7 Top Ways To Lose 70% Of Your RSS Readers

1. Allowing your mood to govern the tone of your post. If you are anything like me you will know how much a change in mood can change your bloggging. Out of these 7 ways this is the 1 I am most guilty of. If I’m in a productive, energetic mood I tend to write pillar posts, usually in the form of scan-able lists. If I’m a bit depressed, I become very fatalistic and view everything as ironic and if I’m very happy or exited my writing can become careless. The chances are your RSS readers’ moods won’t fluctuate exactly in time with yours and so its best to try to be more stable. Ups-and downs can make a blog more exiting, but only within reason.

2. Including too much information about your personal life. I tend to include snippets about myself, either when something very important has happened, or a ridiculously unimportant fact. However, I always find a way to sneak it into a post. The fact is, unless your blog is a personal blog the vast majority of your RSS readers don’t really care.

3. Including too little information about your personal life can be just as dangerous. Non-corporate blogging is all about having a personal style so that your readers feel like they know you. I’m sure many readers of Blogging Fingers do know me surprisingly well. After all, if you’ve been reading Blogging Fingers long enough, you would have seen quite a lot of point no.1 going on.

4. Writing an overly promotional post. It can be tempting to take a day off from writing something creative and write a post about the SEO book (Blogging Finger’s sponsor) in an attempt to make a few sales. I have no problem with making money from your readership providing you are honest with your opinions about a product, but for the most money to be made a balance must be achieved. I’m sure if I were to write a post about the SEO book I would make a few sales but that would not be good for the general readership and RSS subscriber numbers will go down.

5. Writing a post that is filled with old blogging Cliches. I normally only subscribe to a select few blogs but sometimes I give smaller-time bloggers a try. After a few days a post called “content is king” pops up in my RSS reader and it makes me feel sick. While I’m glad the noobies are learning how to blog, it’s a shame they are doing it the hard way and re-writing the commonest post in the book.

6. Suddenly changing posting frequency up or down. This is perhaps the most obvious one but also one of the most important. I’ve previously explained in detail why blogging frequently and consistently will double your traffic.

7. Not giving the full RSS feed . Some bloggers don’t like to give the full RSS feed because it is prone to theft from scrapers, but due to the extremely high value of RSS subscribers, I think it’s definitely worth letting them read your content the easy way. Not giving the full feed does mean more traffic to your blog from the subscribers who don’t mind, but the lazy or extremely savvy ones who subscribe to 100s of feeds will lose patience.

Photo credit: Kristian Peetz

Technorati Tags: mood, RSS, readers

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