I just read (yet another) excellent article by Brian Clark from Copyblogger (a blog which is quickly becoming one of my favorites).  It’s called 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers and I highly recommend that you read it right now.  In it, Brian comes up with a number of useful, creative ways in which you can encourage people to sign up to your RSS feed.  Indeed, he claims that this method has helped him garner 6,000 subscribers in 10 months!  What’s more, he argues that the number of subscribers to your blog is a more telling indicator of the success to your blog than other, more common stats such as visitors and page views:

I value subscribers more than any other measure of blog success, such as page views or raw traffic. Subscribers are the life blood of a successful blog in my opinion, and frankly, I wish I had more of them.

Brian explains this comment in more depth in another entry:

In my opinion, there’s too much reliance on search engines and short-term traffic in blogging. You can’t control Google or its ever-shifting SERPs, and you can’t really predict when and how much traffic will come from incoming links.  But your subscriber list is all yours, as long as you treat it right.

Therefore, in order to help us make our blogs a bit more successful, he offers ten tips on how to get more people to subscribe to your blog.  Those tips are the following:

1. Make it easy and obvious (how to sign up to your RSS feed)
2. Be laser focused (on your topic)
3. Offer something of value in exchange for signing up to the blog (see his blog for his rather clever suggestion of how to do this with an RSS feed)
4. Use viral ebooks
5. [Use a] dedicated subscription landing page
6. Become a guest blogger
7. Start a podcast
8. Post in forums
9. Networking
10. Cross-promotional deals (again see his blog for a suggestion of how to accomplish this)

To these ten ideas I’d like to add a few more:

1. Use your newsletter
   Mention your RSS feed in your newsletter.  Tell people the benefits of signing up and ask them to do so.
    
2. Explain what RSS is and how to sign up to it
   Many people still do not know what RSS feeds are.  It is unreasonable to expect that people will sign up to something that they don’t understand.  Therefore, it is important that you inform your visitors of what RSS is, why it can make their (virtual) life better and how to actually use it. 
    
3. Promote your feed in your email signature
   Every email that you send (or that anyone in your company or organization sends) can also be a mini-advertisement by simply including information about your site in the signature of your email (you can even automate this signature with many, if not most, email programs).  Include in this signature a link to your RSS feed as well as a call-to-action encouraging people to sign up to it. 

And while we are at it, note what Brian has had to say on this topic in a different post.

1. Prominently display your subscription options
   Make it as easy as possible for visitors to your site to find your RSS feeds.
    
2. Simplify the subscription process
   To quote Brian himself:  “Reduce the number of steps and the amount of data it takes to complete the subscription process, and fewer people will abandon the subscription, or get distracted by something else.”

Well, with that said, all we have to do is actually implement his ideas (something that we plan to do with our new design of the site).  In the meantime, there is one easy idea that I plan to start implementing right now; namely, ask you to sign-up to my RSS feed.  Here goes:

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