An enormous part of what you do with your blog and how it is received by others depends by and large on how successful you are at promoting your feed and getting your readers to subscribe to your feed.

I’m not going to deny the benefits of using organic SEO to get yourself found. But you really shouldn’t depend soley on Google or Yahoo or MSN for your lifeblood.

The search engines change their algorythms more often than school girl on prom night. One day you’re listed the next day you could be playing in the supplemental sandbox with every other blog. Or your blog disappears altogether

Here’s 10 or so easy tips for you to more readers to subscribe to your feed.

Keep in mind that while none or any of these may seem original I want you to ask yourself if you’re actually taking any of these steps to get your readers to sign up for your feed.

1.) Ask your readers to Subscribe to your feed

I’ve always been taught that you don’t get what you don’t ask for so ask away. How you do this is really up to you but some good ways are to include your feed in a text link within a post (much like this one). Typically the best place is at the bottom of a post. Use some catchy little phrase… like . Did you “did you like this post then sign up for my feed !!” OR in a side bar, or even create a separate page called subscribe ( you can see mine at the top of the page in the nav header)

2.) Make it easy and obvious that you have a feed subscription option

Place your pretty little feed icon or email subscription option above the fold of your blog and make it the first thing, or one of the first things your readers see when they load your blog. Remember people are already very busy and harassed by time and other forms of distraction, so make it easy for them to get your high quality original content.

3.) Make sure your blog laser targets what your niche wants

IF your blog is about grapple grommets then keep the topics of your blog on topic, don’t post one day about grommets and the next day post about apple pie recipes. Stay focused people. This is whay will attract readers and subscribers.

4.) Guest blogging for feed subscribers.

Are you guest blogging or doing an article traffic exchange with other bloggers in your niche or a related one. Pretty cool idea huh!! Find another blogger in a related but non competitive niche and offer to exchange articles, then include your feed subscription text link that the bottom of the article.

5.) Bribe to subscribe.

This isn’t exactly and mind blowing or novel approach to to getting readers to offer up an email address so you can feed them your content but it is a great method for doing so.  Readers want something  when they drop by and you should offer something in exchange for their precious time and attention. Depending on what your blog is about the freebie should be related. Maybe its an e-book or a piece of software or some other niche related tool.

Reach a “tough to reach” crowd. Many savvy Internet users never even visit their favorite blogs. Instead, they read all of their content inside their RSS reader. Feedvertising allows you to target this audience by having your ad appear directly inside their RSS reader!

Text Link Ads Has a great plug-in you can use to deliver your freebie to your rss subscription readers. feedvertising plug-in Because this Wordpress 2.0 + plug-in only works for RSS subscribers and it ensures your very cool bonus is only available to those that subscribe. 

6.) Use Viral E-books to gain RSS reader subscribers

I covered this in a post called 25 day step by step process to launching your blog If you have something to give, give it away! Give people a reason to visit your site which goes beyond the typical content. If you’re a designer, give away a free HTML design or Wordpress skin. Are you a programmer? Make a cool FireFox plugin. Are you an expert at XX? Give away a free 8-page report, in PDF style, called Secrets of XX Revealed. The point is, by giving away something, even something small, you can create buzz.  A great way to promote your viral e-book is by offering it up in your rss feed using this great Wordpress plugin that Chrisg developed. What would Chrisg Do

7.) Have a dedicated subscription page 

You are definately going to want to have one of these set up on your blog. You can view mine here>>>  Subscribe Once you have that set up You’re going to drive traffic to it. Use Adwords, link to it in a post, post in forum signatures. Include the link in your viral e-book or freebie. Theres tons of ways to get the word out about your subscription page, try and use all of them.

8.) Get your blog hooked on Web 2.0 Crack.

Submit your blog to as many web 2.0 Social bookmarking places as is Humanly possible. This will put your blog in front of more eyes than you can poke out with a handful of ice picks. Such as the old faithful Technorati. But you can also submit en-mass using onlywire stumble upon well thres way too many to list here but I think you get the point. A great feature of Stumbleupon if you’re using firefox, is the email feature. Submit an article page to Stumbleupon and them use the email button to send it to your friends.

9.) Go make some friends

Sounds kind of silly but it is very effective. Its a truth in any are of life that you’ll do better in a group of like minded individuals than you’ll do on your own. In web terms this has been known as JV’ing Another great way to look at this is that by making friends in similar niches and communities you’ll form partnerships with other bloggers and webmasters who wil in turn share your content and get you some RSS subscibers. Heres another very cool use of the feedvertising plug-in

Lets say you’ve partnered up with another blogger who has some very big RSS traffic numbers and want to get into that stream so you can siphon off some of his RSS readers to gain some exposure and more RSS subscribers for yourself. What you do is set up an agreement with that blogger to have his link constantly displayed on your blog, and in return have yours in rotation on his. Feedvertising allows you to have up to 6 rotating ads displayed so there’s some room for you to add and remove links at your discretion.

10.) Use facebook to boost your RSS numbers

If you’re anything like my girlfriend you probably by now have hundreds of Facebook friends. I know what you’re thinking “how retarded is that!!??” Is it retarded though? Ive been experimenting and using Facebook in a variety of way lately. Ive been networking with it. I have a network of about 15 other bloggers and webmasters what we do is exchange information. Submit each others newest blog posts to the social booking sites. Link swap, article exchange. Cross promote each others products, etc etc etc. Did you also know that you can boost your RSS feed numbers using Facebook?

Well you can and you should include your Blog on your Facebook RSS feeds. Each time someone visits your facebook profile it fetches the data from your RSS feed and counts it as a feed readers. Read the whole linked post I just included.