When I started blogging, my intention was to get all my readers to my blog physically so I can have the pleasure of seeing my daily unique hits soar and at the same time maybe get some Ads clicked by them. I still feel that way, but lately, I kind of had a small realization that the number of subscribers plays a more important part in keeping a blog alive and playing a big part in Advertiser’s consideration in choosing your blog as their platform to place their Ads or write their reviews.
The fact is, subscribers are loyal. They subscribe to your blogs because they believe that you have something useful for them. This group of people are serious blog readers who thrives on information rather than the looks of your blog. They are not very interested in how beautiful your blog looks. Nor are they interested in what your sidebar shows. They just want to know what you have for them.
If you look at all those successful blogs, they have a massive number of subscribers. Just by looking at those numbers will tell you the popularity of that blog and a guy out to get someone to write their reviews for them will be willing to pay big money so their products can be read by the thousands.
For the serious blog readers who hates to waste time hopping from one blog to another, subscribing to their favourite blog means they can go through all their favored blogs in one single convenient place. It saves time and they can only go through blogs that has an update. It can be tiring to hop over daily to the blogs and face the frustration of realizing that they haven’t updated their blog for that day.
The fact that lots of successful blogs were able to maintain their status even without updating their blogs for weeks, lies with their sheer numbers of subscribers. Without these loyal subscribers, their blogs will go down the drain faster than you can pull down your zippers to pee. Who wants to go to a blog daily, no matter how fantastic the contents and be greeted with stuffs that are more than a month old. They will stop going totally after the third attempt or maybe the fourth time at the most. However, if that blog is in their subscription base, their rare updates will attract a deluge of readers who has been yearning to read his articles.
John Chow who is having a slugfest with Shoemoney over who can get the most subscribers within this month, is going all out to gain subscribers by giving out fantastic prizes and all. Despite all the evil schemes that he has cocked up to beat Shoemoney, John does sometimes gives us some gems. This Video: RSS in Plain English is one of them. For those who are still in the dark about the advantage of subscribing to blogs, this video should put things in perspective.
sometime it amazes me to look at the sheer number of subscribers a blog has.
i guess there are other reasons why some don’t subscribe to a feed and it has nothing to do with the quality of a blog.
some simply do not know how to take advantage of what a feed has to offer while other are simply “intimidated” by the thought of having to go through technical process to subscribe to a feed.
just a thought. I know because I was once like that. btw, i’ve subscribed
Thanks, Jason.