The pic above shows the latest subscriber statistics for our team at feedburner, which is the service that's installed on the ourwwworld blogs to let people subscribe to your feed.
Subscribers are people who have chosen to receive news that you've posted something new to your blog. Your feed is the technical term for the technology that will automatically alert them. Depending on how the subscribers themselves choose to subscribe to your feed, they are either sent an email when you have posted something new or alerted through an RSS reader that updates them on many blogs that they might be following.
Your feed's subscribers are your blog's most important asset. The more subscribers you have who've chosen to follow your blog's feed, the less work you have to do getting visitors. When combined with income generating mechanisms, a blog with 100 subscribers could be well on it's way to becoming sustainable (ie, it can probably pay for itself and earn a little something extra for the blogger). A blog with 1,000 subscribers or more could be worth several hundred dollars per month or more to the blogger.
Growing your subscriber base takes active effort, but it's not very difficult to start. Once a way to subscribe is installed on your blog, the most basic and obvious way to get people to subscribe is to ask them to.
In the beginning, before a lot of people you don't know start visiting your blog, the best place to start asking is among the people you do know, who you also know how to reach online. Here are some very simple ways to start promoting your feed today:
1. Send an email to your family, friends and supporters letting them know you've got a new blog that's ready for subscribers, and ask them to subscribe. Don't forget to include your blog's URL, with the http:// part so that it's clickable (example: http://ourwwworld.blogspot.com)
2. Ask the people closest to you to send an email to their friends and family, asking them to subscribe as well.
3. Use facebook, twitter, ned and/or other communities you participate in to let your online friends know you've got a new blog, and ask them to subscribe. At the very least, mention that they can subscribe so that you put the idea in their heads.
4. Write your blog address on some small pieces of paper or on the back of some business cards, and keep them in your wallet. When you run into a friend who you know spends time on the internet, give it to them and ask them to be sure to subscribe.
A word of caution - do not ever allow yourself to be disappointed or offended when everyone you know personally doesn't subscribe to your blog's feed. Some people will, some people won't. Some might respond to your email request months after you send it, and some might never respond at all. That doesn't mean they don't like you, and it doesn't mean they will never visit your blog. If they've subscribed in an RSS reader, you can't see who has subscribed anyway. So don't worry about how many people don't subcribe. Focus your emotional energies instead on the people who do subscribe, and do your best to make it worthwhile for them to stay subscribed!
Once you also start promoting your blog in blogging communities, directories and search engines, people who don't know you personally will start to visit. You'll have to work a bit harder to get them to subscribe. Some bloggers use contests and giveaways to get people they don't know to subscribe to their feed; others use sneakier tactics that I won't go into here. By far, the very best way to get subscribers from among folks you don't know is to regularly produce unique and worthwhile content, that makes visitors want to come back for more.
If you liked this post, please subscribe to the ourwwworld feed! You can choose how to subscribe in the sidebar, or click here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ourwwworld. By the way, to find the address for your ourwwworld blog feed if you ever need it, right click on the link in your sidebar that looks like the one below and copy the link location:
One last thing I'd like to ask, especially of those of you with ourwwworld blogs: please visit the other ourwwworld team member blogs and show your support to each other by subscribing today!
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