Blog and Ping

Create a Blog you can install the blog on your own site or use a free blogger tool like Blogger.com. Update the blog everyday with content specific to your niche and a link back to your niche site. Ping the blog using a free pinging service like pingoat.com. This will update several services about new content at your site. The Search Engines will spider your blog and find your site.

Find other blogs related to your niche. Do a search on blogger.com for blogs related to your site. Leave very relevant comments with a link back to your site. Again people and the search engines will find your site. Do not leave worthless and spam comments on other blogs. Be a benefit to the blog community with good information.

Article Submission

Article submission to article directories is awesome. You can earn very valuable backlinks to your niche site. Ezine authors search articles directories for articles to publish in their ezines. Publish a good article and it could be published to thousands of ezine subscribers for free. Write a solid author bio with a link to your niche site. Websites and Ezine Publishers must publish your bio with the article. You will receive visitors from this effort.

There are specific places to submit articles to for massive visibility like GoArticles.com. You can use an Article Submission Service to mass publish your article on thousands of lists and article directories all over the web saving you time.

Forums

Find forums that allow you to post free ads. Better yet find forums related to your niche website. Answer questions on the forum including your signature line with your web link included. Also ask questions. Forums are not only great for posting your web link but can be great to get ideas on new articles to write.

Search Engine Optimization

Work on your Search Engine Optimization. Learn about on and off page optimization. Learn about keyword density, image alt tags, meta tags and link popularity. Search Engines are going to be a huge asset to driving traffic to your site. With a little effort you can find your niche site in the top 10 keywords.

Start a reciprocal link campaign with other web sites in the same niche. Trade links or simply ask for a link to your site. You can do this for free with a links directory script to manage your links.

Text links

Text links are keyword specific links to your web site posted on other sites. You can pay for these or you can set up trades as well.

As a result of my previous post about hitting the 500 RSS subscriber mark, I had a few readers ask for advice on how to grow their RSS subscriber counts.Always one to please my readers, I thought I’d post on the subject.

Why do we even want to increase these numbers? The main benefits of RSS are:

• Allow readers to keep reading your content without having to remember to come back to your site.
• Get your content picked up and distributed by other services and blogs.
• Avoid the need for email newsletters, or at least get that content delivered.

I’m going to package this in a time format to make it easy to achieve this in fourteen days. If you’ve already done any of these things, skip those days and move on and you’ll be done even sooner.

Day 1: Sign up for Feedburner
Feedburner is easily the best solution for managing an RSS feed. Feedburner has a ton of features that help out in varoius ways, but the main ways that it helps grow your feed count is that it allows you to consolidate your feed into one Feedburner URL that is extremely compatible with all the RSS readers and that you can allow users to subscribe to, and then even if you change blogging platforms or move your original feed around you can keep your subscribers in one place.

Feedburner also provides statistics on your feeds, the ability to control various aspects of feed, ping all the ping services, and more. It’s a must.

Day 2: Display the universal RSS feed icon
While it’s not recognized by everyone on the web, those who know about RSS recognize the universal RSS feed icon and then know they can subscribe to your feed. You can download a set of icons at FeedIcons.com.

Additionally, moving your feed icon to the top of your page in a prominent area makes it even more obvous. Tubetorial.com does a great job of this by having a large icon with “RSS Feed” next to it. It’s hard to miss!

Day 3: Submit your feed to RSS feed directories
Just like web directories, there are a lot of sites that allow you to submit your RSS feed for listing. The purpose of this is that people use these sites to find RSS feeds in their areas of interest, and it obviously can bring additional traffic to your site.

The best resource for this is Robin Good’s list of RSS directories. Head there and start submitting in order!

Day 4: Make a page about RSS
Most avid readers of blogs know about RSS feeds, but the majority of the web population still isn’t familiar with RSS. Why not introduce them to RSS through your site? Here’s an example of a page on a site explaining RSS, letting users know how to subscribe, and what feeds the site offers.

Day 5: Use Feedburner Feedflare
Managing your feed with Feedburner allows you to add special links to the end of each content item called Feedflares. One type of link you can setup is a “Subscribe to this Feed” Feedflare so that every blog post or article has a link to subscribe to your feed.

Day 6: Use easy-subscribe buttons
Users who read RSS feeds may be using a number of different RSS readers. It could be Bloglines, Newsgator, My Yahoo, or others. To make it easier for these people to subscribe, you can provide buttons like you’ll see in the right column of this site that allow users to just click a button and subscribe via the feed reader of their choice.

Day 7: Exchange RSS feeds
You’re probably familiar with link exchanges, but how about RSS feed exchanges? If you know of similar sites to yours, approach the site owner about swapping links to your RSS feeds, or both of you could promote each other’s blog/feed in a blog post.

Day 8: Use an RSS auto-discovery tag
Adding a bit of code to the header of your site allows people with feed readers that can “auto-discover” your feed to discover it. For example, if you’re a Bloglines user you can add a bookmarklet to your browser that with one click finds the feed on the page and allows you to subscribe. Here is an example of the auto-discovery tag used here on this blog:

< link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Conversionrater" / >

Day 9: Post about your feed
Sometimes people need a little prodding to take action. They may know you have a feed, but just haven’t done anything about it. Why not remind them that you have a feed, and what the benefits are by subscribing to it. It’s a good time to also link to the page about RSS you created on Day 4.

Day 10: Promote your feed in your email and business cards

A very easy step to promote your feed is to add it to your email signature, or maybe even add a link to it on your business card. People who use RSS will appreciate it.

Day 11: Display your feed count
While to some it may seem like bragging, displaying your RSS feed count when using a Feedburner feed like I’ve got in the right column is a good way to let people know that others are reading your feed. When you see 125k subscribers on Techcrunch, you figure that you may be missing out if that many people are subscribing. Even a lower number like my feed count shows that there are people who find this blog interesting enough to subscribe to.

Day 11: Use an Email RSS solution
Feedburner and Feedblitz both provide ways that users can subscribe to an RSS feed via e-mail. This is great for users who are more comfortable with receiving email newsletters or just don’t know much about RSS.

Day 12: Ping the ping services
Using Feedburner, a blogging platform like Wordpress, or Pingomatic, you can set up your feed to all the blog and feed search engines. This will help drive new users to your site and feed.

Day 13: Use Feed analytics to improve
Use Feedburner’s analytics to find out information about your feed. See what posts are read most and create more posts of that type. Look at what feed readers are used and include easy-subscribe buttons for those readers, or talk about them on your Abour RSS page. You can also use it to track your progress as you grow your subscriber count, and by Day 13 it should have grown tremendously!

Day 14: Make your feed worth reading
If your feed isn’t worth reading, you’ll lose any subscribers you do gain, and they’ll never sign up in the first place if your content is crap. The following tips are all focused on helping you create a quality feed and to keep your subscribers:

• Be relevant and on-topic
• Use great post titles worth reading
• Publish full feeds instead of just summaries
• Avoid ads in your feeds
• Post often, but not too often
• Post original content

If you can manage to crank through all that in less than 14 days, that’s great as well. But if you follow those 14 steps, you’re guaranteed to grow your RSS subscriber count.

Via Conversionrater.com.

• Interlink your Posts

  This is perhaps the most simple method to increase your pageviews. Whenever you write an article, check whether you have written similar articles. If so link to them. This is helpful for new readers as well as it is not necessary that all your readers have been with you from the beginning. But remember that too much interlinking can get your readers distracted from the orginal post.

• Highlight Related Posts

  For WordPress users there is a plugin called Related Posts that can automatically find related posts for you based on the keywords you used in the article. You can do this manually if you want, but I prefer the plugin as it is a lot easier. There may be a similar plugin for other Blog Platforms, but I am not sure about it.

  It is best that you place 5 related posts just after the post ends. You can find more useful WordPress Plugins here.

• Add a Newsletter or Post Notification Services

  Services such Zookoda and FeedBurner can be used to notify readers of new posts via email thereby increasing page views. I think that notifying new posts through emails are more effective than feeds as people check their mails many times a day.

• Highlight Key Posts in Prominent Positions

  You may have noticed that my header links to some of the important articles of johntp.com. When visitors reach this blog there’s a high chance that they will notice these links and click them. My header links has helped me almost double my pageviews.

• “Best of” Pages

  I have collected some of the best articles and put them on a separate page called Top Posts. This not only helps to increase pageviews but also helps in converting casual surfers to regular readers.

  I also use a WordPress Plugin called ‘Noteworthy‘ with which I mark some of the interesting articles. The plugin automatically puts the marked posts to a category which I named ‘Must Read‘. This can also help in increasing the pageviews of those posts. In short highlight your top posts in all ways possible.

• Write a Series of Posts

  A series of posts on a topic can drive readers from the first part to the last thereby increasing pageviews. Readers will also return often to read what you have to say on the next part.

  Although I suggest you don’t break every article into a series of posts as it may irritate some readers.

• Use Extended Entires on your Front Page

  For WordPress users there is a ‘more’ feature that breaks long posts with a ‘more…’ or ‘Continue reading post name‘ that links to the complete post. This can help in increasing pageviews but you must use it only for long posts as it can get annoying for certain readers when used too much.

• Run a Blog Project or Meme

  Group writing projects can get you new links and readers aswell as visitors who come back multiple times in a week to see what updates there had been to it. Projects or competitions works best if you have a lot of loyal readers willing to participate.

• Excerpts in RSS feeds

  If you use Full Feeds, your readers are likely to read your content through feeds and never return to your blog. To increase page views you may switch to Partial Feeds.

  Here at johntp.com, after switching to partial feeds I have found an increase in the number of people coming back and an unexpected increase in RSS readers.

• Entice RSS Readers to Visit

  If you decide to use Full feeds, you need to find ways to get your subscribers to visit your blog. Darren suggests methods such as Polls, writing posts in a way that invites comments and interlinking posts.

• Build Interactivity into your Blog

  The more your readers interact on your blog the more pages they view. Comments and polls are a good way to interact with readers.

  You can encourage comments by asking question or opinions at the end of evey post. If a reader leaves a comment or takes part in a poll they are likely to come back again to see if there are any replies to their comments or to find out the result of the poll. Building an interactive blog can increase your pageviews a lot.

• Draw People Back to Comments

  For WordPress users there are a few plugins that help you make your blog more interactive regarding comments. First is a plugin called Brian’s Latest Comments that shows an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them.

  You can also give your readers the opportunity to follow your comments either by having a RSS feed for comments on your blog or by allowing them to subscribe to comments via email with Subscribe To Comments WordPress Plugin.

  You can encourage your readers to comment more often by listing the Top 10 Commentators of your blog and linking directly to their blogs. You can do this automatically with the Top Commentators Wordpress Plugin.

  You can see all these plugins in action on my blog and find more here.

• Add a Search Feature

  Adding a Search feature to your blog allows your readers to search for previous posts thereby increasing pageviews. Your theme may already be having it by default.

• Give Your Readers a Homework Assignment

  I have not yet tried this method and so can’t comment on it. I am not even sure if it will work for my kind of blog. This method has more chance of working on blogs like Darren’s Photography Blog.

• Via JohnTP.com.