Dear blogger, please start using RSS and email subscriptions

Dear imaginary Blogger,

Somehow, I ended up in your blog. It’s very nice, informative, etc. and I really want to read (most of) your future articles.

The problem is that the “blogosphere” is a huge place and the blogs that I’m interested in reading are thousands.

There is no way to be able to read all of them.

Therefore, I will keep reading only a small fraction of them; let’s say 50. But, there is no way that I’ll be able to remember to constantly check every single one of them for new updates. I might do that for the 4-5 of them that I totally love and are being updated (almost) every day.

Yours is NOT one of them.

That’s why solutions like RSS and email updates exist. So, why aren’t you using them?

No, I don’t want to follow you on Twitter or Facebook to learn about your updates. Some people do and I respect that, but this is not the way I personally use social media. I’ll probably end up missing your tweets in the chaos of my timeline anyway.

Please, allow me to be updated by whichever way I want, especially since it’s so easy to do it!

For example, let’s say that you are using WordPress, like the majority of bloggers. It automatically generates an RSS feed (read the relevant codex page to learn how to generate/find your feed’s URL), so you just have to post this link somewhere in your blog.

Now that you have a feed, go to Feedburner (or any other related service), insert your feed and enable the email subscriptions (Publicize -> Email Subscriptions). That’s all; now the service will send automatically an email with your new articles as soon as they appear in your feed, to whoever has subscribed to receive them.

I personally use only email subscriptions when I want to receive updates from a blog that I like. I know that people like me are the minority, but since it’s so easy to please us, why don’t you spend 10 minutes of your time to gain some more readers?

I hope I have convinced you.

Thanks in advance.

PS: The inspiration for the above post derived from the fact that from the last 10 blogs I visited, 3 of them had only the option to subscribe via RSS but not via email, and 2 of them had …none of the 2 options!

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