Simple tip to increase your Comment Feeds Subscribers
ADVERTISEMENTSEverton has mentioned a simple yet effective tip that helped him to get from 5 to 200+ subscribers to his comment feed! The number of subscribers to his comment feed jumped to 80 overnight after making this change.
The tip he gave was to add the Comments Feed to the list of feeds that are displayed when a user clicks on the RSS link in the browser.
All you have to do to make this change is to find the following line in your header.php file
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
and add the following code below it
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" />
Once you have done this, your Comments Feed will be listed alongside your main feed making it easy for your visitors to subscribe to your comments feed.
I have just made this change and wish to see the same increase Everton had with his comment feed 
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Posted on March 11th, 2007 | Category: Blogging | 37 Comments »
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lyndonmaxewell
March 11, 2007 at 8:15 pm
@ John just asking. Would users be more inclined to signing up for the comments feed as well as for RSS? Besides the point, nice tip for doing so.
JohnTP
March 11, 2007 at 8:27 pm
lyndonmaxewell- It varies from user to user. Some like to read the comments to a post while some like to just read the post.
If you are a frequent commenter on a blog, you may want to subscribe to their comment feed as well.
Ashish Mohta
March 11, 2007 at 8:31 pm
It depends on interest, Most of the people might not like to subscribe to the complete comment feed, as comments might not be co related one after the other, if people are commenting on different posts or previous posts.
however if the post is interesting people would like to subscribe to that comment feed as they can gather more information.
who will not subscribe
1.Too many comments might not be useful, unless the post is.
2.Random comments might distract people and take time to get to know where comment came from .
3.Subscribe to comments are good enough to bring back them to right post so why comments to feed.
Who can subscribe?
1.Good for people who don’t want to comment but like to read it.
2.People who don’t want to give their email id (Mostly RSS readers) or just does not want to.
3.People who want to be in the top commentator and like to interact on blogs, for benefits or liking doesn’t matter….best for them.
My Choice: Email subscription and post comment rather than full comment feed.
Daniel
March 11, 2007 at 8:57 pm
John, if you are trying to promote your comments feed perhaps you should consider adding it to the site as well, for example you could add a “comments feed” link below the subscribe to email form.
lyndonmaxewell
March 11, 2007 at 10:02 pm
@ John I see, thanks. I guess I’m the kind who would go for posts subscription, like what Ashish has said.
JohnTP
March 11, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Daniel- Thanks, I will try it out soon.
chatca
March 11, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Truly John by giving the ease to the visitor then the visitor will be increasingly loyal to us.
abhishek bhatnagar
March 12, 2007 at 2:34 am
Thanks for sharing will try it soon…..
Everton
March 12, 2007 at 3:48 am
It’ll be interesting to see how you get on with it. I’ve made this change on both my sites and I’ve been stunned by how much the numbers went up by.
Ryan
March 12, 2007 at 4:03 am
This is an interesting idea… I assume you have the comments feed going through feedburner?
JohnTP
March 12, 2007 at 7:12 am
Ryan- Yes, I have.
dan1el
March 12, 2007 at 7:47 am
John do the comment feed numbers add to the total of the feedburner subscribers widget? I’m assuming not.
Dan.
JohnTP
March 12, 2007 at 7:51 am
dan1el- Are you talking about the blog’s main feed? The answer is no.
dan1el
March 12, 2007 at 8:10 am
Yep main feed. I thought as much. Thanks for clearing that up.
Dan.
wildbluff_matt
March 12, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Daniel, I had the exact same question. So if this tip doesn’t aggregate both feed counts where do you see these types of numbers? (If I didn’t use feedburner I wouldn’t know how many were on my feeds.)
Ashish Mohta
March 12, 2007 at 7:03 pm
use the feed redirector plugin.I have been doing from day one….
The Reviewer
March 12, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Ok, that is cool, however I am not even sure how to add the feed to the browser in the first place, I didn’t even know you could do this. Is there a plug in for this, or can you point me to a tutorial for it?
The Reviewer
March 12, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Um, never mind, it is already there.
antrs
March 12, 2007 at 9:18 pm
hai John, can it implementation in blogger?
Rishi
March 12, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Pretty cool tip!
Going to apply it soon…
Means there is a way to add same thing but CATEGORY-wise
!
Gili
March 13, 2007 at 12:59 am
Good tip John, will certainly try it.
Gili
March 13, 2007 at 1:21 am
Just implemented it. In the out-of-the-box Wordpress 2.1 templates there are 3 RSS Feeds options:RSS 2.0, RSS 0.92 and Atom Feeds. So in this case you need to get read of the last two and paste the Comments RSS Fedd code.
Madhur Kapoor
March 13, 2007 at 1:47 am
One question John . Why do the subscribers in the Widget keep on fluctuating , sometimes there is more than 1000 , sometimes 900 + something ?
wildbluff_matt
March 13, 2007 at 5:09 am
Madhur, I’m interested in this as well. Our feed count doesn’t fluctuate that much (100’s) but it does jump to over 20 and then down to 10. Not sure why this happens either.
antrs
March 13, 2007 at 7:16 am
how to detect how many feed subscribers in my blog?
lyndonmaxewell
March 13, 2007 at 12:37 pm
antrs, you need to allow people an option to subscribe to your feed before you can even get started. There isn’t a feed option on your blog, as far as I can see.
Daniel
March 13, 2007 at 5:02 pm
for the people who asked about feed fluctuations, here is an explanation:
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/manage-feed-count-fluctuations/
Ashish Mohta
March 13, 2007 at 6:40 pm
@Madhur: Mostly its because of Firefox live bookmarks.Unless they click it….it doesn’t work.
@Gili: If you care using feedburner there is an option which redirect everything to rss2.0
@antrs: you can only find if you are using feedburner.Its the best
antrs
March 13, 2007 at 10:03 pm
ok i try to sign up in feedburner
aad_lfcfn
March 13, 2007 at 10:52 pm
that’s a great tip for more blog exposure. thanks john..
Mr.Byte
March 13, 2007 at 11:28 pm
I was following the whole conversation silently till now but I have a question…Is it possibly to find out the number of people who unsubscribe from a feed if there are any???I guess we get statistics on how many people unsubscribe from feeds through email.
lyndonmaxewell
March 14, 2007 at 7:45 am
I don’t think we receive such information by email. Looks like owners of this site has to compare the results from the previous days. I get what you mean. You want to know the gross number of people who are unsubscribing from your feed compared to those that joined.
Ashish Mohta
March 14, 2007 at 8:09 am
@Byte and @ Lynd: Guess there is no way.We will have to keep track of the statistics.You get only notified when somebody unsubscribed from your email subscription
Find out every day detail and see what people are using more and you will get an average of people .My firefox bookmark subsc was high before.Then i saw google reader increasing.I can only assume either they moved to google reader or they unsubscribed and new ppl joined.Its difficult
Runa
March 15, 2007 at 4:48 pm
It’s easy-to-add and very useful.
Kyle Eslick
March 17, 2007 at 12:43 am
John,
Is their an easy way to add your Feedburner feed through the header.php for browser auto-discovery? What code would you use for that (to lower the options and get all your subscribers on a single Feedburner feed)?