How to Increase the number of RSS subscribers overnight

Photo courtesy Jamesgrayking

No.This is not one of those cliche articles. And I’m not talking about getting subscribers by writing great content, or getting more links etc.. C’mon who doesn’t know those points? We are looking for something new. Right?

I’m talking about that one trick that will increase your subscriber list atleast by 10% over night. Guaranteed.

So you have an RSS feed set for your blog already right? How do you manage it? Feedburner? Great!

If you log in to your feed burner account here, you’ll find a list of email subscribers by clicking on the “See more about your subscribers” link. These are the number of people who are subscribed for your daily updates on email. I don’t know about you but for me they constitute 40% of my total subscription. Rest of the subscribers use an RSS reader/browser to read my feeds.

Today we’ll work on the number of email subscribers. In the dashboard(feedburner), take the email subscribers details(Manage email addresses link). It will show you the email addresses that are subscribed to your updates. Also just next to the email, it also lists is an email address is verified or not. See screenshot for reference.

Now, you can export this email list in CSV format(see link on the same page.)and download it to your computer. Open the downloaded file in Excel and sort the addresses based on whether they are verified or not. ( If you just have a couple of emails. you can do it manually ). Now select the unverified emails. These are the emails that have subscribed to your feed but unfortunately missed the verification part of the process.

Now, select your favorite Email application, like Gmail or Outlook and draft a mail for these unverified email subscribers. Make the email sound attractive and personal – so that it won’t be counted as spam when they reach the targets inbox.

Write a beautiful email that prompts the reader to do the verification part. You can request them to search for the verification mail, by giving your email id from which the email would have been sent. This is the same email that’s given to feedburner in it’s settings.
Also, gently remind them that this(verification part) might have been missed, and they still have a chance to subscribe. Also it may be a good idea to let them know of any recent improvements in the blog.

I found this trick very effective and was able to increase my subscription count overnight. The best part is that most subscribers immediately accepted my reminder email, and apologized for not verifying the subscription. So how’s that idea? Go ahead - Increase your subscribers count overnight!