Feedburner Email Subscriber Count and Feed Reader Numbers Dropped too Low? Get them back up by...

by Paula Neal Mooney

Yesterday I checked my Feedburner Email Subscriber count on Watch Free Episodes to see if I'd hit the 1,000 subscribers count yet and was dismayed to see it had dropped to 86.

Oh no! I thought.

Did I accidentally delete a whole bunch of Feedburner email subscribers when I deleted one woman who sent me an email to unsubscribe? (Some people miss that unsubscribe button.)

Thankfully, the newly redesigned Darren Rowse put up a post yesterday that showed lots of people were freaking out over their Feedburner email subscriber counts dropping.

And praise be to the Lord of Hosts above that I checked again today, and my Feedburner email subscriber count had indeed passed 1,000 on my other site, and was close to 500 for this one.

How to Get Your Feedburner Email Subscriber Numbers to Increase
So now that I've teased you with that intriguing blog post title, here are the main ways I've gotten my Feedburner email and feed subscriber counts to increase and how you can, too:

1 - Turn on your Feedburner email subscriber option!
Since Feedburner has yet to make their email subscriber option default to yes, you have to turn it on. Go to Feedburner.com (burn a feed if you haven't for your blog yet) and click on My Feeds, your blog's name, Publicize tab, Email Subscriptions on the left hand side, save it and activate it at the bottom.

As much as I've begged him to spam me, John Chow has yet to turn on his Feedburner email subscriber option.

(Hint, hint, John. Hint hint!)

So anyway, once he does, his Feedburner feed will look more like mine to the left.

It will have John Chow's email option showing up like mine, with the Get Paula Neal Mooney delivered by Email option displayed beneath the (Choose Your Reader) drop-down menu for folks who access the feed in any other browser besides Firefox, which annoyingly truncates the feeds.

Once you turn on your Feedburner email option, use the code they provide to...

2 ...drop that Feedburner subscribe box and link everywhere!
Put an email sign-up box in prominent places like we have up top on Fantasy Football Free Advice and Noel Gourdin's sites, or in the top left sidebar on my main site.

Also, incorporate the email link within your blog posts and change up the anchor text to say something different, like "drop your email address here for free daily updates," or something.

3 - Decrease the number of Feedburner unsubscribers...
...by making sure people know what they're getting into. If you're a daily blogger, let them know that before they sign-up.

And try to give them a flavor for the kind of updates they'll be getting in their inbox -- like this site, which gives a mish-mash of blogging related stuff.

4 - Make that orange button mean something
The standard orange RSS subscribe button means a lot to us techies, but most average Joes that come across your blog still have no idea what it means.

Make it mean something by using an RSS subscribe button with the word "Subscribe" on it like this or, or one of those cute post-it note subscribe images I've seen.

5 - Ask the readers to subscribe -- explain how they can add it to Google, etc. -- and make sure they know it's free!
At the end of most of my posts I'll put a footer that breaks out individually how people can add updates from my blog to their Google, AOL or Yahoo homepage -- if they don't want to get emails from me.

You never know when you have that one chance to grab a search-engine seeker that can become a lifetime reader.

6 - Burn a Feedburner feed for your comments, and give readers the option to email subscribe to them
WordPress' Feedburner plugin makes it easy to burn feeds for your comments (something I still need to seriously do for some of my other sites.)

But Blogger makes the subscribing to comments tasks a bit clunkier. I mean, who the heck knows what that "SUBSCRIBE TO: POST COMMENTS (ATOM)" means?

Make it easier for your readers by right-clicking on the white space on my site, then choose "View Page Source" to see the code starting with "Want to know what people say about this comment and post?" to learn how I drew people's attention to the comments subscribe.

And follow the Blog Bloke's instructions on how to get the comments on Blogger to stand out with a little color.

7 - Put an image next to your Feedburner email subscriber stuff
I noticed that throwing an image next to text I want people to read draws their eye more than 1,000 words. So put a pretty pic next to your pretty prose, and let's hope all our Feedburner email subscriber numbers all look like this soon...


Hey! Where ya going? Don't leave without:

subscribing for free to my blog by email

or add it to your Google Homepage or Reader

or add it to your Yahoo homepage

or any of your other favorite news readers for updates on how to make money online, get more traffic for your website and more...

And check out my other sites:
WatchFreeEpisodes.com,Find The Answers,Noel Gourdin's Website and 2007 Fantasy Football Free Advice sites.