How ViperChill reached 500 Feed Subscribers

Glen Allsopp / 17 Comments / June 5th, 2008 / Subscribe via RSS

So, recently our feed count crossed the 500 mark and made it to 511. Whilst I don’t want to be “blowing my own trumpet” I am going to take a look at the main principles that helped us reach this target and some of the things that hindered it.

To be honest, 500 feed subscribers aren’t that much compared to some of our fellow bloggers but it is a milestone and one that I am personally proud of. It has taken 2 years to get to this point, i only believe I really started blogging in the last 10 months; we had only 40 feed subscribers when we first added the Feedburner chicklet.

What Worked

There are many things I can attribute to reaching this target but that would be quite a long list and probably not something worth trying to directly replicate. Instead, I’m going to look at the core reasons that people found the site and decided to receive updates.

Producing Quality Content

You hear this time and time again, but if you aren’t following this then you probably aren’t having much success with your blog. When I first started the blog this was something I really didn’t do, I was more concerned to see if I could rank for the terms in the blog title..heck it was 2 years ago and I was only 16.

Quality content is the main reason people subscribe to a feed and continual posting of quality information is the reason they don’t unsubscribe. Quality depends on what people want out of the content, for this site people want to know how to build traffic, what is working and how to have success online. For some sites, such as Flickrbabes it might just be finding an image that the site visitors can enjoy, know your audience and you will know what quality content is.

Networking Online

A good portion of backlinks to this site and people helping me promote content (next part) is from people that I’ve networked with online. Sometimes it can be easier said than done though, especially if you are in a niche where people aren’t communicating much on the web.

Some ways I’ve networked with others include:

• Personal emails to blog authors
• Meeting on communities in the niche like Sphinn
• Adding people as friends to general social networks like Facebook & Twitter
• Leaving comments on the blogs of others

Getting Eyeballs to the Content

Even if you are producing excellent content, it doesn’t mean that the whole world is going to be able to find it. There are two main things I did to help promote the content on the site, the first being SEO. Making some basic tweaks to the default wordpress for optimised titles and linking can make a big difference, also look at getting links from other bloggers that you have networked with. Links will help to increase the perceived authority of your site in the eyes of Google; most of the links to this blog are from other bloggers in the niche.

I also spent a lot of time “building up profiles” on the likes of Digg and StumbleUpon, the more time you spend on them the more you start to notice the type of content that can go viral and you can tweak your blog posts towards that. It didn’t hurt that I’ve had a post on the Digg homepage and also have one of the most popular articles submitted to stumbleupon with over 80 reviews. Start getting involved in the top social media sites in your industry (and the general ones) and looking at how you can promote your writing.

What Didn’t

Sometimes you hit hiccups on the road, most of mine I could have avoided. Here are some things you want to avoid:

• Not posting for long periods of time, there were busy points in my life where I neglected the blog (I probably could have posted) but didn’t for nearly a month at a time
• When I first started blogging I didn’t really understand blogs, I used to write with SEO in mind, not about the readers or building a community
• Writing a lot of ‘basic posts’ that didn’t add much value, instead I now focus on longer more detailed articles
• Expecting to reach thousands of visitors and subscribers instantly, I didn’t and it really put me down, I had to realise building up a successful blog takes time

There are many pitfalls I’ve fell down whilst running this blog, but, if i hadn’t have gone through them then I probably wouldn’t be at the stage I am in my life right now.

Here’s to the next 500!

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