As a blogger we all try to convert visitors to the regular readers of our blogs and we try to encourage them to subscribe to the RSS feeds. We place the links to RSS feeds on the top of the blog to make it clearly visible and easy to reach, we place huge RSS buttons to get the attention but did you ever think about the word “Subscribe” if it is the “right” word to attract people towards your feeds?
Here we will discuss about a little technique we can use to play with this word and try to attract more visitors to RSS feeds.
General Observation
Many people hesitate to click on any link that says subscribe because many people associate “Subscribe” with some type of commitment.
This is typically carried over from the old days of Magazine subscriptions, where people had to commit for a year and pay a price.
Recommendation
It is recommended to say “Get Updates by Email” and “Get Updates by RSS”
Considering this I have changed the word “Subscribe” to “Get Updates” on Decent Weblog to see how it goes. I cannot tell if it is working or not because I re-launched this blog only few days ago and have got only few subscribers. When the number of subscribers grow I will conduct a survey and ask them if they really paid attention to the word “subscribe” or not.
What Do You Say?
Do you think it can make difference? or this little word cannot be any kind of issue?
Hey there.
I retweeted you because I use this exact same method on my website, and it does indeed help get regular readers. Subscribe has been deemed taboo on the web to me – seems to generic. However, when I see “Receive Updates” on a site that generally interests me – I do it.
- Dom
^ But I can see the word “Subscribe” on your blog?
a very good point to consider
Nice article, I’m having a hard time to get returning visitors for my website
i´ve wrote on header: Get designi1 news
and in the input box “getupdates@mail.com”
so far its working… and agree that subscribe word can be tricky
cant comment anymore here when i change the page and return to finish the comment it erases all what i´ve wrote… btw mate you got to configure your tweetmeme also, have retwited this post and the reply goes to @tweetmeme and you can put your twitter on it to know who´s retwiting your stuff
^ If you press Ctrl + Z all your written comment will be back in the comment box. I will try to fix it as well so that it should not remove it when changing the page.
yea
ctrl z works 
ty for the tip
this is something about the onfocus script… :S
Nice article here. This is a good idea. I changed it to my blog too from Subscribe to “Get updates by RSS”. Let see if the number of subscribers grow =)
it completely depend on the visitor, if they really really like your blog then they do subscribe for a next update reminder. if i talk about myself then i join only those subscribe which are related to my interest. no other entertaining blogs as my inbox is quite loaded with unread emails.