The headline should really read ‘Would you subscribe by e-mail?’ but I prefer to keep headlines relatively short for various asthetic reasons.
At the moment I have around 50 people subscribed to my RSS feed although, depending on the number of updates I make in a day this can drop as low as 30 and go as high as 70.
This is great, I love RSS personally and it’s also a brilliant quick indicator of how many people regularly read what I write – what I don’t have any real figures for is how many people subscribe by e-mail and whether the sign-up box actually works.
The stats feed burner give me show that five people subscribe by e-mail at the moment and I’m not many more will bother.
The reason I’m asking is because that big box in the right hand side of my homepage is one I’d quite like to use for other things (not adverts) but currently can’t because it’s taken up with a ’subscribe by e-mail box’.
If I do kill it off does it matter? And what else should I put there? I’m thinking about using it for a sort of one paragraph rant of the day.
Oh and I know my feed currently publishes a very long list of related posts at the bottom of each entry – is this as annoying as I think it might be and if so should I just turn the plugin off to get rid of it or do you find it useful?
Because of the Blog Theme I use I can write this post so that it either 1) only appears in the RSS feed and not on my blog homepage or 2) only appears in the feed and a small ‘admin’ box on the blog homepage.
Ryan Morrison is a geek, journalist and someone obsess with media, technology and geek culture. He writes for the BBC in Jersey on any subject that falls on his desk and presents a show about the islands music scene. He has been blogging for six years.
I’ll confess to being slightly annoyed by the long list of prior posts…
Yeah I think you’re right – I’ve killed the plugin.
Ryan, I’m surprised that you don’t have the Email Subscription box on your post page as well as your front page. People landing on upyourego from search engines would (I expect) land on a post page rather than the front page.
Also, I once wrote a post explaining to people they could subscribe and embedded the Feedburner subscription link into the post. I got almost 50 email subscribers from that post alone so it might be worth doing that way?
Ryan – that’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give that a go – I could drop the Google Search box on posts and replace with with a sign-up one instead.
Great idea – love to know how/if it affects your sign-up rate.