Many new bloggers wonder why RSS subscribers are such as widely referred-to statistic, seeing as a lot of them don’t visit the actual site, but read the article in a feed reader, therefore robbing them of traffic and ad impressions, and reducing the likelyhood of commenting. Sometimes that idea pushes them to use partial feeds to force people to come to their website.
Darren Rowse has come up with the best response I have seen so far.
A subscriber that never visits is better than a one off visitor who never returns.
I had one blogger recently tell me that he’d removed the option to subscribe to his blog via RSS from his blog because he didn’t want to ‘give away’ his content. He wanted people who read his content to ‘pay’ him by visiting his blog (and earning him money from his advertising) and he saw RSS subscribers as ‘freeloaders’.
My response to him was that I’d rather have a subscriber who rarely visits my actual blog than a one off visitors who never returns because they have no way of keeping in touch.
RSS subscribers are your most loyal readers. When they subscribe they see every single one of your posts (though they may skip reading one here or there if they’re pressed for time, or just not interested). They may visit your blog some days, if they want to leave a comment or browse your archives. The point is: If your blog is good enough your RSS subsscribers will visit the website now and then, and more frequently than most non-subscribers probably.
They read your posts, and that’s the real point of blogging.
A couple days ago, I missed a day blogging because I had to remove malware from a computer (not mine). Though it wasn’t the computer I use for my blogging, the main idea still stands: Maintain your computer, and take care to avoid having harm come to it, or you could spend a day (or a week) dealing with an issue.
The internet is what can be called a “two-way medium.” This implies that anyone can create content and publish it online for others to consume, and they can do the same. You don’t just consume canned content provided by SuperMegaCorp, you can actually be involved in the publishing.
In the early days of radio and television, they were two-way mediums. Anyone with the expertise to build a radio transmitter and reciever could talk to other such people. (Give HAM Radio a try if you’d like to see what it’s like.) Then the FCC (or if you live outside the U.S., you probably have your own local equivalent) came along and sectioned everything off, licensing only a select few to broadcast. Then those companies merged and merged, eventually monopolizing the broadcast industry.
There are countless “Make Money Online” blogs. Blogs attempting to make money by blogging, blogs trying to teach how to make money blogging, and blogs trying to make money online by teaching how to make money online. Many of the latter hadn’t made a cent off blogging before starting a blog on making money online.
IntenseDebate: The Solution We’ve Been Waiting For?
Dec 16, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Blogging 9 CommentsNow why is this important?
If you create an account with IntenseDebate (totally optional when you comment on IntenseDebate-equipped blogs), you are given a profile that keeps track of your comments. This means that you can easily see where you’ve commented, allowing you to go back and read followup comments.
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