What Can Seth Godin Do To Increase His RSS Readership

How are most blogs generating regular readership?

My guess would be that those that offer an e-mail subscription and publish at least a weekly "best of blog" e-zine, get most of their subscribers via their e-mail efforts.

For those that don't most readership is probably generated either via links from other blogs or people visiting frequently directly using their browsers.

How about RSS? The way most blogs have it implemented, it's highly probably trailing behind other readership sources.

In one of his posts (to which I got via Brand Autopsy's post, to which I got via Steve Rubel's post - thank you, guys) Seth complains about getting a "scary-low" percentage of his readership from his RSS feed.

What can Seth do to increase his RSS readership?

a] Push your RSS subscribe features upwards, directly below your logo.

b] Having the AddToMyYahoo button is cool and goes a long way towards reaching the mass public, but is it enough to entice visitors to subscribe? Add some copy to actually invite people to subscribe and tell them why. Treat it as a "subscribe" function not an "RSS" function.

c] Add a permanent link explaining RSS and its benefits. I'm guessing most of your visitors will miss the latest RSS post.

d] Don't stick with just the Yahoo! button, but also add buttons from Bloglines, Google etc.

And so on:)

BTW - Brand Autopsy's comment on RSS is spot-on:

"The only way RSS is going to work is if we don't know its there. RSS needs to be 100% invisible. RSS needs to be baked inside every program on everyone's computer. RSS must be seamless to reach the masses. We shouldn't have to use an add-on program and copy/paste geeky code to use it. It has to be simpler. It has to fit our worldview like so many other computer applications of being super easy to use, we don't even know we are using it."