A Reason why Readers unsubscribe to your Feed
Recently I had subscribed to a blog’s feed because I had liked a few of it’s older posts. But after subscribing I could not find those old posts that I wanted to read through feeds. I was so angry that I unsubscribed it’s feed that instant itself. Imagine if subscriber’s to your feed unsubscribed just because of this simple reason.
You can avoid this from happening to you by increasing the number of the most recent posts shown. If you are using WordPress, goto Options>Reading and under Syndication Feeds you will find Show the most recent:. I think the default value is 10 posts. Set this to a higher value, like maybe 50 or 100 and click ‘Update Options’.
That’s it 
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Posted on July 31st, 2006 | Category: Blogging | 9 Comments »
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Marina
July 31, 2006 at 3:29 pm
I would like to suggest another reason: not having a full-text feed. Ironically, I had *just* written down “Send a message to all blogs I subscribe to that do not have full-text feeds to request the option” when this post popped up in Google Reader. Perhaps you could make your feeds full-text?
John T P
July 31, 2006 at 3:39 pm
I found a few blogs copying my content straight from my feeds, so I decided to switch to partial feeds to stop them (as much as possible)
Jason Drohn
August 1, 2006 at 8:58 am
That is a great tip. I didn’t think of it!!
Shivaranjan
August 1, 2006 at 11:32 am
Even me too….. So John so what’s value you have set…
John T P
August 1, 2006 at 11:42 am
Currently I have set it to 100, but I think it’s too much. To test this, I subscribed to my own feed in FeedReader and found that it took too much time and had problems showing my feeds because of the high value. So 50-60 might be a better value.
Venu
August 1, 2006 at 2:11 pm
I guess its difficult to make a meaningful estimate. If a blog has 500 posts, even 50 or 100 doesnt help you in digging other older posts. Finally you have to resort to tag cloud, or archives or Google search
.
John, which reminds me to ask you one thing. How did you get ELA up and running. I tried all sort of things with no luck. It works only with permalinks switched off. If I enable permalinks, its not working !!
John T P
August 1, 2006 at 2:45 pm
K2 supports ELA, so all I had to do was to activate the plugin.
Srinivasa Ramanujam
August 27, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Audiences specifically searches for topic which they want and if they find, they will subscribe to your blog, as long as you feed them with information in that topic. The best way (in my opinion
) is to publish new posts in all categories periodically, thus satisfying almost all the visitors!