A Blog Subscription Rant

February 2nd, 2008 | by Erin Banister |

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If your customers are online, then you need a blog - plain and simple. It helps with your SEO, it helps people to know and trust your business, it’s an excellent promotional platform, and so much more.

Then, why is it so DIFFICULT to make subscription options prominent?

I’ve been actively searching for a couple days now to find a particular type of blog — I have a new product coming out at the end of March, and there’s a corresponding blog. Now, I’d like to have quality outgoing links - but I’m having a difficult time signing up to these blogs because of poorly-placed subscription options… if I can find them at all.

Don’t get me wrong - I understand why a blog might not want a big orange RSS subscription feed button… it may be completely off a website color-scheme. It’s also not easy to place, if you have no php/html knowledge.

I get that, I really do.

But, it’s a standard for a reason: so I can find it when I want to subscribe.

There’s an easy way to prominently place your feed on your blog, FeedBurner. It gives you many options so you can copy/paste the code right into your blog for different readers, and it also will give you the option/code to give your readers an email-based subscription as well. And, on top of that, it also gives you tools to track your subscribers. It’s also free, which makes it whiz-bang, in my book.

Blogs Must Offer Subscription Options for Everyone

I know I’m not like a lot of users; I use an aggregator in MS Outlook 2003 - it’s called RSS Popper, and I love, love, LOVE IT. However, that means that I need the direct RSS feed link - and not something for Google, Blogline, or Yahoo Readers.

I’ve seen so many bloggers use JUST the Google/Yahoo buttons and not the RSS… and in order to find the feed link url, I had to click on of the buttons, find the feed url in the address bar, then copy/paste into my aggregator. Way too many steps for me, and if it weren’t such a whiz-bang blog, I wouldn’t have bothered.

So, if you have a blog, make it easier for readers to subscribe. It’s very easy to forget a website address, even if you’re very interested in the content.

~Erin

PS. If you happen to know a particularly WHIZ-BANG Virtual Assistant Blog, please let me know in the comments! I’d be eternally grateful!