The Dynamics of the Subscriber Impulse: When Do People Decide To Grab Your RSS Feed?

This is a question that has been on my mind for some time already. When I started getting a good response from readers on my first blogs, I thought to myself: “Cool, they like the content. Now it is just a matter of getting mentioned on a blog with thousands of subscribers and these people will want to grab my RSS feed as well.”

Interestingly enough, even a couple of years of blogging experience didn’t manage to dispel completely this belief I had. When I launched DailyBits, I thought that if I was able to get a guest post featured on a big tech blog I would automatically gain thousands of new RSS subscribers.

It is a numbers game, after all. Imagine you score a guest article on a blog with 150,000 RSS subscribers. The article features a prominent link to your blog right on top of it. One would think that at least 10% of these readers would be interested in checking where that guest article is coming from. So we have 15,000 readers checking your blog. If your content is good and has value to that audience, similarly, one would assume that at least 10% of those visitors would grab your RSS feed. So at the end of the day you would have some 1,500 new RSS subscribers.

Sounds about right in theory, eh? Unfortunately this model does not hold true in practice.

The Question

I did manage to get a guest article featured on ReadWriteWeb, which has 180,00 RSS readers, and that resulted in 150 new RSS subscribers for my blog.

The question then becomes: why the conversion numbers are so small, and when exactly does a visitor decides to grab your RSS feed?

People have already discussed widely the question of why visitors subscribe to a blog. Maki from Doshdosh summarizes it this way:

Readers subscribe to blogs when they provide an informational or entertainment value so great that it would be a loss to not subscribe to it.

A guest post on Problogger also covered this topic, mentioning that people subscribe to blogs because they want to absorb the knowledge of the author, for several purposes.

So more or less it is clear why people subscribe to a blog. The question I want to answer, on the other hand, is when they do subscribe.

One simple answer would be: visitors will subscribe to a blog when they are 90% convinced that it would be a loss indeed to miss that content. I say 90% and not 100% because they can always unsubscribe later, and for 10% people would be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.

The problem is getting the visitor confidence level up to that 90%. Probably a single mention on a big popular blog is not enough, and that is why the conversion numbers that I mentioned before are so low.

Different visitors, different results

Additionally each visitor and person will behave differently. When my article was featured on ReadWriteWeb 150 of that audience decided to subscribe to my blog right after seeing it for the first time. That means that a single mention on a blog that they read and trust was enough to get their confidence level to 90%, and as a result they subscribed. For the vast majority of the readers, though, that mention was not enough. Perhaps for some people it added 10% to their confidence level, for other it might have been 50%.

Should I manage to post another guest article on ReadWriteWeb a couple of weeks after the initial one, it is likely that all the readers that were 50% convinced about subscribed to my blog would now finally take the decision and grab my RSS feed. For the ones who were only 10% convinced after the initial post, on the other hand, it would’ve been necessary to get 9 guest posts published before they would achieve their tipping point and decide d to subscribe.

Obviously this example is very simplified and linear. The Internet is a web of connections, and the same readers that saw my guest article on ReadWriteWeb could have seen my blog somewhere else, on a social bookmarking site for instance.

Regardless of where and how they become exposed to your website and content, however, I believe that certain reactions will need to get triggered on the visitor’s mind before he arrives to the conclusion that he actually should click on that small RSS icon.

Factors that can help

Here are some factors that can influence how fast the confidence of the visitor in subscribing to your blog will build up:

1. Quality of the content. The higher the quality of your content, the easier to get the visitor confident about becoming a subscriber. A couple of brilliant and value-packed posts in a row will make a big impact on most people. Take a look at Zen Habits and you will know what I am talking about.

2. Direct recommendation. One thing is to get a link in the middle a huge resources list. Another is to get the owner of a blog personally recommending your content and your site. The latter will make the visitor much more confident.

3. Social proof. People will inevitably get influenced by the number of subscribers that you already have and by the number of people that leave comments and interact with your blog.

Competition

Another point that we need to take into considering is the existence of hundreds of blogs and websites on the same niche of yours. Like it or not we need in a society characterized by short attention spans.

I am sure that someone interested in technology would love to spend hours every day reading all the tech related blogs on the Internet. The problem is that most of us do not have time for that, so we make decisions about where to get information from, usually considering the sources that will pack the most value for our time.

Instead of subscribing to hundreds of tech blogs, therefore, a person might decide just to subscribe to TechCrunch, GigaOM and ArsTechnica.

Even if you have a really cool tech blog, therefore, it will be very hard get the confidence level of that person in subscribing to your blog up to 90%. Basically you would need to prove that by spending time with your content he would gain more value than by reading the sources that he already does. Quite a difficult task.

Conclusion

Overall you will need to get a visitor exposed to your website several times and on different circumstances to get him 90% confident that he should subscribe to your RSS feed (or bookmark the site). Moreover, depending on your niche and approach, it is possible that you will never be able to get some visitors convinced about subscribing to your blog.

What do you think about this theory?

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