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a click to more feed subscribers

April 24th, 2007 by Hans

Making it easy for visitors to subscribe to your feeds increases your chances of getting more feed subscribers. This can be done by cutting the steps it requires for them to put your feeds’ address into their favourite feed readers like Bloglines,Google Reader,etc….

Dropping them the full list of feed readers’ button for them to make their choice just add to the clutter and confusion.

clutter of feed buttons

Many services have since come with handy single button which your visitors can click to select their Feed Readers but this through opening a new window or putting them on a new page. Services like Add This! being the most popular.

add this! feeds button

I’ll here make you meet 2 services that would put your sweet feeds’ address into the hands of your visitors using a nice single button which when clicked drops down the list of available feed readers they may subscribe to. No sign-up required,No pop-window,no redirect to other pages. You allow them to subscribe to their favourite feed readers in seconds without they leaving your blog. I’ve been caught with two such services one called FeedBuddy via Lifehacker and the other FeedButton via Nym’s Blog.

You put your feed address and click the respective button to obtain a nice image button like these :



in the form of javascript code. You paste that where you want that single button to display. Whenever a visitor hovers/clicks on it, a drop-down menu appears allowing them to subscribe directly to their favourite feed readers without they leaving your blog and that page they are on.

using feedbutton
using feedbuddy

While I do like FeedBuddy nice button, I got directly hit with ads when clicking on the more options down the list for more feed readers. Perhaps that may not be good for you since many might think the ads are from you. Worse if you said you’re ads-free, lol :P

click the more button in feedbuddy
ads in feedbuddy

But FeedBuddy has got the additional advantage of providing the direct feed link in the button unlike FeedButton. That’s is if your visitors want the direct link of your feeds instead of choosing from Feed Readers, they may do so with FeedBuddy but not with FeedButton which only provide you with buttons to respective feed readers. So don’t drop that feeds’ icon if you’re using FeedButton, many may still like to hand copy your feeds address. Thanks to Nym and Lifehacker for these :)

If you’ve got any issues and would like help, do drop a comment or mail me and I would be glad to help you. Feel free to share this post if you found it useful.

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