Webmaster ToolBox

One of the key options that make blogs successful are it subscribers. Having the various “Subscribe to my Blog” buttons is even more important than the all important”Bookmark my blog” buttons. Now you may be saying to yourself, that just not true. But it is. Oh it is.

People who bookmark your site spread the word about your site so that other people view it and so on and so forth. A person visits you site, reads your information, and leaves (probably never to return). Subscribers, on the other hand, have fallen in love with your posts and are willing and want to read more. So they subscribe to your page and visit often, and bookmark often, bringing in new people who subscribe and bookmark, etc. etc. To get this cycle going, people NEED to have the subscribe buttons easy to find and available for their various newsreaders. So here is what you gotta do…

First off, read this amazing post on Subscribe Buttons. This is where I got my subscribe buttons which you can see in the top left. If you scroll down towards the bottom of the post, there is the complete source code for the buttons, just upload the buttons to your server and replace the values in the source to your feed.

Here are the RSS Buttons in ZIP

And here is the cod

Simple Edit

1. Open in notepad
2. Replace (Ctrl+H) BUTTONLOCATION with folder where the buttons are stored (no trailing slash)
3. Replace YOURFEED with your feed url

If you want to be real sly, you need to arrange the buttons in order of the most used readers to the least which is…

1. Google
2. Bloglines
3. NewsGator
4. Netvibes
5. Windows Live
6. Rojo

Source: FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market

Be sure to keep the subscription buttons organized, easy to read, and easy to find (above the fold). This will ensure that people who like your site are more likely to come back.

Filed under: Blogging, Marketing | 1 Comment »