Here’s another great post from Himanshu. You can get a free 125×125 image ad on Novak’s blog if you write a guest post.

Every blogger has a dream to have enormous count of RSS subscribers to his blog. But with this number they forget one thing that if the subscriber is reading their posts using external feed readers like Google Reader, Outlook, Feedburner etc then very few of them will turn up on your blog and it may decrease your ad revenues.

So how to take full advantage of your blog subscribers?

If you are writing a plain simple post with no internal links then why would a subscriber go to your blog. Even if you add a YouTube video in your post , Google Reader now is able to embed it inside. Basically you are feeding him enough inside the cage, he’ll never try to break it and come out if things are going this way.

In this situation most common solution is that whenever you write a post try to include links to your previous posts. More the number of links more will be the clicks to open those links. There is big percentage conversion of those links to actual hits on your blog. In this situation you are basically leaving some percentage of your subscriber’s delicious food outside the cage. He gets tempted and breaks the cage himself to get out of it.

Another solution which some people will suggest is to have only partial feeds allowed for your blog. Partial feeds are the first few sentences of your post which will be visible to the subscribers. To view whole post they’ll have to click on the link below the partial feed which will lead them to your post.

I’m very much against this practice. By allowing only partial feeds you are limiting your subscriber to view some part of it which may not be as much entertaining as the next part. As you’ve pretty much guessed, in this situation you are feeding them some food inside the cage keeping some of it outside. But the problem arises if he’s dissatisfied with only that much and never bothers to come outside.

How can I link my previous posts in my current post?

Whenever you write a post you’ll associate a category or tag with it. In WordPress you can view posts of particular categories and tags like –

http://www.yourblog.com/category/categoryname

and with tags it is

http://www.yourblog.com/tag/tagname

Before and after writing a post search for your particular tag and category and see what stuff you can link in your current post. Even if something is not very closely relevant, you can give a link explaining to your reader that in your previous post you did this.

Not necessarily, your every post should contain the internal links. There may be few exceptions as you may be writing about some new topic. If you are using wordpress then you must install WordPress Related Posts plugin and check the option in it to enable it inside the feed. This will have few links after your post on similar topic inside your feed itself. For non-Wordpress users, you can manually put Related links after your post if you find nothing relevant to link from within your post content.

Then why are bloggers cribbing about subscribers count even when it is not useful for them?

That’s easy to explain. From the previous example, how would you feel if you tell someone that you daily feed xxxx number of subscribers with your food (posts). Those who want to buy something from you will look at your social status. Moreover, not only this, most of the readers prefer reading data from different sources under one roof. Of course, you won’t like to check any new posts by Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Daniel Scocco and so many other popular bloggers one by one on your browser. Do you ?

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