AdesBlog.com

Increase your RSS subscriber count with FeedSmith

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This plugin requires you to use FeedBurner. So if you are not using FeedBurner, then it’s strongly recommended that you signup for it. Because it allows you to manage and track your RSS subscribers. It’s a free service and most of the bloggers are using it.

Ok, let’s proceed. By default every category in your wordpress blog has it’s own feed. Let’s say you are in my blog’s “CSS category”, normally without FeedSmith, when you click on the feed icon on the Firefox browser, you would be subscribed to my “CSS category” feed, which is: http://www.adesblog.com/category/css/feed/

But after installing FeedSmith, it will redirect all these individual feeds to your main FeedBurner feed url. In my case all these feeds

http://www.adesblog.com/category/css/feed/
http://www.adesblog.com/category/make-money/feed/
http://www.adesblog.com/category/firefox/feed/
http://www.adesblog.com/category/ajax/feed/
…etc.

… would be redirected to my main FeedBurner url, which is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AdesBlog

The Point?

The point is that, there might be many people who have subscribed (and will subscribe) to your category feeds. And when they do that, they won’t show up in your main RSS count. So if you have 50 people subscribed to your main RSS and another 38 people on various category feeds within your blog. FeedSmith will allow you to increase your RSS count to 88 (50+38) instead of just 50.

Bonus Tip: Another way to increase your RSS count is to simply ask the readers to subscribe to your feed. It’s a simple thing to do but it does work. Probably because it’s a human nature to follow recommendation of others.

FeedSmith Plugin Page: www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart