You have your site setup properly, a beautiful design, perfect content... that's everything right? Do you have RSS feeds? Can people subscribe to your site? Quick, off the top of your head, what's your site's feed called? Do you know? What's the feeds URL? Is it available from any page in the site, or just the home page? Do you have multiple feeds? If so, where are they available from? Here are a few things you can do to make it easier for your users to subscribe to your site.
- Make sure your RSS feeds have easily identifiable names. This is configurable in a lot of content management systems (CMS). "News" might make sense to you, but when your subscriber has multiple feeds they won't know who's "news" is whose. For a single feed I would suggest the site name. For multiple feed sites, I'd suggest the site name and an individual identifier like "site name - news" or "site name - blog".
- Make sure your feeds are easily available. If a site has a feed, but it can't be found, it's not benefiting you. It might makes sense to make the news feed accessible from the news page, and the blog feed from the blog. That's a reasonable organization. You might however, want to also make them all available from one unified location. I'd suggest the home page, or a dedicated subscriptions page if you have a number of feeds available.
- Do your feeds work? Subscribe to all of your feeds, and check them regularly. Make sure that they work, and they display your content as expected. A surprising number of RSS feeds I see don't display properly, or have errors that don't allow them to be viewed at all.
Don't overlook the details of your site. It can be a little thing like a malfunctioning or poorly named RSS feed that keeps your from that one important contact you needed.
