With any type of advertising or marketing campaign, results are measured. You analyze the statistics of your website. You should also analyze the results of your RSS feed. If you don’t measure results, how do you know if what you’re doing is working or not?
There are three simple things to look for when analyzing your feed results, and if your results show people are unsubscribing, how to fix it!
First, you need to know how many people are registered or subscribed to your feeds. Services like Feedburner give you these numbers. if you are using Google advertising you can also find your subscriber numbers there. When you do an update, how many people have asked to be informed?
With that simple number, you can use it against numbers from previous subscribers. If you’re just starting out, you can use it to monitor over time. Are the numbers going up or down? Declining subscribers over a period of time is cause for concern. That indicates there is a problem. Check that the problem is not technical. Check that you are fetching your own feed correctly. If not, and you’re using Feedburner, use its tools to scan your feed for issues. If the feed is working properly, then you should look for likely reasons why people are choosing to leave your feed notifications and take steps to stop them from continuing. This means that your content is not engaging enough to keep your readers subscribed.
Here are nine reasons people are unsubscribing from your RSS feed and steps to stop the problem.
1. Your theme is not exactly what they want. Are you making it too broad or too focused? Has your theme changed from what it was when you subscribed?
2. Is your quality still the same? If you have lost quality in your thoughts, you will stop reading. Make sure you keep to the same standard or improve!
3. Please try to add more suggestions on how to do things. People like step-by-step instructions on every subject imaginable.
4. Are your thoughts too impersonal? Or too personal? You want your personality to show, but not your whole life, unless that’s exactly what you blog about. If your website is a news site, consider adding some opinion pieces to give it a personal touch. Include a personal note or describe how you have personally used a product to give your thoughts a personal touch. Alternatively, if your thoughts are highly personalized, perhaps you should look into writing sometimes in the third person.
5. Are you posting infrequently? If you don’t produce regular thoughts for your subscribers, they are likely to leave. If your RSS feed is just to update users about a particular app, for example, that might not apply, but then you probably wouldn’t be reading a website article like this. You should post at least one article a week to keep your subscribers happy. If you don’t have time, consider hiring a ghostwriter or copy-paste from article directories (leaving the author’s resource box intact, of course) as guest posts. Soliciting guest bloggers is another way to get more content for your readers.
6. Are you overposting and overwhelming your subscribers? A news website will post dozens of new thoughts each day, but a general internet site shouldn’t. A couple of posts a day is more than enough for most readers. One is usually enough.
7. Are you rambling, into long drawn out posts that take forever to read? If that’s the style of your blog, then fine, but make sure you have your RSS feed set to summaries, not full posts. Why don’t you try shortening your thoughts or breaking them down into several posts?
8. Are you posting very short updates of 150 words or less? Short posts should be sent to your feed in full format. Be sure to add some longer regular posts to add quality content for your readers to appreciate. Your blog posts should not be read like Twitter tweets! Your blog posts should definitely not be Twitter tweets. Leave them on Twitter.
9. Are you sharing yesterday’s news? Is what you are delivering to your subscribers up to date and relevant? Make sure you are up to date with the trends. Outdated content loses subscribers.
There are other reasons people unsubscribe, but the nine suggestions above are all things you can examine about your feed and make gradual changes. Try just one thing at a time and look at the stats over a short period of time to see if it makes a difference.
The second metric you want to know is who is reading the feed.
If your subscribers aren’t reading your feed, then your efforts are wasted. Are you using catchy headlines in your thoughts to attract them? What about your first paragraph? Are you summing up the article in the most interesting way possible?
Finally, it’s good to know your feed click-through rate.
Are your subscribers clicking the ‘read more’ button or your ads? If they’re not reading more, then you’re missing out. Subscribers get the headlines and first few lines of the article from your website and judge the rest from that.
If you don’t have time to use statistics, you have no idea if your efforts are working. You have no idea if you are being productive or wasting time!
