I remember back when I first started hosting my domains on private servers that I started keeping track of stats. I use Webstats in my control panel and I use AWSTATS.

I did notice that I had a value for visitors and a different one for unique visitors. It may sound clear as to what it means but back then I wasn’t sure I understood it so let me explain for you, just incase you are as green as I was back then.

Visitors vs Unique Visitors

Let’s say we have 1899 unique visitors and the number of visits is 3876. The lesser value, the unique visits are the actual number of visitors you had that month.

If you look at the difference between the total number of visits, 3876 and the 1899 unique visits you can see how many return visits you had which is 1977.

It’s nice to see that number of return visits is higher that the number of unique visits, but it can get way better than these numbers. Assuming you have good content people want to read then you just need to work on getting them to return.

It’s time to make your RSS feed more visible. Explain why people should subscribe to your blog feed. Make it easy of them to subscribe.

Not sure what a RSS feed is?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Take a minute and read up on it. Not knowing about it may just being hurting your business.

Once I made my readers aware of the fact I even have a RSS feed and made it visible and easily clickable my number of return visits increased.

Just 5 to 10 minutes of my time, after not doing it for years, and I was increasing the number of visits to my site. I grew up hear not to put off until tomorrow those things you can do today, but I guess I didn’t listen close enough.

Give Your Visitors A Reminder About RSS Feeds

I have been working online since 2001 and couldn’t tell you how many sites I have left and never subscribed to because it just slipped my mind. The ones I remember to subscribe to land in my Feed Reader, Bloglines and I can see when the 100 or so blogs I follow have a new post. Those blogs get a lot of my attention, the others, well I may never find them again.

NOTE: It’s better to have people ignore your subscribe to feed options because it’s a choice, don’t let them leave without subscribing because you never took the time to add section to remind visitors of your feed.

I have just started using the Thesis Theme on a few of my blogs and the developers have made it pretty easy to add the Thesis Subscripton Widget . I had it setup in less than 5 minutes. I even went to Feedburner and added an email subscription option, the two steps only took 10 minutes.

So just 10 minutes of my time and I have it done forever on that blog. Now my visitors can see I have a subscription section right at the top of my sidebar.

The Thesis Subscripton Widget Setup.

Using the Thesis Subscription Widget you will be able to tell your readers that you have a feed and why they should subscribe to your blog.

A few weeks ago I was coding this stuff by hand, now I just fill in a couple of text boxes and I’m good to go.

  • First, I logged into my blog Admin area.
  • Next I opened the Appearance menu where I chose Widgets.
  • Because I have two sidebars I had to choose which one I want to place the subscription widget in.
  • Then I clicked the Subscription Add link from available widgets.
  • I wanted it at the top of the list so I dragged it to the top of the list on the right.
  • I then clicked the Edit link on the widget and filled in the blanks.

There were 4 boxes, I only needed the top 3.

Text box #1: Give your subscription widget a name. I used ‘Subcribe to my Blog’.

Text Block #2: It is useful to enter a description so those that don’t know what a subscription means when we talk about blogging.

Text Box #3: Here you can put the text you want your feed link to say. Example: ‘Subscribe Now!’. It works for me.

In my case I choose to use the 4th box to add my email subscription link from Feedburner, but it’s not necessary and would be for another post on another day.

Get your feed subscription setup and watch your visitors grow.

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