means that all those people who prefer to receive updates via social media, can do so via Twitter.

Another great feature about FeedBurner is that it lets you give readers the option to subscribe via email. On the sidebar of every page of our blog you can input your email and get updates by email. Interested in trying it out?

You can use Facebook too

Facebook also gives you the option to import a feed as notes which can appear as a status update. Import your RSS feed to Facebook page and you create yet another way for people to follow your blog and read your content. All you need to is ‘like’ Technology Bloggers and you can get our feed! The one thing I would say about Facebook is that its updates aren’t nearly as frequent as Twitters are!

Click ‘Like’ below to see what I mean.

So now you know that you need to make it easy for people to follow your blog, do you have any amendments to make to your feed or social profiles?

Useful reference: How to add an email subscription form to your blog.

Categories: Blogging Series
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Written by Christopher Roberts
Founder and editor of Technology Bloggers, Christopher is passionate about sustainable technology and environmental initiatives. He wants to popularise critical thinking, promote responsible innovation, and excite you about the world around us.

13 thoughts on “Help your readers follow your blog”

  1. David@offshore software development

    In todays time it has become quite essential to give your readers ways to connect with you on different sites. Any blog you visit surely has a facebook, a twitter, linkedin and youtube (only a few) icons placed somewhere on the webpage which allow the user to connect with them.
    And yeah, don’t forget the subscribe box next time.

    Reply
    • Alan Tay@it security

      Sometimes it is great to have all those items like Facebook page, Twitter link, LinkedIn page, Youtube page and RSS feeds icons or gadgets on your page. However, I find that sometimes it is easy for readers to just glance through all of them without clicking them (unless we re-design our site). Even with the widgets like WP-Greet Plugin is not doing so well for me. One thing I realized it worked so far is to write a line of sentence remind the user to subscribe to your social account at the end of your post manually worked better. Do you practice the same method or putting social share gadgets is already working?

      Reply
  2. DiNaRa

    I think that the more options you offer today the better as people want variety and so usual and standard attitude to blogging. I would include everything into the blog like Facebook links and FeedBurner and a chance to subscribe.

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      As I say we just use Facebook, Twitter and FeedBurner, however at the bottom of each post you can see loads of other buttons to share the blog with, not follow though – I don’t have the time to create that many accounts!

      Reply
  3. Brochure Templates

    There are loads of RSS readers available but some are already built in on browsers. Bloggers love readers who keep on coming back because they find something useful and interesting in the articles. It would be great to know that whatever thought that pops up on your mind and write it to your blog, is interesting enough for someone to read.

    Reply
    • Christopher (admin team)

      Browsers provide on solution, however I believe that social media and email subscription is much more common nowadays.

      Bravo on adding your first comment and becoming part of the community!
      Christopher – Admin Team

      Reply
  4. Chadrack@SEO Tactics

    There are truly many options today with more and more social media sites springing up. However, I think the first thing should be what you’re looking for. That will determine what options you should include. For one, I’m considering adding email subscriptions with an autoresponder. I think that has many uses.

    Reply
  5. Pingback: How to be a successful blogger | Technology Bloggers
  6. Amit

    A little bit of everything should do the job just fine. I don’t use FeedBurner right now, but i should give it a try and stick true to what i mentioned above.

    Reply
  7. Jarrod Frenzel

    I give two thumbs up for FeedBurner. What I really like about it is that there’s a feature wherein readers can subscribe to a blog via email. I believe this can increase email list.

    Reply
  8. John@Seo

    I’ve read all previous blogs and they are full of interesting ideas. Probably best way to increase the amount of traffic on a blog is using Facebook and FeedBurner. Yes, Twitter too, but you rarely get any permanent positive traffic that stays with you, it’s more of a pass-along thing.

    Reply

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