There are two common blogging mistakes I’ve seen recently which will really hurt your subscriber stats. Avoid these and I am convinced you’ll see an increase in subscribers.
The two mistakes to avoid:
- Not having a site search, or burying it towards the bottom of your home page
- Not placing your RSS Feed Icon at the top of every page
Site Search
Why is this important? New visitors to your site may have been drawn to your blog by a recent post, but they may be interested in knowing if you’ve discussed other topics. Without a site search, there is virtually no way they can find out. Sure, they can put your feed into Google Reader and search that – but it’s not all of your blog! Make your site search obvious and towards the top of the page!
RSS Feed Icons
Congratulations! You’ve got new visitors to your blog. The hard work has paid off! But hey, where did they go? Why did they not stay and subscribe to your feed? Because you’ve buried your RSS Feed Icons somewhere deep within the middle of your side bar – or obscured them with a million similar icons. Use a simple orange RSS Icon, and place it in the header of your blog, and put text links in your footer. No one will miss it then and they won’t have to go hunting for it!
As I said, I am convinced that if you do these two things you’ll see an increase in subscribers if your doing a good job of getting new visitors to your blog already!
Note: You can feed icons at http://www.feedicons.com
