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Tweak your design, increase RSS subscribers by 80% in 25 days.

Posted by Peter F on February 17 2007 in, Blog Design, Design, How-to, Traffic

Since I posted How to Increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 Days, the subscriber numbers have increased their rate of growth. We’re now looking at an increase of 80.5% over just 25 days.

Because I’ve been using my traffic building worksheet, I’m able to determine what it is that I did that led to this increase. As I outlined in my earlier article, it was changes to the design of the site that had the single greatest impact.

I want to illustrate just how big an impact these changes have had. Take a look at this chart on the right. This shows the subscriber activity for the entire life of The Blog Studio. Note that after a nice initial growth period, the subscriber level tops off right below 200, and stayed there for an entire year. Nothing really changed, despite the fact that the site went through 3 designs in that period. It wasn’t until I made a dedicated effort to make subscribing easy and obvious that the number finally broke the 200 barrier. After a year, it’s only taken 10 days to go from 200 to over 300 subscribers.

It is very important to note that while site traffic has grown too, it’s not at anywhere the same rate. In other words, a greater percentage of new readers are now subscribing to the site. Note too that there have been no traffic spikes from digg et al. This has been all natural

The point of all this is not simple bragging. Rather I want to highlight a couple of things:

  1. the vital importance of using a traffic building worksheet or something similar so that you can test and experiment with site improvements and acurately track your results
  2. the vital importance of ongoing site tweaks
  3. the kind of effects we can bring to your site.
As I mentioned in my previous post about this, I’m only getting started. I have a bunch of ideas to try out, and I have the baseline metrics I need to measure their effectiveness. I’ll continue to share the techniques and the results. If you haven’t done so yet, I recommend that you use the box at the footer of this page to subscribe to our news feed so that you can keep up to date with our latest discoveries.

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