Increase Your Blog Subscribers By Not Using The Word ‘Subscribe’
ADVERTISEMENTS
Every blogger wants to get more readers for their blog and do it by asking their readers to ‘subscribe‘. But did you know that you could lose readers by using this word?
I never thought about it until I read this post on CopyBlogger that made me realize that ‘Subscriptions generally cost money’.
By asking your readers to subscribe, some might get the feeling that you are asking for money.
To know if its true, I asked a few people (who did not know much about blogging) what they understood by the words ‘Subscribe via RSS’ and ‘Subscribe via Email’.
Their responses were:
for ‘Subscribe via RSS’ - “what is RSS?”, “RSS? what’s that?”, “I don’t know what RSS is”
for ‘Subscribe via Email’ - “you are asking me money for sending something via Email?”, “What are you asking money for?”, “I am not sure.The site visitors have to pay?”
They had no idea what RSS was (which I already knew), but the interesting response was to ‘Subscribe via Email’ - all of them thought that I was asking my visitors money for sending something via Email!
Another interesting thing was when I asked one of them to click the ’subscribe via email’ button at DigitGeek. He was taken to the FeedBurner Email Subscription Request page and had no idea what to do next. He looked confused and said that if he ever landed on such a page, he would just close it and visit another site!
Make it clear to your site visitors
So how do we make it clear to our visitors that we don’t charge money for subscribing? By removing the word ’subscribe’ ofcourse!
At DigitGeek I replaced the ’subscribe via RSS’ button with a small RSS icon linking to the FeedBurner feed as the people who know about RSS will only need this.
I also replaced the ‘Subscribe via Email’ button with ‘Get FREE daily updates via Email’ and put an email form below to subscribe via email. The email form should reduce a bit of confusion.
It depends on your niche
The number of readers who misunderstand what you mean when you ask them to subscribe depends on your niche. Like for example, blogs on ‘blogging and make money online’ will have readers who are bloggers themselves and so most will not be confused with the word ’subscribe’.
Educate your readers about RSS
Also it is a good idea to educate your readers about RSS by putting up a page explaining about it and then linking to it next to your ’subscribe via RSS’ link. You may have already seen this on Problogger and other blogs.
Are you using the word ‘subscribe‘ on your blog? If so, what will you replace it with?
Search JohnTP.com or view a random post
Related Articles
- Tips To Increase Your Blog Subscribers
- Increase Your Blog’s Subscribers By Offering Email Subscription
- Feed Count Meme
- Reached Over 2,000 RSS Subscribers
- Spamming to increase your RSS Subscribers
Find out what I am doing currently by .
Posted on July 28th, 2008 | Category: Blogging |
Ken
July 28, 2008 at 12:36 pm
It’s a great idea here. I too never thought about this far about the subscription matter. I guess I can leverage my chicklets count now with your tips! Thanks a lot John!
gadgeteer
July 28, 2008 at 12:43 pm
That is a great infromation as we had tried ecerything and we never stop to think why people aren’t using our subsribe?
Thanks for the info.
Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach
July 28, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Excellent ideas! It gives me something upon which to ponder…never really considered that before.
Data points, Barbara
Kaushik
July 28, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Good tip John. Have to try that on my blog.
William Waites
July 28, 2008 at 6:59 pm
A big thanks. I too have puzzled over the reluctance of people to ask for free updates, especially RSS feeds, which I have tried to explain, with little success. Today, I will make these changes on my web sites and watch for a boost in “subscribers.”
Muhammad
July 28, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Indeed, I have never thought like that. Good Idea, I will surely try to improve my “Subscribe” buttons
Be happy!
Keith Dsouza
July 28, 2008 at 10:38 pm
I too read this post from Copyblogger and made those changes, seems to have worked quite nicely
Dave
July 29, 2008 at 12:08 am
I use the term subscribe but I will be changing it now. I think I will use something that says, “get free updates” or something to that effect.
I think all too often we bloggers have our own language and forget that not everyone speaks it. By making your language you use on your blog more for the casual internet user you should attract more people.
JohnTP
July 31, 2008 at 1:22 am
Thank you all for taking the time to comment here, I did not expect any comments after the long break I took
David Bradley
August 1, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Yep, the word “subscribe” is definitely a no-no. I dropped it a few weeks back and have seen steady climbing ever since, although Feedburner’s amazingly unreliable reporting says I have less than 3000 “subscribers” today even though there were almost 3200 at last week’s peak. It’s definitely a that these are valid numbers, I take an average of the three highest from each week and that’s always on the climb even though there are outages from Google Reader etc.
JohnTP
August 1, 2008 at 8:38 pm
David Bradley - nice to see you back David