Does Showing Your RSS Feed Subscription Numbers Help?

Does showing your RSS Feed subscription numbers on your blog helps in increasing the subscription further? Darren from Problogger has recently posted an article on RSS subscription numbers and this post is to add to what he has already mentioned on revealing your subscription numbers to site visitors. Here is my take on this.

All subscribers can be broadly put into three groups. First group consists of people who are interested in reading your content because it either appeals to their interest or they learn something out of it. The second group has people who strongly believe that since your site already has a large number of audience, which they find out by looking at your RSS subscription counter, your site must be featuring content which is very useful in some or the other way. All others can be put into the third group of people who may subscribe to your feeds to keep up with the latest on Internet and other relevant topics of their interest that you blog about.

People who belong to the second group may or may not continue to remain subscribed to your blog. The reason being that they may no longer find your content interesting to them and will unsubscribe from your feeds in due course of time. People from first and third group will remain subscribed as long as you keep writing solid and relevant content.

Bottom line, as long as your content is relevant, informative and caters to the interest of your audience, the subscription figures will continue to follow an upward trend. As soon as you observe a drop in your feed subscription, that is not due to a technical issues with the counter, you should revisit your blog and do a self check on the content you are writing. Other means to know if you are not doing good is by taking a closer look at the comments section in your recent posts and checking to see if your audience are complaining about what you are writing, and also by running a poll. Comments section will reveal most realistic feedback about your performance, so don’t ignore it.

Finally, I strongly recommend that you should display your RSS feed subscription numbers to the visitors because you should attract people from all the three groups and retain them as subscribers by always writing good content. What’s your take on this?