Quick Sprout has been around for 3.5 years and since that time I have built up a nice little audience of 12,329 RSS subscribers. Considering that I have only published 171 blog posts within that time, I am pretty proud of my accomplishment.
When I first started out my feed count was growing at a rapid pace, but what really started killing off my growth rate was my inability to publish new blog posts on a consistent basis. During my peak I was able to publish 2 blog posts a week, and during slow periods I was only publishing 1 blog post every 2 months.
And after I got back into the groove of publishing a blog post every week, my subscription count still remained flat.
Here is how I increased my subscription growth by 243%:
Think outside of the box
I was at a conference in Indiana a few months back and I ran into a gentleman by the name of James Paden. He has been a reader of Quick Sprout for years and he specializes in conversion optimization.
To make a long story short, James invited me out to dinner, and we had a whole conversion on how we could grow Quick Sprout. Between the two of us we started brainstorming and we came up with ideas on how we could increase Quick Sprout’s RSS feed count.
We came up with a ton of concepts, but here are the 4 we ended up testing out:
Idea #1: Hook your readers
The most logical way to get someone to subscribe to your blog, is to offer a subscription option below each blog post, right? Because if you are reading something you like, why wouldn’t you want more of it?
The idea James came up with was to have a subscription box fade in once someone finishes reading a blog post.
Idea #2: Offer email options
A lot of people don’t use RSS feed readers. Heck, even I don’t use them, but what everyone uses is email. Within the sidebar, we added an email option.
If you notice, we still left the feed reader option, but we put an “enter your email” box within the sidebar.
Idea #3: Offer a white paper
A good way to get someone to subscribe to your blog is to offer him or her an incentive. Blog content is great, but it isn’t enough.
What we decided to offer was a free white paper on the business mistakes that I have made. To receive this white paper, you have no choice but to enter in your name and email address. Once we collect your name and email address, when then automatically add you to my RSS feed count through Aweber (this allows you to get Quick Sprout blog posts delivered to your inbox).
Idea #4: Friendly pop-up
I know what you are thinking, no one likes pop-ups anymore, but they still work. I already wrote a white paper, so why not create a nice looking popup that asked to see if you want to download it?
Whether you happened to put in your information or click on “no thanks” you would never see the popup again. And similar to idea number 3, we then passed in your information to Feedburner (they host my RSS feed) through Aweber.
The results
Drum roll please…
Instead of having my RSS feed count grow at the usual pace of 3522 new subscribers each year, it is now growing at a pace of 1007 new subscribers a month or 12084 new subscribers each year. This accounts for a growth rate of 243%.
But what’s really interesting is the RSS subscription method that you prefer. See, I would have thought that the most popular way that you would have liked to subscribe is the call to action that fades right in at the bottom of each post. But according to the image above:
- 63 of you entered in your email from the call to action below each blog post. (idea #1)
- 14 of you clicked on the RSS subscription icon from the call to action below each blog post. (idea #1)
- 161 of you subscribed by entering in your email in the sidebar. (idea #2)
- 98 of you clicked on the RSS subscription icon in the sidebar. (idea #2)
I don’t have a full 30 days of history with idea #3 and #4, but ever since James implemented them you can see how my RSS count really started to skyrocket.
On October 28th, idea number 3 was implemented and my new daily RSS subscription growth went from roughly 9 new subscribers a day to 53. Within the next day or two it died down to 20, but that isn’t bad considering it was Halloween weekend.
On November 1st, idea number 4 was implemented and my new daily RSS subscription growth went from 21 to 110. And of course, it slowed down over the next few days, but it still shows that pop-ups are effective.
Here are the stats for ideas number 3 and 4:
- 186 of you put in your name and email into the sidebar white paper call to action. (idea #3)
- 467 of you put in your name and email into the pop-up. (idea #4)
Emails cause higher engagement
The best piece of information that I found out through this test is that email subscribers engage a lot more than RSS subscribers.
If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll notice that there is well over a 60% engagement level through emails collected through Aweber. And if you compare that with the image below, you’ll notice that only 30% of the RSS subscribers who use feed readers engage.
Conclusion
If you really want to sky rocket your RSS subscription growth, create a free ebook or a white paper and give it away to your readers. Just make sure that you are using Aweber to give it away as it won’t just help you collect more emails, but it causes higher engagement levels.
This amazing course will teach you, step by step, how to double if not triple your traffic over the next 30 days.
Good concept!
I have implement subscriber via MailChimp and outcome is tremendous. Mailchimp gives good look for my newsletter.
Feedburner newsletter delivery is clean.
Both are well!
I agree…both systems have worked really well for me.
It is interesting how all those ideas seemed fairly straight forward, yet they weren’t apparent until you had someone, who was outside of the project, take a look and give their ideas.
It’s a good lesson to us to always ask for a second opinion and, even when you think you are doing everything you can to increase conversions, there is probably something you can still improve upon.
Yes…it’s something you’ve heard of, but haven’t really used them to their full advantage.
Hi Neil this is an excellent post to implement and get huge Subscribers list. I gonna try these 4 steps on upcoming days and I am sure it works. Cheers
Fantastic… let us know how it works out for you.
And just as an FYI, this is only the first step in the RSS optimization process. We’re going to start doing actual split testing on these call-to-actions now. Look for more posts from Neil on this topic in the future!
Interesting…you’re going to do some split testing with the RSS location? I’d be really curious to know what you come up with.
Best part is that you tracked and reported on the growth. What fun is growing if we don’t measure it? Great stuff Neil.
I agree.. especially when you hear numbers like 200%
Yes that’s right, tracking the results really helps if you are trying something new for the first time. And yes, numbers like 200% or so make you more confident.
It’s always very exciting
Well written article and some good information here but there is one thing worries me as a user experience designer: If I’m trying to get an ebook I don’t want to subscribe to your RSS feed. That’s a bait and switch.
I’m assuming for your audience it’s not much of a problem because they are pretty sophisticated and understand that you are offering something for free so you can collect emails. But I bet the average web user isn’t going to put those things together.
Brad, I agree. While common in some circles, I think this is a bad practice in general. I hope to release the next round of testing next week which include a subscription notice. It’ll be interesting to compare the conversion rates on the two different CTAs
Good idea. I wonder how different they might be.
I agree. If your audience is sophisticated, they won’t have a problem. You just can’t do it with a non-sophisticated audience.
I use Aweber and I love the fact that they make it incredibly easy to create things like a light-box pop-up and all other sorts of forms to capture emails.
Yes, they have a very simple to use system, that’s definitely why I’d use them.
Hey Neil! I’ve been subscribed to your Feedburner for awhile and immediately subscribed to your white paper. And last I checked I was getting both your Feedburner email and Aweber email when you post new content. I don’t mind but I think others might. Is there a way to take people off your Feedburner after they’re on your Aweber?
Sadly, there is no way I can do it on my end. They will have to unsubscribe from one.
I appreciate the feedback though and I will ask around again to see if I find a solution.
Gotcha… Thanks Neil! Also, is there a reason you still give people the option to subscribe by email (through Feedburner) rather than having everyone sign up through Aweber?
The rss feeds are what’s controlled by feedburner still.
Awesome thanks for sharing good tips, yep offering email as well as RSS sure is key. For less sophisticated audiences I would suggest not offering RSS at all, it’s too confusing for people and people that do use RSS readers should already know how to add your feed without the button anyway.
I would still offer it… but I get that a lot of people aren’t too familiar with how it works.
Good stuff.
If many users mirror my habits, it goes like this: I sign up on my Google RSS but get busy and don’t go there that often. And when I do, I see such a backlog, I either leave or do a wholesale delete so I can start over.
Recently, I’ve begun signing up for interesting feeds via email. Why? Because I know I will look at my email every day; ok, I admit it, I’ll look at it many times in a day.
So, the advantage to me is that I will know when you make a new post. Frankly, I may feel too busy to look at it BUT at least I have seen it, something that wouldn’t happen if it’s sent to my Google Reader.
And chances are, most of the time, I will at least open it and browse quickly to see if it’s something I want/need to read, either right now or later.
I would tend to agree with you… I think a lot of people are the same way.
I can’t believe the pop up works that well! I have such a habit of just clicking off of it as soon as I see it, I’ve never even considered it for my website. While I do subscribe to the RSS feed, I still received the pop up when viewing this article, so it’s also something that I don’t love because it seems to never go away.
You just need to tweak the right settings into it.
All are aware about RSS but very few can utilize it properly. Neil i think your white really boost up and off course your post always taught new lessons, but we hoping more frequent post from you.
You’ll get something from me at least once a week
Those were interesting ideas, Neil. I guess it depends a lot from the niche of your website and the audience that follows your content.
I would be very interested to try your idea #1 as I think it might work on my case. Is that a WordPress plugin freely available or you have is custom made for your site.
As for idea #4, is this the same WP plugin that also offers a sign up form in bottom as in most of WP blogs out there?
It was custom, my designer set it up for me.
I mainly use my RSS reader to filter the article headlines in sites like Yahoo News, Engadget, Slashdot etc because these sites can have many posts in a single day. I only read the articles with headlines that interest me.
I am not sure if RSS is useful for sites with not that many posts.
I would say it’s useful for someone who does update their content on a frequent basis at least.
Neil or James, do either of you know of a plug-in that will accomplish the fade in email subscribe at the bottom of each post? Neil, thanks for sharing the information from James Paden with us.
I don’t of any WordPress plugins, but I used a modified version of this jQuery plugin: http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload. It was a custom project.
Thanks James
It’s a custom plugin that you’d need to create.
As stated, email subscribers engage more than RSS subscribers. But i noticed that receiving QuickSprout (QS) notifications through email takes much longer than receiving them through an dynamic bookmark for instance.
Generally, i missed one or two days the release of new posts.
Did QS send too many subscribers to feedburner ? :p
Anyway, is there any faster mean to get notified ?
Just make it a habit to visit this site every morning
In the long run, how do measure the impact of the ideas and see them performing upward, downward … ?
Best way is too look at analytics over the long haul and see if people are still subscribing.
Hi Neil, Good info was trying to figure out how i can improve my subscriber count of my blog & this post has made many things clear, on how i can do that.
The other points I would like you include that if you are using facebook fan-page then by using fbml you can insert the subscription form at the welcome page its also a good way to increase your subscribers as it has worked for me.
Regards,
Nikunj
Thanks for sharing that, that’s actually a really good idea
It’s viral. I often pass links to your articles on to my students through my Facebook page. Often I think they don’t read them, but then they mention them, and I know I am passing them a valuable resource.
However, I have stopped asking for anyone’s white papers. It just means that I will have to do a lot of deleting of advertisements I don’t want.
Sometimes it’s an issue and other times it’s not.. you just gotta dig through the dirt to find the gold.
Hi Neil, I don’t know whether I would mix my RSS subscribers with my email list. Personally I think the 2 should be kept as different lists.
When I subscribe to a RSS I don’t expect to end up on a marketing list.
Just my humble opinion.
Pete
Sometimes people like getting both for convenience. It just depends on the person.
A person from outside can have a much clearer vision that a person from the inside because seeing the same things every day you get lost in details and tend to miss some points. I still think that combining all the ideas together is the best option. Every subscriber counts after all.
Yes… you never know which subscriber is the person who can help you go viral.
Wow, well done!
I’m currently working with a client (we’re taking some similar first steps) and I hope the results turn out as well as yours did.
That’s fantastic to hear, make sure you let us know how it helps out.
Wow, 161? That is pretty substantial. Right now I have text in my sidebar that tells users to subscribe, but after reading this, I think I am going to switch that up and change it into an rss icon and an email subscribe button.
I only get 150-200 visitors a day so I am not quite ready to launch an email list with aweber, but I am working on a free giveaway. When I get to 500 visitors a day I will start an email list. Thanks Neil, this was insightful and a fun read
Many things come in small steps. You can’t expect to grow your readers in a few days. This process takes some time and requires a few strategies as Neil pointed out. Good luck with having more visitors to your website
Yes it does… slow steps consistently, rather than giant leaps occasionally.
I would suggest you get started right away… 200 visitors a day is enough to collect a few emails each day. I think if you don’t do it, you’re missing out on a lot of potential clients.
Neil,
This is definitely a great collection of data that I am definitely going to test out. I think right now, I am gaining the most subscribers from my lightbox opt-in form on my website, but then again I don’t have all of the other things in place.
Thanks a bunch for breaking down the hard numbers
I’d be curious what either an email or icon option below the post title would have achieved. I think of this as the sweet-spot of any post, the area — whether it be links, ads, a welcome message — that gets the most attention and clicks.
Exactly, the more attention grabbing it is, the easier it is for people to subscribe.
I finally gave in and will try Awebber. I wasn’t sure about the cost, but seems that if you’re serious, about growing your blog it’s a must.
Hi Neil,
I’m a fan by the way. I was wondering how this guy James approached you? Was it purely informal, “you should try this” type of approach, or was he more like “hey man, I think I can help you, so here’s the deal”. And if so, I was hoping you could elaborate on “the deal”. I’m thinking about moving from standard online marketing services to a 100% “share the wealth” model where I would make money only on performances. I know you’re creative when it comes to create win-win deals so I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks,
J
James and I were just chatting about blogging at a conference and he informally offered to help me. There was no deal or anything like that… he just did it for free.
You could switch to a “share the wealth” model, but a lot of businesses hate it.
Awesome post Neil, building your subscriber list works fine by strategizing. If you are able to strategize in a cool way, you will get good results. Thanks for sharing. Have fun.
Exactly..then it won’t be too long till you have a really powerful list.
Some great ideals you have, I like the one after the post where it fades in… although I have one at the end of my post, but getting it to fade in… seems to be cool. How you do that?
And using Aweber to get email subscription… that was a nice ideal and I didn’t know about it till I read this post… OMG… thanks for sharing this info and now I have something to change and do in my Aweber account… talk to you soon.
You just need to talk to a web developer about doing that.
well… didn’t have a web developer, but I will ask Carl Ocab’s UBT team, if they could do that for a cost, since I’m using their theme… thanks for the advice.
That’s a great way to go.
It is true that the world wide web is filled with millions of blogs apart from millions of websites. However, I think, blogs that have been actively blogging will range among hundreds only. And that is the reason why the success rate of the people who ty to make money online is substantially low! They need to change their mind, their intention to find things that can keep them continuously active. One master and known formula is to select businesses/websites/blogs which you think you are passionate about.
That makes the process 100x easier… yes. People are unfortunately all over the place and for this reason, this don’t make it. They need to do a mass cleanup of all the garbage there.
Maybe I’m missing something in your writeup, but how is someone subscribing to your blogs in ideas 3 and 4? Signing up to receive a report is not giving permission to receive emails of new blog posts.
Through Aweber they are automatically subscribed to the blog.
With a non-sophisticated audience it could be a problem, but with a savvy one, there usually isn’t an issue.
Some great ideals you have, I like the one after the post where it fades.
Although having thousands of subscribers is certainly surprising considering you only published 171 posts in over 3 years, i feel the backlinks pointing to your site does help.
According to Yahoo, you have over 60,000 backlinks pointing to this site. Surely, that does help with the organic traffic you receive and getting a PR6 homepage.
Good eye.. yes it does. I try to spend a lot of time on each post so I can have more people blog about it. But these changes I recently made, helped me drastically.
Idea #3: Offer a white paper is really helpful..
.
I tried this on my institutes site and it really works. Sadly I had to remove this feature because of copyright
Still I m happy with this IDEA
Create something else and do it again.
Hi Neil, Loved your post,very honest, I run a small wordpress blog, just curious is there any plugin that you user for you RSS and Email bar to show after each post or is it self customized?
Regards
Self customized
Hi Neil,
I am first time visitor to your blog, I am completely sold to your art of writing. They are simple and clear.
I have downloaded your 13 business mistakes….. doc. It is really great. I am happy to have this at right time as I am planning to start my own from Jan 2011.
Best Regards
Thanks Ravi, glad you find all these useful. Hopefully the advice helps.
Hi Neil,
It’s my first time here. I’m overwhelmed by your style and content. Do you use a plugin to add the subscribe RSS by email ?
I really want to implement that.
It’s a customized bar yes…
Great post for webmasters.Thanks a lot for sharing this valuable tips on getting more subscribers.But please do try to post on the technical matters related to these processes, e.g.- how to make the subscription form or how to manage them.
Thanks.
I won’t
It is puzzling to me now, but in general, the usefulness and importance is overwhelming. Very much thanks again and good luck!
It is very useful and even though it maybe overwhelming now, it’ll become natural soon enough.
So much information here on email subscriptions and I like the pop-up to subscribe. I’m not familiar with how to do this on my website. I use WordPress, like so many other people, and would like to know if there are any good plugins recommended to mimic this popup. Anybody?
Thanks for the post!
You’ll have to hire someone to do it.
This is great content Neil. I’ve implemented a few of these elements into my site, but I’m about to do all 4 now. Any chance you know someone good who I can hire to add these elements on my site? I like the RSS that appears at the bottom… as that’s something I don’t have.
Try elance.com
Combining all these options will help a lot more that just using of them. After all, everything that is added counts after all and even the most underrated thing can help you a lot.
True… collectively, everything ads up and allows you to move forward.
Great ideas and great results. Thanks for sharing. About your email option #2, I’ve read somewhere (can’t remember where) that using the word “subscription” might confuse the less web savvy into thinking it’s a paid subscription. So using ‘free’ and ‘delivered’ as you’ve done is a good step as well. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing that, that’s good info!
I really like the fade-in RSS Subscription box idea. How did you do it?
I had my programmer create it for me
Who cares about RSS? It seems like complete BS. wouldn’t you rather have an email list that grows 243% than an RSS feed that no-one ever checks?
A lot of my traffic actually comes from my RSS subscribers
. An email list is great and I think mine will grow over time.
Neil, what kind of plugin are you using for the email “RSS”, I tried a lot but none seems to be working as I want, most of them were ugly and I didn’t find a way to customize them
Thanks!
It was a customized plugin installed by my developer.
Hey Neil,
Why don’t you released that plugin publicly ? This seems to be a great plugin and I really need it.
I didn’t create, it was customized.
Neil can you please tell me are you using any plugin for that rss and email box below every post or how to add this to a wordpress blog.
Is there word press plug in for the email box under each post?
Not that I know of, it was customized.
If such a version would be become available for the public would be great
I see that many people are asking about this.
Maybe a good idea for someone to create it
I liked the way this theme has simplicity and options to subscribe which is one very good reason i had subscribed here. Popup option did work for me but it was only in the case of first timers and regular readers feel annoyed with those banners for subscriptions.
Just the little tings that tend to be the most simplistic can produce grand results.
Nice post.I liked offering white papers to the users .Thats the best way to engage them.What is the role of PR in this.I subscribe those blog having nice PR.Whats ur take on this?
Neil,
I have all the options in place that you mention here. I am having a problem with getting enough traffic to my blog. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Craig
Write better content, promote it to social media platforms and be patient… it takes time. This blog took me over 5 years.
12,000 RSS subscribers! That is impressive Neil.
Thanks!
The points you have mentioned herein are actually the best tips to get more subscribers. Out of all this, the pop-up, which I also see has been the most converting for you, is the best. lightbox popups that offer a useful freebie and has an email form in it, often works pretty good. The conversions are seen to be extremely high in such popups.
BTW, I noticed one more thing on your blog. You reply to almost every comment. This way you engage your existing readers and people who might not have been on your RSS list or, email list would want to join your list. I personally feel that this is one thing that can help you grow you blog considerably.
Thanks for the tips.
Yeah… I’ve been preaching that to people for a long time now. If people take the time to respond to my blog, I definitely want to respond to their comments.
Great post Neil, One question though, Do you know if you can do the same thing with GetResponse AR? That is my AR service and I have been having problems with my RSS feed on my blog. Thanks
I think you can, I just prefer AW because that’s what I’m use to.
I had great success with the white paper. Sure, more people unsubscribed after they downloaded the paper, but many more found value in the newsletter and the subscribtion rate grew much faster.
I bet the % in conversions or quality of the contact goes up though.
Neil,
Is there a plugin or something for idea #1 or did you just customized your own. I think that’s a pretty awesome feature.
There should be one soon
How could we can make the importance of rss feed to our readers because not all of them are interest to subscribe to my rss,any suggestion
Maybe your visitors are more likely to subscribe to your email feeds. It varies on the industry as to what people want.
thanks for the tips. My RSS scripts are low and it is something I have needed to work on but haven’t carved out the time to do it. These tips should help me get back on track.
Can you please tell me which plugin you are using for after post rss email feed.
Thanks
Great article Neil! Is there a plugin you use for the RSS subscribers or do you think a paid service is preferable?
Thanks!
My experience is that RSS readers number are decreasing over time..Especially in the last several months of 2012!
hey neil,
this post has cleared my concepts.
very informative article.
Thanks.
Matt
That is pretty substantial. Right now I have text in my sidebar that tells users to subscribe, but after reading this, I think I am going to switch that up and change it into an rss icon and an email subscribe button.
I think Idea no. #2 is good to implement.
Definitely, it is one of the more useful ones..