Posted on April 11, 2007 at 10:09 am | 
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In my last “Blog tips” post, I discussed how to make it easy for readers to find the content they’re looking for. This time I’m going to talk about how to substantially increase your readership and more importantly, how to keep readers informed or interested, to ensure they continue to come back.
Making it easy for readers to learn about updates to your blog is vital. Subscription is the most compelling method to gain readers and retain them. There are more than 22 million blogs tracked by technorati so competition for readership is buoyant. What’s the point in providing quality content that’s hard to subscribe to and difficult to navigate. Chances are, someone else is providing similar content with user friendly subscription and navigation. So, improving the user experience by providing a friendly navigation and easy subscription method makes your readers feel that you care.
Its not rocket science, a few tweaks here and there in your blog template code is enough. Naturally, if you run out of fuel and need specific help, just post a comment and I’ll help you out.
Allow readers to subscribe to comments
Some readers may only be interested in the ongoing discussion of a specific post, rather than the whole blog. This is especially true when they’ve posted a comment themselves and wish to be updated when others respond.
There are two popular methods to enable comments subscription; comment feed and email subscription. Personally I prefer using both methods at the same time, as that gives readers a choice.
By automatically emailing people who comment on a blog post when someone else has added a comment after them, you are significantly increasing the possibility of them coming back to post more comments. In turn, this increases the possibility of them becoming more active on the blog to possibly even become a member of your community.
Method one: Via comment feed Adding an RSS feed to your posts is very simple. WordPress already has a global comment feed present, which you might have noticed if you installed a new theme. You can access this by placing the following tag in your sidebar (sidebar.php) or footer(footer.php).
<?php bloginfo(’comments_rss2_url’); ?>
But for showing RSS feed of a specific post and let readers subscribe you need a different function, actually a WP template tag.
<?php comments_rss_link(’text’, ‘file’); ?>
The “text” parameter represents the anchor text to display the comment’s RSS feed and “file” parameter represents the file the link points to. The default is ‘wp-commentsrss2.php’. Better to leave the file part at the default if you are not playing with your feed core file.
Place the code below in your themes comment section header (usually comments.php) just bellow the #postcomment call (as shown in the image). Replace the Anchor Text to suit your test.
<?php comments_rss_link(’Anchor Text‘); ?>
Method Two: email subscription
Via email subscription, your readers can be notified by email when a current discussion has been updated (someone leaves a new comment to which they may wish to respond). The advantage of adding this feature to your blog is that you are giving your readers an update alert even when they are away from their feed readers, through email which can easily be accessed via phone or PDA.
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The easiest way to to add this feature is using a plugin (Subscribe to Comments). Alternatively you can implement it with a few tweaks in the comment form (Moderate PHP and SQL knowledge necessary).
Place this code snippet just bellow your comment form (comments.php) function call. Note that the classes can be configured in CSS. You can customize it further by adding subscription management, auto subscription (off course all in PHP).
<form action=”http://<?php echo $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . wp_specialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>” method=”post”> <input type=”hidden” name=”comment_subscribe” value=”comment_subscribe” /> <input type=”hidden” name=”postid” value=”<?php echo $id; ?>” /> <input type=”hidden” name=”comment_ref” value=”<?php echo urlencode(’http://’ . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . wp_specialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])); ?>” /> <p class=”subscribe_comments”> <?php _e(’Subscribe without commenting’, ’subscribe_comments’); ?> <br /> <label for=”subscribe_email”><?php _e(’E-Mail:’, ’subscribe_comments’); ?> <input type=”text” name=”email” id=”subscribe_email” size=”22″ value=”<?php echo $user_email; ?>” /></label> <input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”<?php _e(’Subscribe’, ’subscribe_comments’); ?>” /> </p> </form>
Go the extra mile - Subscribe to categories
This is a very simple yet highly adorable feature you can offer to your readers. You may write about lot of things in your blog but that doesn’t mean your readers are interested in everything you have to talk about, that’s why you sort them into categories. Now if you can offer your readers the ability to subscribe to specific categories, it would be wonderful, don’t you agree? The method is simple, as WP already has a template tag ready to take care of it.
<?php wp_list_categories(’arguments’); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above] <?php wp_list_cats(’arguments’); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]
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These two functions work almost the same, they dynamically list categories available to your blog. There are two ways you can let your readers subscribe to categories.
By showing a text RSS link beside category name-
<?phpwp_list_categories(’orderby=name&feed=RSS’); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above]
<?phpwp_list_cats(’orderby=name&feed=RSS’); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]
By showing RSS feed image link beside category name-
<?phpwp_list_categories(’orderby=name&feed_image=/files/rss.gif‘); ?> [for WordPress 2.1 and above]
<?phpwp_list_categories(’orderby=name&feed_image=/files/rss.gif‘); ?> [Prior to WordPress 2.1]
For feed images do not forget to replace /files/rss.gif with your own feed image location. You have to place these codes to your sidebar template (usually sidebar.php) above </div>.
Good luck and give me a shout if you need a hand with anything.
16 Comments
So far,
April 24, 2007 @ 
Bernie Goldbach
There’s a very illuminating discussion unfolding on Twitter concerning subscribers, site visitors, readers and reach. It’s part of a disjointed converstion between PaulWalsh, imeallach and topgold that might be useful in its distilled format as a follow-on to this post.