What follows is a blindingly simple but powerful tactic that will not only quadruple your traffic, but will also substantially boost your site’s income.
The vast majority of sites do not spend time implementing this, and best of all, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
Note: for this to work, you will need to already have built a solid base of RSS subscribers.
Here’s the reality…
When you post a new article on your blog, the vast majority of your initial traffic comes from your RSS and email subscribers. Obvious right?
Yet, your traffic is being constrained by the very vehicle that is delivering your content to your subscribers – the RSS feed itself. Your typical RSS subscriber reads all of their subscribed-to content in their RSS reader, and never make it to your site.
In fact, for every 100 of your subscribers that read your article in their RSS reader, only 1 will click through to your website.
So, even though your content is being digested, it’s not being done on your site. And with only a 1% click-through rate, there is a lot of scope for improving this area of your traffic stats.
Here’s the solution…
Change your blog to partial feeds. This means that instead of serving your entire article in your subscriber’s feed, you display the headline plus a snippet/teaser of what the article is about. In order to read the entire article, you have to click through to your site.
Doing this typically increases click-through rates to 4-5%, a quadrupling of your article’s initial traffic. Yes we’d all love click-through rates approaching 100%, but that’s the nature of the beast we’re dealing with.
Here’s how to implement partial feeds…
1. Sign up to FeedBurner and create your RSS feed
Feedburner gives you more control over your RSS than than your standard wordpress feed setup. It also gives you useful stats about how your users are interacting with your site.
2. Click on the “Optimize” tab, followed by “Summary Burner”
Here you can set how much of your post you want to show in your subscriber’s feed, as well as append a ‘teaser’ message to help sell the click.
Does it really matter where my subscribers view my content?
Sure, having your subscribers read your content in their RSS Readers is better than having them not read your content at all. However, there are four key benefits to having subscribers visit your site:
- 1. A more interactive experience for your subscriber – RSS readers don’t include post comments, which can add as much value as the post itself. They are also more likely to post a comment themselves.
- 2. Increased traffic to other parts of your site – you control the environment and can entice click to further articles on your site.
- 3. You will earn more money – if you show ads an a CPM basis, you can command higher ad rates.
- 4. Boosts your credibility – more traffic inflates your Alexa rank, Compete.com rank, so you are perceived as a more authoritative blogger.
To round this off, I want to stress how important the first 24 hours is to your blog post’s life-cycle. It will either gain momentum or it will die, and the more people you can physically get to your site during this time, the more you edge it in favor of the former.
Now go test this out already! It only takes a few minutes.
